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
From SPE Standards to Hands-On Automation with McKenzie from CLN of SF and Ed from HARTING (Automate 2024)
Join us as the Automation Ladies sit down with McKenzie Reed, President of Single Paired Ether Standards Development / CLN of South Florida, and Ed Garskowitz, Business Development Manager at HARTING.
Mckenzie shares his journey from working at Harting to acquiring his own industrial machinery company. Alongside McKenzie, Ed reflects on their collaborative history, and their innovative office. They talk all about SPE's, their IoT integration, and empowering smaller systems.
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
I'm McKenzie Reed. I've worked for Harding for the last eight years and my primary function now is single-pair Ethernet standards development, mostly through ODBA, a little bit through IEEE and TIA other standards organizations. And then last May my wife and I acquired an industrial machinery company in South Florida doing three-axis CNC router tables and a proprietary machine that bends industrial outdoor signage, so like the profile for like a sign that will go on the outside of your building or like a plaza or something like that. So industrial automation in that respect.
Speaker 2:Yeah right on, I guess I'll introduce myself again. We've met before Ed Garskowitz, edgy, long time Harding employee, 26 years. I am currently, and most recently, in the role of senior industrial segment manager for automation and robotics A role, by the way, with some big footsteps, because that's one of the roles that mckinsey actually the role you joined the company yeah, yeah yeah, so yep, first automation, ism.
Speaker 1:Uh, that was when it was split from machinery and automation to just automation, because the market had gotten big enough to like justify bringing on ahead. And and I worked together in the same pod you were energy man I was broadcasting which was a lot of fun.
Speaker 5:Yep, yeah you said pod like podcast. Oh, what's up?
Speaker 1:uh like our seating pod oh, right, yeah cool like kind of this four person thing.
Speaker 5:What? Why is it called a pod?
Speaker 1:It was just like a big square and we had like a meeting table in the middle of it. Actually, that was like my favorite setup that we had in the office.
Speaker 2:I love the pod. It enables collaboration right, yes, exactly it does.
Speaker 6:Little communities within your whole floor space. Yep it does. Pod. It sounds like.
Speaker 2:Orcus or something.
Speaker 6:Yes, it does Pod. It sounds like Orcus or something.
Speaker 2:Yes, or the pod people in sci-fi, you know.
Speaker 5:I just imagine this like in-shape thing.
Speaker 6:So, Allie you should introduce yourself.
Speaker 5:Oh, I'm Allie Gilpin. I started a systems integration firm after being a controls engineer for 10 years, and where I first actually found Harding connectors was at an OEM. I came from process side, so I came from process automation and transferred into like factory machine automation Cool and so that was a change for me. But now you do it.
Speaker 6:I'm Nikki Gonzalez. Although some in the industry may remember me from my maiden name days. I actually met an old Keyence colleague earlier this morning. I used to go by Halgrim's daughter a lot harder to figure out how to spell, but you kind of don't forget it.
Speaker 6:And yeah, I've kind of come full circle in a lot of ways. I used to be a field sales engineer for machine vision, barcode readers and laser markers back when those were small enough product lines to be lumped together Sure, which they're really not today, right, yeah, and I've kind of worked my way around different things because I'm perpetually curious and I get really bored once I learn something really well and I find myself, I guess, the happiest at a bottom of a steep learning curve, with a little bit of anxiety at the bottom of my pit of my stomach and there's just constantly something new to learn in this industry completely and never ended, and so when, when I heard somebody on LinkedIn to ask about connectors the other day and this is a couple months ago but kind of how we ended up connecting with Harding and why we're here having these conversations, it's just something that I never really thought about.
Speaker 6:It didn't touch what I did enough. But, like a factory floor, a manufacturing facility has so many facets and I think a lot of us are kind of used to our little space in the industry. We look at things through a certain lens. And me, coming in as a sales engineer with vision systems, of course I was always looking for a problem to solve with vision and then I ended up wanting to learn more about the handling systems, more about the control systems, and I guess I just kind of can't get enough of trying to learn. The next thing Didn't think about connectors before, but I am actually really fascinated by meeting you and your journey because I actually now have a goal I would love to own a manufacturing business so that at some point I can kind of practice what I preach.
Speaker 6:You know like test your own stuff on your own business.
Speaker 1:We're about a year in, almost exactly coming up in June, and and it's a lot of what you just said of like the anxiety at the bottom level of like, oh my God, I feel like I don't know anything.
