Automation Ladies
The podcast where girls talk industrial automation!
We interview people from all walks of life in the Industrial Automation industry. Through a personal narrative/conversational framework we talk about PLCs, SCADA, IIoT, Machine Vision, Industrial Robots, Pneumatics, Control Systems, Process Automation, Factory Automation, Systems Integration, Entrepreneurship, Career Stories, Personal Journeys, Company Culture, and any other interesting and timely topic we want to discuss.
Co-Hosted by Nikki Gonzales and Ali G - find them on LinkedIn.
Automation Ladies
Exploring Festo's Innovations with Sandro at Festo & Lucas at HARTING (Automate 2024)
Ready to revolutionize your approach to automation and connectivity? Join us on the show floor at Automate, where Nikki and Ali sit down with two industry powerhouses, Sandro Quintero from Festo and Lucas Knapp from HARTING. You'll uncover the secrets behind Festo's groundbreaking transition from traditional pneumatics to state-of-the-art electric automation solutions. Sandro delves into his fascinating background in mechatronics engineering and the rapid growth of educational programs in this field. Nikki also shares her personal insights and experiences from her time at Festo, highlighting the company's pivotal role in training the next generation of mechatronics engineers.
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the critical world of connectors and their essential applications in industries ranging from automotive to medical devices. Hear about the real-life challenges and rewards of working with such a broad product spectrum, and learn why reliable connectors are vital to success—illustrated by a dramatic tale from a robotics competition. This segment underscores the importance of early education in connectivity for young engineers and the indispensable role of sales engineers in bridging the gap between innovation and reliability.
Lastly, we dive into the future of machine-building with a focus on advancements in configurator technology. Lucas Knapp explains how modern configurators, like those from Harding, simplify the design process and improve efficiency in flexible manufacturing systems. We discuss the impact of AI on these tools and the continuing need for intuitive, adaptable solutions. Wrapping up, we spotlight Sandro's influential content on LinkedIn and YouTube, offering invaluable resources for anyone in the field, and extend an invitation to our listeners to connect and collaborate at upcoming industry events. Don’t miss out on this action-packed episode loaded with insights and expert advice!
Co-Hosts are Alicia Gilpin Director of Engineering at Process and Controls Engineering LLC, Nikki Gonzales Head of Partnerships at Quotebeam, and Courtney Fernandez Robot Master at FAST One Solutions.
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Get in touch at automationladies.io!
Music by Samuel Janes
Audio Editing by Laura Marsilio
Well, welcome to another talk here from the show floor at Automate Harding, so graciously accommodating us, having conversations with our friends and also meeting new people. So I am Nikki with Automation Ladies. I feel awkward saying that because we've had three conversations so far, but this is probably going to be standalone at some point on a video or whatever. So Automation Ladies here and we have our friend with us that we're going to have a little discussion with I guess I'll call it kind of more like a roundtable discussion is Sandro Quintero from Festo?
Speaker 1:Yeah, A little fun fact we actually recorded sort of a Automation Ladies episode with Sandro and his friend Alejandro in the Customer Solution Center up in Canada. We did video. It was our first foray of trying to do some sort of video at Automation Ladies and it failed miserably. We had a great time and they showed us some really cool stuff that they had in the shop and we never published it at all.
Speaker 3:Oh, Nikki, I almost forgot about that, but now that you're reminding me, I think we gotta do it again.
Speaker 1:I think we do. So I know there's video here If people are watching this. You know we're just having a nice little chat here in a very cool little podcast setup on the show floor at Automate. But in this case, yeah, we thankfully were able to grab Sandra to come here and talk about connectivity, what's going on, what's been going on in the business, talk about connectivity, what's going on, what's been going on in the business. And so, yeah, I guess, Sandra, if you can introduce yourself a little bit and kind of what you guys are up to and who you are and we also have an expert from Harding, so maybe I'll let him introduce himself as well, because you know a lot more about yourselves than I do.
Speaker 3:Well, Lucas, why?
Speaker 2:don't we start with you? I guess? Sure, yeah, so from Harding Lucas Knapp, I lead our product and market development teams in the Americas.
Speaker 3:Awesome, awesome. All right, so my name is Sandro Quintero. I work with Festo North America. I've been with Festo for around 13 years. Right now, I'm working in a team that's called Mechatronics Technology Engineering Team and basically we focus on everything mechatronics technology engineering team and basically we focus on everything mechatronics, right? Um, what else? It's uh good to say. Uh, yeah, well, festo, probably. Let me maybe ask, ask this question to all of you when you think maybe not you, nikki, because you're gonna know the answer, but ali and lucas when you hear about festo, what do you think of?
