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Ramia Lloyd:
Welcome to [inaudible 00:00:13] technology research in news. Today's episode is sponsored by IMTS+.
Ben:
Steve, we're traveling again today. Not today, I'm sorry. Two days ago.
Stephen LaMarca:
I was like, I just got an anxiety attack.
Ramia Lloyd:
You're leaving right after this. Goodbye.
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm not going anywhere right now.
Ramia Lloyd:
Plane.
Ben:
We were at a supply chain event, ProMat, which is worked out really well. I'm glad we explored that event. You got some observations on robots?
Stephen LaMarca:
Yes.
Ben:
Tell me more.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yes. So to add on to your point about ProMat and being supply chain related show, last year I attended a supply chain show, MODEX, and this year you suggested that we try ProMat. By the same organization and funny enough, we found out it's the same show, just ones at McCormick Place, which gave me a sensation of home field advantage. Made me feel really nice. I know McCormick really well. Thanks AMT. Thanks IMTS. And we went there to, I expected more of the supply chain stuff, which is really fun in my eyes because as much as I love IMTS and we get to see the latest and greatest manufacturing technology there. At the supply chain shows like ProMat and MODEX, you see, okay, what is the technology that is getting product out the door? It's not necessarily related to the manufacturing workflow or the manufacturing process of making parts in products in assemblies. It's okay, the part has been made. The thing has been made. How do you get it packaged? How do you get it shipped and how do you get that stuff done super fast?
Ben:
I'll add to that a little bit. I agree with you. It's the kind of beginning and end of the manufacturing process.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think to your point is it's shipping stuff out the door, getting stuff into a pallet, wrapping that pallet up. But also don't forget, it was inventory and material handling in the beginning.
Stephen LaMarca:
Right. Right.
Ben:
So getting stuff in the door.
Stephen LaMarca:
And safeguarding.
Ben:
And safeguarding. Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
You can't sleep on safeguarding, but there wasn't a single C&C machine there and that's fine.
Ben:
There were a lot of robots though, robotic arms.
Stephen LaMarca:
Lot of robots.
Ben:
A lot of automation, which is very interesting.
Stephen LaMarca:
Oh, yeah. And what Ben and I wanted or were most, at least I was, I'm not going to speak for Ben, I was the most excited for the robots, specifically two great conversations that we had. Our first one with Yaskawa. Yaskawa is just a company that I haven't given enough attention to in the past. And when we were walking past their booth, I pointed out to you that I think that's a new collaborative robot because I hadn't seen that cobot before. It's been out for a couple of years now. Hadn't seen it before. And I wanted to just learn more about it. And some of the Yaskawa. I also noticed ProMat, like the people who are working the booths are much more, I'm not going to say aggressive, they're much more active in coming out to the hall to grab you and talk to you. And they were all great.
Every booth that we went to, they put their all-stars in those booths. Not to say that they don't in IMTS, but like we were talking to two people at Yaskawa. One who had been there for a long time, knew all of their products and the other one specifically knew about this new pendant that they have and their collaborative robot. And it was really nice for me because I was like, oh man, I actually know a thing or two about robots. And going through all the things, all the features on the pendant was really cool. I was like, dude, I could program this right now. I could use this robot right now. There would be no learning curve.
Ben:
And I think that's the biggest takeaway in looking at both the robotic companies that we saw there,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah.
Ben:
Is the interfaces and controllers and pendants.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yes.
Ben:
It's come a long way and,-
Stephen LaMarca:
It's come so far because as gassed up as I am, and I think I'm a roboticist, it's like really anybody could have gone up and known what they were doing. There's straight up buttons on the end of the arm. There's a teach button. You hold that, you grab the end of the arm, you hold that teach button and then you can move the arm wherever you want.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
It doesn't go limp, but it becomes conforming to whatever you do.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
And we saw that on at least two robots that,-
Ramia Lloyd:
That's kind of cool.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yaskawa was great. I'm surprised. They are an established name,-
Ben:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
In robotics. They are up there. They're one of the big robot manufacturers. They have some really affordable offerings. They're not insanely out of reach. They're not the cheapest, but they're competitively priced.