Speaker 1:I've been in automation for 12 years and I'm just like, yep, no, all right. What is this problem? Every day is a new problem. Every day is like we have to try and find a solution in real time, whether it's like a machine that's been out in the field for 15 years which we don't even make anymore and we're three iterations of machine past that one, but we have to support it, yeah. Or or just improving the design of what we are doing now, which is, you know, including connectors like we're taking hard looks at Harding products and then things that are outside of the Harding portfolio to connectorize more of the machinery. So it's like I was just actually talking about that this morning with one of our suppliers of like practicing what I preach. It's like I've been talking about automation for a long time.
Speaker 1:I did automation for four and a half years at Rockwell Automation as a field engineer. Like I didn't just jump into like a machinery business. It was like they shipped me all over the country starting up industrial machinery. So it's like a little bit of that experience, but different animal now of like being in the driver's seat, yeah, real yeah, yeah, it's fun though.
Speaker 1:Uh, we just went to our like biggest trade show of the year, uh, last month for the industrial sign industry and, um, my wife comes from that world of doing like trade show exhibits and whole like user experiences, so that was that was a lot of fun to like kind of reintroduce the whole company there I mean that's a huge resource that you have.
Speaker 6:I mean most new companies or people starting out like I've built many a booth from scratch, not knowing what I'm doing whatsoever, with no professionals.
Speaker 6:That's a, that's a pretty nice built-in advantage that you have right there.
Speaker 6:Um, but something that I'm seeing you know more and more in the industry as well is that we're, as we get a chance to talk about it more with the outside world. We can have more collaborations with people, whether they know our industry or not. Like there's more people kind of coming in, becoming aware of machinery, automation, manufacturing, what we do, and a lot of people think it's really cool and, even if they have no background in it, like they want to come in and it's been traditionally kind of a closed industry. Like you have to have connections to be able to learn about this stuff, and I love this direction of like Harding being part of this. Hey, we want to just get the information out to the people, however they want it Right, be a supportive resource, be somebody that people can call on when they need to know about this very niche area of the industry which I mean there's just like so much to so much to know. Our good friend Josh Vargis made a really good point the other day.
Speaker 1:He said oh, if you want to be impressive, just get really good at like a really niche thing that most people don't care about, and then you'll always sound super smart yeah and that's easy to do in this yeah, there, yeah, you could, niches in the niche, pull on whatever thread you want to pull on and you know talking about being a subject matter expert or trying to just get the word out there. Uh, we're sitting with the person that's probably been in more harding marketing videos than anyone, which is ed uh and touched basically every product line in your uh, in your what 26 years you said yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:um, I think we do a pretty good job of that of like, whether it's industrial ethernet Week, which happened a couple months ago, which was single pair Ethernet focused as well as other parts of emerging Ethernet, or, like our Han product line, we're pretty much always kind of doing customer outreach learning sessions. Have you guys seen our digital experience center? No.
Speaker 1:In the headquarters. It's very cool, uh, state of the art. Instead of traveling during the covid year, we built that facility with like a big led wall for presentations. So if you've seen anything that's kind of recent within the last few years at harding, it's out of that studio right, that's where gora and I had our conversation the last time.
Speaker 6:Yeah, yeah so so you guys were definitely, if not our only, guests that had a recording studio on the other end of our meeting, nice Versus just showing up with headphones or whatever. So it's very impressive and I think we're very much looking forward to an opportunity to visit Not that- I'm sure we have an open invitation, but we do a whole lot of travel already.
Speaker 6:Sure, Trying to really like. If you gave me carte blanche, like what I wanted to do all year and it had nothing to do with like family responsibilities or other work that I have to get done, I would be visiting all of these places and talking to all the eds in all of the different niches, because they are also the people like as the workforce is transitioning, and especially younger people, they stick around one discipline you know less often than I think, often than I think used to be the case. But once you find people that are passionate enough and have been in a niche long enough, the more we can proliferate what they know and make sure that they're a known connection in all of our different communities. I know for us we work with a lot of smaller systems integrators that are growing. They're not going to be experts at everything, but in order to be effective and grow their company they really have to know who to call on for those different areas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd say we talk about that a lot. When it comes to the standards body, what we talk about within ODBA meetings a lot is that we have to define these standards down to granular levels that we haven't done before, which includes connectors, actually, you know, calling out one specific connector to use for IP20 applications or IP65, ip67 applications, and it's because I fully agree that I think that people are going to be more generalist than specific. Moving forward. It's like within basically any company that you look at, people are wearing multiple hats and don't really have the bandwidth anymore to just be that specialist. You're expected to be the subject matter expert and extremely niche, specific and also do another, probably two roles on top of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, from the standards point of view, we're trying to go down to an additional layer that we didn't go to before. To be extremely explicit, of like you don't have to go figure this out, Like we will figure it out for you and just give you the roadmap, and then you just implement, um, and you keep going about. You know your design process, like here's the five that you use, here's the cable, here's the chip set, here's the connector for this application. And being more specific about what applications certain technologies go into and which ones they don't go into, I think is kind of the main difference.