Speaker 4:German pneumatics Okay all right.
Speaker 3:Yeah actuators, actuators. So that's a good answer, right? The one thing that I wanted to mention when I mentioned my title I'm in the mechatronics department, I'm not in the pneumatics department, and the reason why I wanted to say that is because I usually asked a lot of people out in the industry hey, what do you know Festo for? And that is the immediate answer you know pneumatics. And that is because Festo has been a leader in pneumatics for so many years. But also, for more than a decade, we've been doing a lot of electric automation products and solutions. What is electric automation? And we're gonna get to the connectivity topic later because of that electric automation is basically servo motors, servo drives, linear actuators and whatnot. We're doing a lot of work, collaborating with some companies on the robotics side of things. So that is exactly the link that I wanted to make in terms of the mechatronics side of things.
Speaker 1:So we're still leaders in pneumatics, but we're also bringing the electric motion side of things, that's great, and as mechatronics becomes more available as a subject to study, we've really I think it's become more popular now, but back in the day, like controls engineers and mechatronics, folks really didn't necessarily go through like a specific training for that.
Speaker 1:They got some sort of engineering degree and then they branched out into these disciplines Learned on the job, and this is so. I used to full disclaimer, I used to work for Festo which is why Sandra told me not to answer the question but a part of Festo that is not really part of the organization that I was in, but it's called Festo Didactic. They've really been on the forefront of selling like training systems for mechatronics programs for a long time, right, and so I think most people that know the word mechatronics from they've been to some sort of mechatronics program. Um, they've seen the festo trainers and on that side of the business it's always been a big collaboration of training people on the industry stuff, not just the festo stuff. Uh, and this is probably not where you were necessarily going with this, but I just wanted to point that out. I think you know I personally, without working at Festo, necessarily find them to be synonymous with mechatronics in a way.
Speaker 1:But that's because I've kind of known them a little bit from the training side, just from some of the people that you know I've met not necessarily while I worked at Festo, but in this kind of community, like Ted Rosier and other people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, fun, fun fact, nikki I actually my degree in engineering is in mechatronics engineering and I still find it interesting today that in the US what might?
Speaker 3:I got my degree in Mexico right and I find it interesting that in the US it's still kind of like a newer thing. Like not every university here has a mechatronics degree. Now we're starting to see them more and more, but I got my degree back in 2011. So it's been more than 12 something years, right, and and I wasn't the first generation out of that degree, right. So I find it interesting because mechatronics has been around since the 80s or 90s. You know it was originated in Japan and then we're still. You know we're barely seeing it here in the US. But I'm really glad, though, because I always recommend to people like in high school if you're interested in science and technology and engineering, look at mechatronics.
Speaker 4:I always Then you get all of it, you get all of it.
Speaker 3:You get all of it. But warning, warning here. The bad thing about mechatronics is that you know about everything but you don't specialize in anything. So you got to be careful with that. You can pick, you know, an area of specialization later, like in my case. I specialized in controls more than anything. I know some colleagues of mine that specialize more on the mechanical side of things, but I love it because I'm able to talk to all of the different engineers that I'm working on daily. If I got to talk to a mechanical designer, I know he's doing a finite element analysis. I know what that is about. If I'm talking to a controls engineer or an electrician, I know what they're talking about. I might not be able to do exactly what they do. And Niki touched on the didactic portion of things. Another fun fact when I was at the university I learned on Festo equipment, festo didactic equipment, and I'm talking about more than 10 years ago. So yeah, good point there.
Speaker 4:Would you say that made a huge difference in empowering you like to go forward? Oh yeah, into your career, oh yeah, having actually used the real stuff and not big learning something else and I know I, I really love what you guys are doing with the plc kits.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. We need more of that, because we need to. We need to show the newer generations how exciting this stuff is. You know, know, it's not nerdy, you know it's-.
Speaker 4:There's glory involved. Maybe it is a little nerdy. Sometimes it makes problems on the platform. There is yeah.
Speaker 3:No but it was so useful. You know, I remember being a college student back in the day. It was awesome to be able to use a six-axis robot, you know, to program a Siemens PLC or a Rockwell PLC, because when I graduated I was able to go immediately out there and work and be able to. I wasn't able to do a you know, a complex program, but I at least had an idea of what it was about.
Speaker 4:You weren't starting from absolutely nothing.
Speaker 3:Yes, which a?
