Podcast: How major tech players are transforming manufacturing software solutions

Greg Martin is founder at Equip LLC Automation Consulting, a software and electrical service provider in South Bend, Indiana, that works specifically with automated systems. Greg was in Chicago recently to explore the IMTS 2024 trade show, and met up with Thomas Wilk, chief editor of Plant Services, to trade their observations and reflect on the past 10 years of systems integration.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Greg and I found ourselves at the IMTS trade show a couple of weeks ago in Chicago, and we were both surprised, I think, by the number of software vendors who were there and the number of not so much by the number of cobots that were there, but we thought we’d better get our thoughts down here in the podcast and share them with the folks who listen. Greg, welcome to Great Question, I'm really happy you're here today.

GM: Tom, hey, first of all, it's great meeting you at IMTS and I'm happy that we can hang out today and chat a little bit about our life’s work.

PS: It's funny that your work right now is on the integration side and my work is covering the asset management side, and at IMTS there's a real convergence of those two worlds happening. I was really struck by that.

GM: Yeah, and I honestly wish I had more time to go over the sheer breadth of technical innovation, ideas, simple things like laser cleaning. I'd never heard of that until this trip and it caught me for about an hour and a half in one section of the of the show!

PS: Well, what was it that drew you to IMTS this year, given what you're working on? Was it the cobotics side of things? Was it just the general need to tie systems together, given the way the industry is moving data around?

GM: Whenever I go to a show like IMTS, I always have my clients’ specific needs in mind, right? The type of projects that we're working on, new ideas we’re coming up with, stuff we're trying to sell and get engaged with. And there's always that thought where it's like, I know there's going to be stuff there that I have never heard of, that I have never seen. People that I've never met before in fields that that I haven't really engaged with, so there's the general idea that I'm going to come out knowing something that I did not know before I came on the trip.

PS: There's a lot of that at IMTS for sure. Besides the laser cleaning, what else caught your attention this year?

GM: The thing that stood out to me is, I walked by a booth that Google put in, and I don't know if you saw that, but right smack dab in the middle there were a couple of guys there that were working in the Google Workspace. And when I come in, I'm thinking, OK, well, I use the Google Workspace, I do Smart Sheets, I do Gmail, I’ve got all sorts of different aspects of this, I use their calendar system, so I was like, what's this doing here at IMTS? I'm going to talk to these guys.

It turns out what they're looking to do is to remove the need of a brand for a robot on the shop floor. So if you're working with orange or yellow or whatever color robot you got there on the floor, if you integrate their tools in it, their goal – and they're not out in the field yet, so this is still in the contemplative phase, they're still in development – they're wanting to make it to where you don't have to be brand loyal to a robot. If you bring a robot in that that shares the work envelope size, the payload, if those things are a match, you should be able to use this unit.

Honestly, it geeked me out because I was a FANUC integrator when I first started this, and I was like, are you housing the software and you're just using the motion planner for the robot? How in the world are you accomplishing this? Honestly it intrigued me and there’s a couple more conversations I think we need to have before I'd say my brain is officially wrapped around it, but I was intrigued on what they were trying to accomplish. It’s almost like you’ve got the robotic simulators of today, right, create my offline suite in-path, but I don't have to transfer that to the robot anymore. That's what it sounded like, high-level.

Those guys might roll their eyes at me if I said that, but it's like it skips the step between having to create it online and then have to do your path touch up and stuff like that when you actually go to apply it to the field. That was probably one of the things that captured my attention the most when I was walking through there.

PS: I can see from a high level perspective it's kind of nice for the business side of things not to be attached necessarily to a contract if you don't have to. Right now even with the fed still planning and next interest rate cut, they cut it by half point a few weeks ago, I’m not seeing a huge rush to spend money. Something like something you're talking about with Google gives organizations a lot more freedom to pick and choose when and how they have robots, and it sounds to me like one of the next steps that Google achieves is RaaS, or robotics as a service – bring in what you need, when you need them.