Speaker 2:Right, I would say McKinsey is the Michael Jordan of SPE.
Speaker 6:I kind of feel really honored sitting next to him.
Speaker 2:If you have any questions about that in particular, I would fire away right now.
Speaker 6:I guess my question is SPE specifically. How do you see that potential to transform your manufacturing business? Like what do you have strategic imperatives to or plans to utilize that technology specifically as any kind of catalyst within your business?
Speaker 1:I think that it's going to enable IOT really for the first time. We've all been in different sectors of this industry for varying amounts of time and I think that we haven't seen IOT grow the way that we've seen IoT grow, you know. So, like on the consumer side, with consumer appliances or whatever you choose to look at smart TVs, whatever Everything is integrated, everything talks to each other. Everything in your home talks to each other, if you want it to be that way. We haven't seen that happen in industrial automation or process automation yet. Haven't seen that happen in industrial automation or process automation yet. I think that SPE will help with actually bringing that to the forefront, because you're going to cost effectively put things on Ethernet for the first time. It's going to be easier to implement at varying speeds and distances. I know that you spoke with Gota and Ed about this previously, but like starting at 10 megabit per second and going up to multi-gigabit speed, all on one network, one common protocol, one common connector. You know if it's for industrial automation or process automation, there are a few different flavors, but I really just see it facilitating that for the most part, and within my own business, where we are already planning to implement.
Speaker 1:It is the edge cases, so the sensors that we already have on the machine.
Speaker 1:Some of them can be retrofitted for SPU, which is what we're working on right now. Other ones where you know, there are adapter kits where Harding has partnered with companies like SparkFun and other partners to put a whole adapter kit together and other partners to put a whole adapter kit together. That's another one that I'm looking at implementing to just add more sensing to, specifically, the CNC 3-axis router tables where we want to start measuring temperature and vibration on the spindle, which will run 10 hours a day at 24,000 RPM, just back-to-back cutting for wholesale manufacturers. So we want to be able to have our customers monitor what's going on with their machine and then the bonus being that we're also able to monitor where we get an alert and are able to actually contact our customer before they contact us for technical support. That's huge. That's going to be a big enabler for us moving forward. And then it's just more analytics. I want to know more about what's going on with the machine before things break or need maintenance.
Speaker 6:Yeah, so a big part of it is obviously operational efficiency, cost savings, quality, but then really it's also enabling you to potentially provide a much better customer experience right than your competitor. Sure. Yeah, it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. You know, on the one side of the business, we have a specialized machine that has a patent and all this fancy technology. On the other side, with the 3-axis CNC router tables if you're familiar with them, a router table is a router table is a router table. It's the same general technology. So you have to set yourself apart in other ways, and the way that we do it is through our service and technical support, and so this is just the next iteration of that. We're remotely, if you give us access, we're remotely monitoring your machine and can tell you when it's time for maintenance, when you're having premature wear on any one of the specific components, and one of the most expensive and sensitive things on the machine is actually the 11 horsepower spindle, so you want to protect that at all costs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But some of our customers are more output driven and they're like we will just replace the spindle. We are just all about output. And other ones are like no, I want this spindle to last for 15 years. So anything that we can do to protect it, we want to protect it. So you know. Again, going back to connectivity and networks, that's really where we're looking to improve. By the end of this year we aim to have a single pair Ethernet solution on the machine.
Speaker 6:It's pretty exciting. But yeah, like you said, different customers have different goals and so they're not all focused on the same metric necessarily. I've talked to people that are like, oh, we have a machine down and you know, this is a huge deal, and some people it costs them tens of thousands of dollars an hour or more. And then others are like, yeah, it's totally fine, this is down for a week, so you can't make the assumptions. But I think connectorization, modularization, flexibility right, and having, let's say, something like Ethernet, you can choose to use all of that power or not, but you have it built in if you need it.