Ben:
And to be fair, I think that's the overall market trade that we've been keeping an eye on.
Stephen LaMarca:
We have been.
Ben:
Specifically for cloud robots. I don't think we've investigated too much on the industrial side, but the overall shift in pricing has come down quite a bit.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah. But another thing that I really appreciated about Yaskawa, the takeaways that I got from the two people we spoke to, Yaskawa's robots are very much built to last. They're not built to have all of the features. They're meant to be durable, reliable, they can put up with abuse, which I thought was very cool because being a car and motorcycle guys and talking with Ben, fellow gear heads that a big selling point to a lot of cars and just fun hobbies is how much abuse can it take?
Ben:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
I don't want to, but can I neglect it? Can you do that with a Ferrari? Absolutely not. Can you neglect a Toyota? Oh my god. It will ask for more.
Ben:
Right.
Stephen LaMarca:
And it's cool to know that okay, so Yaskawa's trying to be on the Toyota level on that. And then the other cool thing I got from Yaskawa was, and I've noticed this for years, but I never really put it together until this person said it, was Yaskawa doesn't just sell the robots, but they sell the entire cell, the entire system that you need. The solution that you need, they will source everything for you and everything will be painted blue unless you specify otherwise. And that's really cool because I, in other hobbies, I also prefer when, like if the main thing, let's say a firearm, if it's a firearm that you have, you would ideally, at least for me, ideally, I would like the main brand or manufacturer that made the firearm, I want the other stuff around it with exception like optics and stuff. I'd like most of the other stuff to be made by that same brand.
Ben:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
Then you'll know everything works together.
Ben:
As a strategy, I mean it's similar in terms of how you want to approach integration. Some other companies prefer to use their partners, but to your point,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Right. And they do have partners to work,-
Ben:
Agreed.
Stephen LaMarca:
With if they don't offer the thing but.
Ben:
It's a different, interesting approach on how they see integration of their equipment, so.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah. And I think they can provide more of a promise and more of a guarantee of durability because everything is from a certified ecosystem, everything's within an ecosystem.
Ben:
I was going to talk about, oh, go ahead. You got one more left?
Stephen LaMarca:
We got one more robot company to talk about. I'm sorry I didn't like, nevermind. I got to actually talk to people at Schneider Electric. They're a bit of a newcomer to the robot game. I think I shared something last year in the tech report about Schneider Electric and there were two things of note from that article that I shared last year. Schneider Electric, the two cool things that Schneider Electric does with their robots. Number one, they publish accuracy figures. In the past, nobody else has done that. There's only one other brand that does that. It's the 800 kilogram, 800 pound gorilla in the room, FANUC. For the longest time, FANUC was the only robot company that had A, the results and B, the cojones to actually publish their accuracy figures, which is really cool. That's awesome, that they sell a robot and they can guarantee that it will be within that accuracy of performance.
And Schneider was, to my knowledge, the second company to do that. And they're a newcomer and they're a collaborative robot company, which is, like it's one thing to get an accuracy figures out of industrial robots, but accuracy figures out of a collaborative robot. That's sick. Second thing that is really cool about Schneider is pricing transparency. You don't have to play a game of, oh, well talk to this sales. Oh, which region are you in? We got to talk to our salespeople.
Ramia Lloyd:
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Stephen LaMarca:
Nope, you go to their website, you'll see the prices, you will see pricing transparency. You're welcome. It's millennials that are making this happen because we're anti-social. We don't want to talk to salespeople.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's a good point. Just show us the price and then we'll know if we can talk to you because if the price is too big, we can't talk to you. Those boomers, they're all like, if you have to ask, you don't have enough. It's like, that's why we don't like talking to you. You raised us.
Ben:
So that is actually pretty useful, particularly on their collaborative robot line because you can [inaudible 00:10:21]. I mean, you could do the risk assessment yourself, right? And we talked about their controllers and stuff like that.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yes, their PLC controller is the bee's knees. I thought the robot was cool. It's their PLC controller. I've never Ramia been excited about a controller. Controllers, boring, snooze fest. Not Schneider's. So Schneider Electric, they started, they were originally a French, I think they're French. They said French. Somebody over there said French.