Speaker 4:lot of people in the US do. Yes, for mechatronics anyway, exactly Now that's changing, but yeah, it was rough.
Speaker 3:So if you're in one of these schools that has the equipment, you should consider yourself very lucky, because that is truly a big tool, truly a big tool.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm really curious to hear what you guys are showing here at Automate. Where are you guys focused and what are you showcasing here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this year we're showing highlights. It would be 7th axis integration to different robots. In this case, in the booth we have an ABB robot and also a UR robot and basically we're driving those robots with a 7th axis, but additionally we can have more access. So if you have like an indexing table, we could also control that through directly through the robot controller. That's one thing. We're also showing a new set of linear actuators that were released less than six months ago. Those are tooth belt and baltster actuators. More on the mechanical side of things. The third thing that I would say to highlight it's a new vault manifold that we have. Going back to the pneumatics, going back to basics, right, we have a new vault manifold that has, of course, the valves, but it also has some IEO integrated on it. So those are the three key things that we're focusing on this year.
Speaker 2:That's great. And where would you see? I mean, from a market perspective, where do you see these products going?
Speaker 3:Everywhere. Everywhere you mean in the industry, yeah, yeah. So we have customers from the automotive industry, food industry, electronics, medical. We've been doing a lot of medical lately. You know, either that's medical device manufacturer or that could also be lab equipment, you know, like dna sampling and all that uh so, uh, food, uh, mining as well. So that's the complex part of working for a big company, right, that it's so broad. But it's beautiful too. I out every day. For me it's. It's great because I get to see different applications, I get to meet different interesting people like yourself, you know, like like all of you, I like that, I love that. Yeah, but all of those industries are industries that we work with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree. The same thing is that Harding is, you find that most industries need some level of power and data and you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the best way to solve your problem with the toolkit that we have in front of us. So just fun to see. You know automation, robotics certainly, but there's a wide number of industries that need the products that that we offer right.
Speaker 3:no, and when I see hard thing, I like I immediately think about reliable. You know like I don't get to use the products every single day nowadays, but in the past I would use them a lot. For example, we at Festo we carry demo cases with equipment that we got to show users and whatnot, and most of our demo cases they have harding connectors because they're so reliable. We can take them out on the field, plug them, unplug them, plug them in them in, do a show, you know, talk about how to use our product and then unplug it and go and picture how many times we do that a year, you know, and multiply that how many sales engineers we're going to have. So your products are great. You know a vault manifold and I can have all of the pneumatic connections plus the electric connections, plus maybe the connections for the servo drive everything on one connector. That's I love that. Yeah, I love that. That's great.
Speaker 1:Very modular my gosh, I'm going to interject here and Courtney Fernandez, who is. She's in the URG booth because that's her day job, but she's our co-host with her automation ladies as well, our kind of resident robotics expert. She was watching a. She was part of a. I guess it was a competition at robotics companies. There was some sort of innovation prize and I don't remember all the details of the story, but the point was she said the company that really she thought should have and could have won because of their technology. They actually lost that competition because of a connector.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness because these very specialized and incredibly smart software engineers that came up with this ai assisted robotics, whatever it was.
Speaker 1:They neglected to think about the fact that this standard basic you know, consumer grade connector on their robot would just potentially fall out and they they got disconnected from their robot during the challenge and could not finish it oh no and that's where, like something, where you know, getting to meet you guys and and me just opening my mind up to like, hey, this whole world of connectors that I took for granted in some applications like that, that point of failure. I mean you can over engineer. You can engineer a system to perfection and if it gets disconnected and it doesn't work it will not work and your customer is still mad. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And these details matter. At what point in an engineer's career do they start to say, oh, now the next thing I'm going to learn about is connectors. Or do they just have to run into a problem in order to realize that it's important and frantically searching for who the heck do I talk to or learn from about this stuff, so that this doesn't happen again?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what we find with, especially with a lot of younger engineers, is that connectivity is somewhat of an afterthought. It's a hey, I'm going to design the system and like, oh yeah, I need power or I need data or I need pneumatics, and so we spend a lot of time actually just educating our customers on what's important, why it's important and how to do design the right way. So it's a fun place to be at, but it is interesting coming in sometimes towards the end of a design and helping people pick the right thing.
Speaker 3:It's not the best time to come in right, but the thing that I always tell our customers is give the sales engineer some love sometimes, because a lot of the people might be like oh, here comes that sales engineer.