Speaker 6:Yeah, right, I'm seeing a lot of that in terms of like design projects that we've been working on is designing for future capabilities as well, because we all know that, like you, have a process today, but if you're a forward-thinking company, you're going to potentially change it or add on to it or do something right.
Speaker 6:How do you do that without starting from scratch? Do you have a piece of hardware that you have to completely replace the system, or can you, you know, make those changes as business evolves? Right, and I think we're seeing that with a lot of the soft platforms that are coming out, less, you know, reliance on one specific piece of hardware. And you know, with, I think, the standardization of connectors, right, you get more flexibility by it being standardized, because then you can use them in more places. You can, you know, stock replacements and spares and things like that. And I don't know if it's like commercial reasons or industry norms or whatever, but we've kind of been very siloed in the past and like, just like, I mean, I guess the same thing could be said for things like the consumer ecosystem, sure, but wanting to keep people in your kind of grip, right, use this specialty and then you can't replace it except for with anything but mine. And I think our generation in particular, and younger people, they don't appreciate that attitude anymore, they're like you know what?
Speaker 6:I want you to actually earn it and I want to be able to switch over and not just use you because the cost of changing is too high or because I'm now caught in some sort of barrier. Competitively, obviously, companies want to build a moat.
Speaker 1:I think, a really good example of that and I'm not the expert on this, I don't operate within this standards project, but it's the Open Compute Project for data centers, which we've been involved in, I think, since back in 2016 or 2018. Center space and said we want you to standardize on. You can have your own proprietary technology, but we have to standardize on where the mounting holes are, where of all the individual components that go inside of these blades for data centers.
Speaker 1:We have to standardize on what these look like and where they go and how they get mounted and what their power requirements are and what their outputs are. Everything like that they moved in the direction of you can be competitive in your offering, but we have to standardize on the hardware. So I completely agree with you that the users are going to be looking for more options where you may want to use vendor A for an HMI, vendor B for a PLC and vendor C for a drive, and the expectation moving forward is going to be that all those things work together and aren't, you know, safeguarded behind a proprietary, you know like annual cost, or that they just flat out won't work with each other.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and I think COVID kind of exposed a lot of the flaws of this model where we don't work together, because if you can't get something, you have to do something, you have to change over right. It was really painful for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:That was before my time at CLN, but that exact thing happened where the manufacturer of the variable frequency drives that we were using they were just nowhere in the world All of a sudden you could get them drives that we were using. They're just nowhere in the world. All of a sudden you could get them, and so they had to get really creative of finding an alternate that would be as close to a drop-in replacement as you could get, and it wasn't a seamless fit but it worked and I have about 50 of them still sitting in the inventory because we don't use them. It was just kind of to get through that push, yeah, and now I have to. You know, like figure out was just kind of to get through that push and now I have to, you know, like figure out what I'm going to do with that.
Speaker 1:But you know that's a pain point that I'm living right now is that before my time they had a problem. They just had to solve it for the moment, and then now we're kind of figuring out what we're going to do with it now that things have gotten back to normal. But I'm even seeing that you know with it, now that things have gotten back to normal. But I'm even seeing that, you know, for whatever reason there's not a root cause that I've identified yet but that lead times are getting pushed out pretty drastically. In Q1 of this year we went on one part from six weeks to 22 within, you know, like one reorder, and couldn't really get an explanation as to why. So, like we're looking for those options of like vendor A, b and C as a swap-out replacement when we need it.
Speaker 6:Yeah, because I mean just yeah, relying on one vendor or one, everything is great, it's fine, but when you're forced to make these tradeoffs because you can't get what you, you know, originally signed up for, you have to have some options. Sure, and I think you know a lot of people kind of changed. You know what this is actually necessary. We have to be able to make these crosses. You know we have to be able to collaborate as an industry Because ultimately, if our customers can't automate, then our entire industry loses. Yep, right, and I think you know, with robotic deployments, for instance, like why the heck has it taken so long in the US for us to really start deploying lots of robotics? And not to say that robots are the answer to every automation challenge or that we should be automating everything with robots.
Speaker 6:Personally, having worked with, like, gantry systems, there's tons of other options which are often better, but I have seen, you know, robot deployments that failed. It was really like a lack of training, maintenance, knowledge, and I think if we standardize more, then those sorts of things can be more general, people can be generally more aware of like hey, this is generally how we need to maintain and operate robots Versus it kind of used to be like every vendor had their own class that was very specific. It's a very closed system and so it just doesn't become like general knowledge. It's kind of gatekept, like you have to be able to afford to go to the class and become a specialist in this and learn this particular operating system. And this is maybe just you know my view.