Ramia Lloyd:
Okay.
Stephen LaMarca:
French circuit breaker company.
Ramia Lloyd:
Okay.
Stephen LaMarca:
They do circuit breakers.
Ben:
Right.
Stephen LaMarca:
That was their bread and butter for the longest time. They have since got into robots, but going from circuit breakers to robots naturally, their real product, the real star of their show is going to be their PLC. And they advertised, they told us that their PLC controller can handle, one controller, one PLC controller can handle 300 something different joints.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
And a robot typically has three to six joints, three to seven joints on it. That means that this one controller, you can control not just tens of these robots, but you can control those robots all on one controller. Any gantry system and tracking system that you have for those robots, which is adding another joint and adding another degree of motion and whatever your heart desires all on one controller and all of those devices that you have will interact with each other and move as one cohesive unit, which is like this is the perfect foundational controller for robotics.
Ben:
Yeah, that was a really interesting takeaway when,-
Stephen LaMarca:
They have not paid me.
Ben:
They were describing,-
Ramia Lloyd:
This is not paid advertising.
Ben:
Their controller and it's not number of robots to your point, I think the biggest takeaway is,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah, it's not number of robots.
Ben:
Number of the total number of joints. So if you look at it from that perspective, it kind of opens up how you control,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Joints, axes, degrees of freedom, whichever term you want to use.
Ben:
Yeah. How you control the whole cell. So it was a very fascinating look on both how the humans interact with these robots, but also the capability of the PLC.
Stephen LaMarca:
And again, affordable. I love, ugh.
Ramia Lloyd:
I just recently learned what the PLC means five seconds ago because I Googled it.
Ben:
Congratulations, Ramia.
Ramia Lloyd:
Thank you.
Ben:
We're all learning stuff here.
Stephen LaMarca:
Primary Logic,-
Ramia Lloyd:
Programmable,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Logic Controller.
Ramia Lloyd:
Logic Controller.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah, man.
Ben:
We're there. Ramia?
Ramia Lloyd:
Yes.
Ben:
You want to tell us about today's sponsor?
Ramia Lloyd:
Yes, I can. Manufacturing digital content. To get you ready for IMTS and after, we're hosting videos and articles on topics relevant to manufacturing technologies and the business of manufacturing and it's all free. I guarantee you'll find something you like. Go to imtsplus.com.
Ben:
That last sentence was me putting that in, so.
Ramia Lloyd:
Oh, okay. Imts.com. I also realized that I didn't say IMTS+ at the beginning. So our sponsor is IMTS+. Thank you.
Ben:
Thanks, Ramia. I found an article on AI in the business place. So Axios published a survey results from executives and the employees about how employees and C-suite executives view select areas of AI adoption at their company. So it's a very interesting perspective of where the leadership is kind of pushing the organization. Everyone's interested in implementing AI, but they have a couple of questions. And the biggest difference in the survey results is the difference in views from the employees versus the leadership or the executive staff. So the first question they talk about is feel the company's approach to AI is well controlled and highly strategic. So at the executive level, they say 73% of the executives agree with that, but at the employee level, only 47% of the staff feel along the same lines. Think their company has been successful in adopting AI over the past 12 months. Only 45% of the employees feel they've had success.
Ramia Lloyd:
Jesus. Yeah.
Ben:
But 75% of executives,-
Stephen LaMarca:
This is funny. This, ugh.
Ben:
Say the company has an AI strategy. Almost 90% of executives feel they have a strategy. Only 57% of the employees feel like they have a strategy.
Stephen LaMarca:
Is this an article about AI or is this an article about how out of touch C-suite level executives are,-
Ramia Lloyd:
No, this is very telling.
Stephen LaMarca:
From actually getting work done?
Ben:
I think it's very telling, because I think there is,-
Stephen LaMarca:
Spicy.