Speaker 3:He's going to take all of my time, but I tell them, hey, whenever we're there, it's basically what we're doing is we're putting more tools in your toolbox, right? I'm not saying, hey, get it now, I'm just showing. You know, hey, we came up with this new technology. You might, you know, use it at one point, or might not, but now you know that it exists. So I'm looking at that case that's behind you. I love those kind of things because you're like holy, like I've never, never noticed, like, or I never knew that that existed, you know, like this is great. And we, you know, no one was born knowing everything right. And I think, engineers, we gotta be humble all the time and we gotta be. I'm gonna emphasize that we gotta be humble because we tend not to, because sometimes engineers tend to be like oh, I know it all you know, like.
Speaker 3:I went through a five-year degree and I'm an expert in uh, thermodynamics or whatever, but there's always something. So I always, you know, encourage. I always, you know, encourage people. Make good relationships with the salespeople. They might help you out at one point right.
Speaker 4:Some of them in my previous career, I guess I started as a process engineer and, yeah, the salespeople you become, you learn which ones are your allies and they're the ones that teach you and they'll go out of their way to go find you another solution that they're not necessarily selling, because they want to keep that relationship with you yeah, sales engineers are truly, or can become truly, an extension of your engineering department yes, like you can have your internal engineering group, but these people are going around multiple companies, seeing multiple applications, facing different challenges.
Speaker 3:You know, talk to them and you know explain to explain to them. This is my challenge, right, and they can help you. They can help you.
Speaker 1:And the good ones care about. You know they have a long reputation in the industry and you know people find out real quick. If you're just out there selling and the best ones you know they'll tell you no, don't buy this right now.
Speaker 4:This is not the solution for you or tell you that they can't, they don't have the best technology for that, and those are the people that get everyone to come back to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, yeah, I would say. Our, our most successful sales engineers are the people that are exactly like that. They have relationships with the customers and they're side by side, helping pick out the right solution for their specific need, and just continue to have success over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I will say, though and I love about both Festo and Harding is that you guys are also.
Speaker 1:You place importance on digital self-service configuration tools and things that engineers, when they want to figure it out on their own, up to whatever part where they need to maybe confirm that hey, I did choose the right thing, like let me get an applications engineer's blessing on this, but configuration tools is something that Festo has been.
Speaker 1:I mean, they have such a huge catalog that it is impossible to see everything on your own, but they've done a really good job for almost of the product lines to create these interactive product selector tools so that a customer or a sales engineer can go in, use the tool, configure something that makes sense, and I think you guys are doing that as well. You're providing that option to those sales engineers that may not yet have a relationship with someone in sales that they feel comfortable with or, in some some cases, you know there are salespeople out there that aren't technical, that don't know the details, that will just try to sell you a solution, and you know you want to know who you can trust, and sometimes you want to start with okay, well, is this brand putting out enough information?
Speaker 2:that.
Speaker 1:I feel like they stand behind their product. They know it well enough to be able to create a configurator.
Speaker 1:They've invested money in making this information available to me and then it might be easier to then, you know, start that personal relationship with someone if you're not forced to start. Like I personally, okay, and I'm a woman in this industry and many others, I will not walk into a dealership, like a car dealership anymore and have someone try to suggest to me what I need. Like it's condescending, um, when I care about the car, I've been told, like, where I can put my purse in the car, like that's what I should care about. Um, and I'm. There might be a parallel, I'm sure, to some engineers, like hearing from a salesperson like, oh, this is what you need. When, yeah, we don't like that.
Speaker 4:oh, this is what you need when, if?
Speaker 1:you actually know what you need and you have some chops behind what you're doing. You want to be able to use those skills, but you need information available and I personally now completely stay away from brands that it's kind of all or nothing. You either like get in front of a salesperson and have them give you a whole pitch and they're going to to sell you on the spot, or you get, you know no information. To me that's a huge turnoff. Sandro, have you seen, like in your evolution, I guess, in your role, like whether that makes any sense from the people that you work with? Like, do they utilize the self-service along with the, you know, bringing the sales engineer on site to add that value totally?
Speaker 3:Totally, totally. I mean, I think it also comes from us being consumers. You know, like, hey, I'm laying on my couch at 9 pm and I'm like, oh, I've got to order some body wash. You know, I go to Amazon and I can do it at 9 pm or at 2 am or whatever. I don't have to go to Walmart or whatever another company and I don't have to drive at 2 am, right, that's part of the self-service. So I think let's say that was at 2 am. When I go into the office at 8 am, if I'm at a machine builder, I expect the same thing, Not every single time I need to talk to someone. It's nice to have that ability, right, but no, I love it and you're right, I mean having that ability of sizing something by yourself, and I've seen your configurator online.