Speaker 6:Looking back, like I feel like we would have gotten more deployment faster if we were kind of more open about it this way Shared more information, made more hardware, more interfaces, interoperable Because then, yeah, it's risky to like go down a path, invest a lot of money in something that you can't change. Sure, and you know manufacturing businesses, a lot of them. I mean, maybe you can speak to this, but like your goal every day is to run your machines and run your business, and then you have some time to hopefully work on the business, make investments, like all of those things. But you have to be conservative. You can't just like jump on every new trend and start implementing it on the floor.
Speaker 1:Sure, does it de-risk it to feel like you have options and more ways that you can make money on your investment if things change.
Speaker 1:Right now, we're in the mode of making improvements to both of the flagship product lines and we're doing it slowly and, I think, with purpose, to make sure that we don't break anything that came before. Yeah, because, as I said before, we have to support what's out there and, specifically on our channel letter machine, we'll release a new version of it. You know when it's ready and eventually. But I want to make sure that everything that we change on that machine is reverse compatible where we can put it into a kit and ship it to a customer, because I want to make sure the customers that bought a machine in 2023 or 2022 are still going to get the latest and greatest in terms of, like the software and the firmware side, which we're working on, as well as any hardware improvements. So it's taking longer than I would like it to, but we're doing it in a way where it's like, okay, we're going to make sure that these are drop-in, replacement improvements to the machines that are out in the field.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of how we're de-risking the situation of getting away from products and suppliers that are maybe like long in the tooth, where we have concerns that we're not going to be able to get those components in a few years, and just making sure that even machines that we haven't made product lines that we haven't made in a few years are still supported with the latest and greatest in controls and electronics. Ed, I think you were going to say something.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I wanted to say on the standardization topic is that what I like about it, the beauty of it also, is it forces the supplier to innovate. So let's say, the interface itself is standard, right, it has to fit. It has to fit in that box, that profile, whatever. So how does a supplier differentiate their product from any other person's product besides price? And so what you do is you add bells, whistles where you can. Maybe you make your product easier to use, maybe feel installable, whatever you can do to then differentiate your product. So I think standardization also supports innovation, kind of in a backdoor way.
Speaker 5:I have a question about single-pair Ethernet because I'm thinking about implementation and this is after, because we have IO-Link right now and that's kind of how we do it. We do it in clusters. Single-pair Ethernet is going to let us do every single device has an IP address and we're just going to talk to that directly. But that's going to blow up our networks and so do you guys have a partner in networks to help your customers when they do finally get all of their devices in their plants with their own IP address?
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is.
Speaker 5:I think I'm excited for that.
Speaker 1:It's a challenge and it may finally push us into IPv6 versus v4.
Speaker 5:Oh, definitely.
Speaker 1:Which has been an option on a lot of control devices for the last 15 years at least. You know. For me, when I was commissioning machinery, it was like a checkbox of whether I wanted to use IPv4 or v6. For any listener that's not familiar with what we're talking about, it's just adding more strings to the IP address.
Speaker 5:Yeah, we literally ran out of IP addresses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which would just exponentially open it up In terms of, like, the bandwidth and the traffic on there. That's kind of where I think that the network will continue to have to evolve. We have to get really good at that.
Speaker 1:ODBA did a good job with this back in the DeviceNet days where you would have a DeviceNet network of 40 nodes and maybe all of those were variable frequency drives and then it had a converter to Ethernet and then from your PLC you would only really see that connection point and then you could drill down into all those drives. But now what we're talking about is each one of those drives has an IP address, and not only that, but all the sensors that are out on the conveyor belts or your process automation application, they also have it. So I think that it won't be gateways in the way that we understand gateways today, but there'll be access points to where you know. You kind of just like open up the tree and here's a whole plethora of IP addresses and then you close that one, you navigate to the next tree and then you have a whole bunch of them. But it is a challenge.
Speaker 1:The network companies, like the ones that do the networking technology and switches and routers they're all taking very serious looks at how we deploy this. I'm excited. Benefit of it will be that there aren't going to be a lot of customers that do a full deployment of SBE and we're changing over our entire plant. Maybe there will be a greenfield customer that does that, where we want the latest and greatest of everything. But I think that SBE will be rolled out into the market and already is being rolled out into the market as like pocket applications. Sure yeah.
Speaker 1:And we can kind of like deal with it as we go.