Ben:
There is a big gap, what I've noticed in the say past couple of years of the execution of certain projects.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Ben:
And aligned to where the kind of leadership is headed. The reason I bring up past couple of years is related to digital strategies and implementation digital strategies. As manufacturing moves more digital, getting the IT and OT teams aligned in terms of I got to put a widget somewhere as opposed to the executives or C-suite saying this is our plan and calling it done before we actually get value out of that, so.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's a great point. I would actually, you know what would make this survey better? Not just going between the C-suite executives and the regular staff. If they did C-suite versus IT.
Ben:
That'd be drastically different.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
Ooh.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm just laughing at this last one. Say their company has an AI strategy, is there an AI plan at all?
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly.
Stephen LaMarca:
89, 90% May as well round up even further, 100% of C-suite executives say there is. The rest of the staff, less than 60.
Ben:
Yep.
Stephen LaMarca:
Wild.
Ben:
That's a big disconnect, is like technology adoption still, especially if something's fast-paced as AI, getting a strategy of what are we going to do with this organization related, it's not making it down to the people who have to do work.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
30% is a wild deficit, wild disconnect. Excuse me.
Ben:
And so in the article, they have a section on the big picture and driving news and the chart kind of hits on some of the stuff that's driving news, but there's a stunning stat section and it says 59% of the executives say they're actively looking for a new job with a company that's more innovative with generative AI and among employees number's 35%.
Ramia Lloyd:
That is crazy.
Ben:
That's pretty wild. That's a pretty big difference also.
Ramia Lloyd:
It is. For people to say that they've like, you're already saying that your AI is doing well and then you're like, I want to go somewhere with more AI and everyone else is like, no.
Ben:
No, we're fine.
Ramia Lloyd:
No. Yeah, I'm good. Thanks. Keep that to yourself.
Ben:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's wild. That took me a while to... Not only are they over hyping it, they're trying to leave.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Ramia Lloyd:
And do more of it, like please.
Stephen LaMarca:
Do more lying?
Ramia Lloyd:
This is astonishing.
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm broken. I was not prepared for this.
Ben:
Is it too early to hit you,-
Ramia Lloyd:
It's very fitting, honestly. Yeah. This is too triggering.
Ben:
Yeah. And to be fair, I don't know how to bridge that gap in the disparity between the perception of AI in the organization versus actually providing value and the tactics of it. So I don't know, man, it's pretty alarming. So thought that was a good article though.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's really good.
Ramia Lloyd:
It is really good.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Ben:
But we do have some good news. Steve, you want to tell me about,-
Stephen LaMarca:
I do have good news.
Ben:
Let's end on good news now.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca:
So I've been seeing articles, a few articles, all saying the same thing, but I finally got one article saying the same thing from a source that I hold in a higher regard. From Reuters US manufacturing output accelerated in February.
Ben:
Nice.
Ramia Lloyd:
Good.
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm not the principal economist.
Ben:
There we go. There we go.
Stephen LaMarca:
I cannot say that.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah, it's a hard word.
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm not the principal economist at AMT.
Ramia Lloyd:
Chris Chidzik.
Stephen LaMarca:
Chris Chidzik is, and if you want more economic information, go see his content. He's got some great content, but,-
Ramia Lloyd:
Check out the USMTO on AMT.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's right. Shout out USMTO. But with all of this AI disconnect, manufacturing is on the up and up. At least it was in February. Let's hope we're continuing that. And that's good news.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah.
Ben:
And it's a similar trend we've seen. So our automation committee kind of discusses where they think the market's headed based on their bookings and things like that. And they definitely see a potential upswing for this year because end of last year they saw a lot of interest, but not a lot of people signing purchase orders, but they kept pushing it out to this year and we'd see a lot of pent-up potential on that. So I think there's a lot of potential for this year. So we'll definitely see more.
Stephen LaMarca:
Yeah.
Ben:
There's a winter economic, some economic webinars going on and then we have AMT forecast later on this year, so it'll be an interesting look.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yeah, I'm excited.
Ben:
Ramia, where can they find more info about us?
Ramia Lloyd:
It changed. Techtrends.amtonline.org.
Stephen LaMarca:
Like, share, subscribe.
Ramia Lloyd:
Bing bong.
Ben:
Bye everyone.
Stephen LaMarca:
No.