GM: Right, right. It is freaky, the things Google dabbles in. I mean, I think they owned Boston Dynamics at one point. They have a Google AI and I think what this was showcasing specifically was it was a small startup that got backed by Google, so it wasn't like a direct Google thing, if that makes sense. So yeah, they're out there trying to help out the small guy.

PS: I did take a robot walk with one of the vendors there and they showed how their robots were sort of patched into different applications on the IMTS show floor. It was interesting to see how one company can be so versatile across all kinds of applications instead of specializing.

GM: Was that the UR robots, Universal’s?

PS: Pretty sure that was Universal Robotics, yeah.

GM: You see them in a large amount of applications at the show, because they're really simple to just move around. From a cobot standpoint, man, they’re definitely in the running and probably top three on what's out there.

PS: Were other things that caught your attention besides Google? Walking in, what caught my attention was the fact that for the first time in IMTS, you had a major presence from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon / AWS, all staking their own kind of claim in what used to be simply a show for machinists, right? The latest in cutting tools, these are people who are cutting and forming metal in various ways, both traditional subtractive and then on the additive side. Now you've got the software vendors with huge booths, a huge presence at this show. Just the fact of it signaled a shift in the way the show was thinking about the way it does business.

GM: I think too, what did Amazon do 10 years ago versus where they're at today, and what was their systems integration path? I wish I knew more on the topic. I'd be curious on what your thoughts are because when these players come in, they come in with the type of backing that we would dream to have – the budgets, the staff. When I integrate a system, when I come in, I come in and I'm me – I work with the contract group for the electrical and I’ve got some mechanical stuff getting done. But when I'm writing the software, it's me, most of the time just me.

How many people programmed Microsoft Word? How many people programmed Excel? What army of people, men and women alike, are getting these things done out there on the floor, and now, like you're pointing out, they're shifting towards automation, influencing not just data but trying to get into a world. What I always loved about controls is the fact that my software actually touch mechanically. The end game is I'm using my nervous system and electrical, I'm touching the end game products where you're actually seeing the motion the floor, you're seeing the impact, you're having influence over what's actually going on instead of just having one piece of the pie. You're the whole thing, and to have players that large come into that, what's going to happen next year? Because that's when the change really starts rolling.

PS: I had the chance to talk to someone from Microsoft, she's the VP of Global Industry Marketing and before that she worked for PTC back when they were working on strategies such as partnering with Rockwell Automation. A lot of what she was talking about was their vision for the AI Copilot, and sort of move it on the plant floor to facilitate the streamlining of work, making work frictionless, whether it's simply a case of a maintenance worker speaking into their phone to call up a job plan, or whether it's something more involved in the back end where you've got a lot of data being combined to understand machine health better. That's where they're staking their claim at least, and they seem to see the metal-working, metal-forming side of things as a pretty rich area to mine right now.

On my side, Greg, I noticed that a lot of the small- to medium-sized CMMS vendors had a significant presence at the show for the same reason Microsoft and Google and Amazon did. They see there's an opportunity with these plants to really get them on board with even moderately sized work order management software systems. I met with Limble and MaintainX, and I know Upkeep was there. Each of these vendors, they offer a solution to help teams make sure that when work orders are set that they don't get dropped in the shuffle, that teams can enter into the system and then the system triggers the work itself. For a lot of plants they're still struggling in that basic level to get the work order entered and to the right people.

GM: One of the systems I saw recently that I know handles that type of thing I saw in utilization for just simple parts management, to make sure that they’re keeping an updated list of what's in the game. So if you're going that far and you have that much spare parts, they have their own engineering and automation team that that I partner with on certain types of projects when they get overwhelmed, and even in that environment with the engineers, and the techs, and the process improvers, and the one guy that they have that's responsible to keep that list updated -- it’s so easy for somebody to just walk up the stairs, grab a part, and walk off. Now all of a sudden your list is no longer updated.

It’s definitely still staffing issues like you're pointing out, and culture that is sensitive to the importance of not just maintaining those lists but keeping their work order process while helping to keep their workers accountable.

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About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.