Speaker 6:I'm hearing from our friends in networking that the startup-y customers are the ones that are wanting basically everything like with a single just IP address, up to the cloud. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Virtual PLCs. They're really trying to get ahead of this using the older hardware and I think also their talent pool is more modern software engineers and so they have a hard time getting traditional controls folks because just the way that their companies are operating, the way they're recruiting, they have this kind of different talent pool that they're looking at and I think they're looking for they're the ones that would be doing a Greenfield project, Like let's just connect everything this way, Right? I think that's a very small percentage of what's going on.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and we really try to stay away from those types of buzzwords because we feel like they've been talked about for so long. Oh yes, Are they being realized on the floor? In most cases not, and we see great presentations with all this promise and then it's like but you kind of glossed over a part there that's actually really big and really complicated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the implementation and how do you go line down to test this thing, which has been simulated, but you're maybe the first one to actually deploy it. That's the other part of the standardization process where the market is really pushing us at the moment to publish standards for single-payer Ethernet guidance, because some of the biggest movers in the industry are ready to move and that will drag the rest of the market, but they're not going to do it until they have specific guidelines to do what they want to do.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people have the hesitation because they want to see the big movers move before they start making changes on their plant floor.
Speaker 6:Is there anything you can recommend to us to stay on top of news in this area? Standards body is like what's going to be coming out what people? Can where you recommend they can like, if they want to be involved or just follow along. Sure kind of ask. This is evolving uh.
Speaker 1:So within odba they do a pretty good job of um like public uh news releases of what we're working on and what they're allowed to talk about. Uh, one of the most exciting things which ed and Gota touched on was that last year we did a marketing study of the market readiness for single-payer Ethernet and ODVA published that last October. It was very surprising the amount of people that are ready to adopt and deploy now and so, kind of leading the project that I lead within ODVA, I was like, okay, we need to move forward towards publication because the market is more ready to adopt in a faster timeframe than I was expecting, honestly. So ODVA is a good resource. Ieee is always a good resource with the publications that they put out.
Speaker 1:I'd say that Harding does a good job with our industrial Ethernet weeks of like this is what's coming. This is what we're working on within standardization. Just in the last few weeks there's been calls for interest within ODVA, profinet organization and advanced physical layer for more collaboration across the global standards groups to make sure that the one standard is being put out and is not directly in conflict with another standard that's being put out in Europe or you know just that we're not breaking anything along the way as we're publishing what we're doing.
Speaker 1:So it's a challenge because these are all volunteer-led organizations where you're doing that on top of your normal day-to-day job. And and now there's a challenge because these are all volunteer-led organizations where you're doing that on top of your normal day-to-day job. And now there's a lot of groups having the same conversations. But we have to do that to make sure that we're not.
Speaker 5:Check each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that we're not missing something, that we're not missing an entire subsegment of the market, like you said that you would come from, process automation, and that's a whole different application use case than industrial.
Speaker 5:Yeah, we do flow meters that have Ethernet, so I'm just thinking process stuff that everything could have. There's already two wires going to it.
Speaker 1:Explosion-proof applications. That was the APL project.
Speaker 1:They were the first to deploy single-pair Ethernet and it uses a completely different connector solution than what is general-purpose single-pair Ethernet, which is kind of like the working term of the projects that we're working on now, because it is going inside an explosion-proof cabinet, so they're just landing on a terminal block or they picked a m12a code for their application, but what we're working on within our working groups is completely different from that. But we have to make sure. Okay, is this going? Is this all going to connect up in the same switch, and on one side of the switch is general purpose spe and on the other side of the switch is apl, explosion proof applications or these two different networks that have to talk to each other? Like those are all the things where we're checking each other and cross collaborating. You know this is. You know we work with direct competitors. Automation companies that are historically direct competitors and never were really in the same room are directly working on this technology together, which I think is really promising.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that's been. We're part of an association for high-tech distribution, so distributors, and there are tons of competitors in that group. Sure.
Speaker 6:But it's growing. It's growing a lot and more and more people come to these conferences every year. So I think people are seeing kind of the benefit of yeah, you know what these are my competitors, but we all have certain things that we can actually work together on. You know what these are my competitors, but we all have certain things that we can actually work together on Sharing knowledge. You know best practices. Obviously, standards are something that just the industry in general has to happen, but the more we can collaborate on them, the better. And yeah, I'll just keep like my big soapbox is always like the pie is getting bigger for all of us and it's really the customer that needs to see the success of this and us inviting and or keeping things to ourselves and things like that.