Speaker 3:You know you're able to put together a connector. You specify how many, you know how many volts, how many nomadic connections you need and whatever, and then it'll tell you a model, right? I think that's great, and I've been in the situation so many times where I'm like, I'm like 99%, I just have one question and I can call you, but I already have 99% of the stuff done right, and then you might tell me hey, you know what, what you're looking at maybe has you know, for whatever reason, has extremely long lead times. And that's when you can, you know, guide me. And that's also another point where I usually reach out to Nikki and I'm like Nikki, can you get me something through? Quote me right like a, is there something available? Or yeah, but no, totally, nikki, I think that's.
Speaker 1:That's on point and that's something that like if you're not in that area all the time, like I. When I used to be a sales engineer at Festo, I did a lot of work with my customers to like swap out. Sometimes it was this particular seal that they chose. That might have been a great option for the application, but it extended the lead time by like eight weeks because that material was harder to get and you know somebody that works with that all the time. It was easy for me to make the suggestions of well, I know that this particular material is easier to get. I know that would work for your application.
Speaker 1:That's something that you know a manufacturing engineer should not have to know as much about and that's the shortcut of getting the experienced sales engineer involved. That will shave off the last. You might spend 80% more time trying to figure out the last frustrating question that you have than the original time it took you to configure, and that's where you just need to be able to access somebody real quick that has whatever knowledge you need to complete that action.
Speaker 3:And I think that's the key. You know, I was talking to a customer the other day and they mentioned something that, to me, was revealing in a way, because it's so basic. But basically they said let's say that I'm going to change the product, but let's say that they'm going to change the product, but let's say that they made toothbrushes right, and we were talking about sourcing a component. And they're like listen, my job is to manufacture toothbrushes. My job is not to, you know, set up a servo drive and make it turn right, like that is part of something that I have to do to get the toothbrushes going right out of the conveyor line. And that's the key thing. Going back to that topic of self-service, I want to be able to do this as quickly as possible because, let's be honest to ourselves, time is money, right, time is money, and people don't want to waste time where they should be producing toothbrushes right. Yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess, yeah, to try to. We've got a whole day ahead of us and I think some of us need some lunch. So either one of you any closing thoughts that you want to talk about, major trends you see coming or things that we should be aware of from your perspective as we close out this conversation.
Speaker 2:Well, I just think from the configurator perspective, at Hardening we're trying to make things even easier than before, and one of the things we showed at our last show is actually an AI prompt, so you can actually go in and say I need a connector that has this functionality, and so it's like trying to make it even easier from picking the right product just from a text prompt instead of knowing the modules or knowing everything that you need to build it. So it's a fun advancement that we're making. Again, you said time is money and we're trying to make it as easy as possible to get that up and going.
Speaker 4:Save your customers some money, like that I'm jealous of young engineers that have this now. Totally, totally. We didn't have this.
Speaker 3:I'm so jealous too, so maybe tomorrow I'm going to be like hey, siri, get me a Harding connector for four conductors and three pneumatic lines or something right?
Speaker 3:No, I think that my closing remark would be I think nowadays especially I see it with my customers is there's a lot of they're looking for flexible machines, right? They want to be able to produce product A today and product B tomorrow, or some of the customers are doing product A right now and then product B in the next hour and having that flexibility. I think that these connectors come into play, the products that you guys do, because it's so easy to interchange. Hey, I can roll in a cart with the new tooling or whatever, plug it in, roll it out and bring the other cart in the next hour or something. So flexibility is key. And one point is thank you for having me. It was really good conversation and I'm looking forward to utilizing more of your products in our solutions.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for being a part of this, yeah.
Speaker 1:Great to see you again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, sandro.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll be coming by the booth and hopefully you can join us at our party tonight Manufacturing Happy Hour with Hardeen the booth, and hopefully you can join us at our party tonight manufacturing happy hour with harding um. And then I would encourage everybody if you're listening to this and you don't know sandra yet like, follow him on linkedin. He produces a lot of quality content.
Speaker 3:Yeah if you're you know what he's talking about yeah, and if you're looking at you know you have an issue. At 9 pm, 10 pm, you can always go to youtube. Uh, we also have some content there for troubleshooting, uh, how to set up a PLC or something. So we do a lot of content. We put it all out there, thank you, thank you, again, thank you guys.
Speaker 4:Thank you Bye.