Speaker 6:If it doesn't, it won't help the customer. It makes all of us look bad. Have you found that working in standards organizations has had a positive impact on your career? Does that feel like you've made personal connections or?
Speaker 6:it's added to your I don't know the enrichment of you actually doing your job, Because it's challenging, right? Like you said, it's a volunteer gig that you do on top of your normal job and now you run a business, right? Same thing with the podcasting we find it to be extremely rewarding, but it can get exhausting, sure, but for us, like, the pros heavily outweighed the cons. Would you say that participating in these types of standards organizations has been positive?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would say one of the largest reasons why is because I have professional working relationships with our direct competition now.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:We're on first name basis. We have conversations about this technology inside the standards groups A lot of the times.
Speaker 1:we don't agree on everything, but we have built a bridge which I've never seen in my professional career of working with our direct competition, having personal and professional relationships with them where, like we know each other, we meet in person a few times a year, we meet virtually every week, um, and and that would have never happened before you know they we ask about like, oh, what did you do on this vacation that you recently went on, or some people were traveling to see the recent eclipse, and you kind of chop it up and have those conversations before the meeting gets started, and I've never seen that before. So it's pretty cool to see.
Speaker 6:It makes a huge difference to get to know people a little bit on a personal level, because at the end of the day, we're all people. We have to spend time with all these other people at work, and it's much better if you can get a little bit of joy out of it and feel like you're actually there, you know, for a common purpose or to help each other.
Speaker 1:Well, when you need to push and when you need to pull it makes it easier because you have a relationship with this person where they're not just going to completely shut the door every time because you're a competitor, like we work collaboratively and maybe not always in our own best interest but in the best interest of the industry and the technology. And because you have that relationship with them, you know they're able to like work with you more than I think that they otherwise would be.
Speaker 6:And I'm not a specifying engineer, but I am a buyer in some capacity now with my role and all other things being equal, somebody may have a great technology, but I personally want to know that there's some goodness behind the company or that their people are community-minded, or that you know and I see and hear that from a lot of my peers is they actually want to know a little bit about what your motivations and how you act in the world as an organization and like your people, in addition to just the technology, because there's so many choices now for type you can, you know, find anything. Sure.
Speaker 6:From a lot of places.
Speaker 2:That's sorry. No, go ahead the differentiators. I mean you want to like who you're working with or who you're buying from.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That could be the difference between buying from vendor A, who's a little cheaper, and vendor B, who actually seems to be a quality person, or about the world, or sustainability, whatever.
Speaker 5:That's just sales 101, right, you're going to go to the people that didn't make you mad or the people that give you the better feel?
Speaker 6:yep yeah, we talk a lot about uh, or we don't talk about it a lot. But you know like, oh, it's engineering, it's not about feelings. Uh, you may think that all you want in the front of your brain, but your feelings are still at play, no matter how. You know technical, you're, you're going with it. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:When I get a tech support call about one of our machinery. These days we've hired a full-time tech support person to handle those, but for a while in the early days I was handling myself and it is emotional.
Speaker 5:Absolutely, oh my God.
Speaker 1:They've had a machine for eight years and have never done scheduled maintenance on it, but then it goes down and they like literally call and are screaming at you and it's tough not to get emotional in that situation. But it's like, okay, let's just work the problem.
Speaker 5:This is your fault. Yeah, yeah. Let's just okay what is going on?
Speaker 1:What are your team viewer credentials?
Speaker 5:Let's start there, let me just remote in see what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, we may not emote it, but it's always emotional.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, but that's how you produce a happy customer, I'm sure yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah, so thank you so much for coming here and having this conversation with us. I mean, we love this actually just getting to know people on the podcast. You know we can have a whole hour to prepare ahead of time, but we just get to know each other and this is, I think, hopefully the first of many conversations.
Speaker 6:You know, we out of all the thousands and thousands of people here, the people that have this mindset, that they want to collaborate, that they want to, you know, share, uh, share knowledge and move our industry forward together. Um, those are the people that we end up like coming back to again and again. And so I, as this single pair, ethernet, rolls out more as the standards come out, I really look forward to you know, following it and seeing, now that I know some people that I can talk to about it. It's not just like, oh, view a webinar, yeah, like there's so many of those topics, and I'm like, yeah, there's so many innovations, and then I'm just going to forget them all because I don't care, I don't have a personal connection.
Speaker 1:Especially during COVID. It was like every week, everybody was scrambling to you know produce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, including us. This was even before our studio and we were just doing it in like one of our office spaces, but it very quickly, kind of washed over me of did come down to well, this is a person that I know so like I trust their opinion. I know that they're a subject matter expert, that they're going to, you know, do a deep dive and this isn't going to be like just a general session. So that's just challenge for all of us in like doing content. I'm sure you both probably know that better than myself, but yeah, it's all fun.
Speaker 6:We try to be transparent and one of the reasons why we do so many different formats of our content. Sometimes people are like what are you exactly? We're like, well, we're a podcast, but some of the conversations we want to have need show and tell, so we can't just do an audio recording like this. So we came up with this idea demo days. Sometimes I just want to see a new cool product and I'm not qualified to buy it right now and so like but can you just come give me a demo? Like can you do it on camera so that my friends can also see it? Or if.
Speaker 6:I want to like I thought it was super cool and I thought of someone that should have seen it. I can just send them the recording instead of now having to send them to you and you qualify them to spend another hour to show them the same thing that you just showed to me. But yeah, we call it demo so that people know if they're going to come watch it. It's a sales demo.
Speaker 6:It's not a podcast or a sales demo disguised as a podcast, or a sales pitch disguised as a webinar. Like, let's just be real. Sometimes people want the sales pitch. Let them know that it's a sales pitch and let them know that that's what they're in for.
Speaker 6:Or if you're going to have a deep dive discussion with the subject matter expert about applications, then let people know that ahead of time. You know we have so many imitations to so many things and I'm really tired of like the next big thing in Industry 4.0, come watch our webinar and I'm like how is it going to be different from the webinar I've been on for the past 10 years?
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 1:And on the CLN side, which is still all very much like a raw and learning experience for me, we've had the best performance by not doing anything that's like sales related, but to reaching out to either an existing or a potential customer and just saying send us a file and we will run it and we'll record it and we'll send you the result of like number one, how fast our machine is and number two, the quality of what it outputs, and that is miles ahead of anything else that we're doing.
Speaker 1:It's just like no, send us, like send us your worst file that you have a problem with, and like let us run it and provide the results to you. And I mean, you know, sometimes out of the gate it doesn't come out well and it takes like massaging on our side. And then it's a learning experience of like okay, we found out that we had to edit your file in like X, y, z ways and now it runs well, and so like here's a immediate solution for you, and then keep us in mind in the future. And you know that's just what's worked for us. So far.
Speaker 6:I think we've all been a little jaded by all kinds of advertising over. You know so long of things that are shiny, that are really great, but the devil's in the details, sure, and then we try it and then we fail or whatever. It doesn't live up to its hype, like I would rather see you like tell me your flaws ahead of time, show me the demo, and I know something's going to go wrong. But at least I know you're doing it live and not giving me something pre-canned that's so perfect that I would never be able to actually replicate that. Because we all know real life always comes with challenges, right as somebody that's been in the field, like actually starting up machines, the seamless is that a? Favorite of yours.
Speaker 2:Oh man, Seamless integration.
Speaker 6:Anybody that actually does it. You kind of feel slapped in the face with that. So, for us, embrace the fact that things are imperfect and you can earn your stripes and respect actually. Sure.
Speaker 6:Because people that really have been around the block. They don't want your shiny sales pitch, they want how is this actually going to work for me, and the braver you are in trying to give that a legit try and give them personalized answers. I think, yeah, we earn respect that way, oftentimes through our failures, in fact. And how do we deal with challenges versus just having the coolest thing and it's easy to market but it's hard to follow up and practice? Yeah, absolutely Well, like I said, I think I tried to wrap this up once before, but I would probably keep talking about this for another hour.
Speaker 6:Ed, anything that you want to add before we?
Speaker 2:sign off. No, I'm good, let's go.
Speaker 6:Cool. Well, yeah, thanks everybody. We'll be up for doing a few more recordings today. I know this is not going to come out live because A this show is crazy and we can't even stream stuff. The internet here is so bad. Yeah, but if you're catching this and you didn't come to Automate this year, we will be back at every Automate, I'm sure, for years to come. And then there will also be Ethernet Week what was it?
Speaker 1:Industrial Ethernet Week. That Harding does. That's a virtual event, correct? Yeah, it was a few months ago and we do a few different flavors of that across the year. It won't be called Industrial Ethernet Week, but single-pair Ethernet and all of our Ethernet solutions are included in multiple events throughout the year.
Speaker 6:Okay, well, we'll be continuing these conversations and thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you.
