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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
Revolutionizing Automation with Corey at HARTING & Ale at Gray Solutions (Automate 2024)
Join the Automation Ladies once again at Automate 2024 as they chat with Corey Jenkins from HARTING and Ale Walker from Gray Solutions. Corey dives into the engineering magic behind HARTING's plug-and-play solutions, while Ale brings a personal touch, giving a heartfelt shout-out to her mom, Kathy Walker, the CEO of eCami. They share how these connections aren't just mechanical but deeply personal, enhancing the efficiency and flexibility of modern automation systems.
Explore the future of automation with insights from Corey on miniaturization and sustainability trends that are shaping the industry. From the nitty-gritty of connectors to the fun of cowboy boots, this episode contains more talk on connectors.
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.
Follow us on Linkedin and YouTube for live videos, demos, and other content!
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Get in touch at automationladies.io!
Music by Samuel Janes
Audio Editing by Laura Marsilio
Okay, so we are up for another conversation here in the Harding booth at Automate 2024. It is now the afternoon. We managed to a little bit have lunch and another cup of coffee. So we have our friend, good friend, longtime friend, Allie Walker, or Ale as we like to call her, so we don't mix our Allies up. It's good to be here, guys. Yes, and we have a new Harding SME with us today that we haven't talked to yet.
Speaker 2:Yep first time.
Speaker 1:Corey, you want to introduce yourself and tell us who you are, what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, corey Jenkins, I work for Harding Been here for over two decades, nice, so it seems like a long time. I'm currently on the business development side but I've held many engineering, product management, business unit director type roles so I have experience on kind of both sides of connectivity and from the design to the implementation side. Yep.
Speaker 1:I love that. Somebody with a real background and doing stuff and selling stuff makes a whole lot more sense.
Speaker 3:It does. You could be like me and just be a salesperson out of the womb.
Speaker 1:You've got somehow the family connections that the doing stuff is in your blood and your DNA too. So, like I think we, I'm a mountain girl.
Speaker 3:Yes, you are Of course.
Speaker 1:And I guess I recently saw you feature your mom at an event. Was that last?
Speaker 3:week, it was. Yes, it was last week in Lexington at our event at the Great Solutions. It was great. It's really nice when our worlds, you know they can collide with mom sometimes it's good.
Speaker 1:So for those that may be watching or listening to this and don't know your mom, who's your mom?
Speaker 3:It's Kathy Walker. She's the founder and the CEO of eCami. It's a workforce development institution in East Kentucky.
Speaker 1:All right, so just wanted to make sure if we give a shout out, people can look it up. Shout out, mom, I'm in Chicago today. I haven't heard from her, so my mom gets to watch my escapades on LinkedIn, because I guess I post more about what cities I'm in there than I do contact her on Facebook or give her a call on Sundays.
Speaker 3:And your mom's in Europe. Right, she's in Iceland, iceland. That's what I thought, yeah.
Speaker 1:So she adds a whole other country to the listenership of Automation Ladies.
Speaker 2:A little further than Kentucky.
Speaker 1:A little, yeah, yeah, a little bit, a little bit. So, yeah, I really want to kind of have you guys drive this conversation. I've been asking people questions and talking about innovation and connectors and connectivity and community all day. These are all things that I think you know you at Great Solutions can tie in with all kinds of things. You guys do all of those and more. Yes, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you guys do For sure, yeah, so we're.
Speaker 3:We are a large organization. Actually we are a design and a build firm, but my division on the solution side, we make the building work right, so we would integrate a lot of things like what Harding does, and I actually, in all honesty, I just learned about Harding this week and I heard you all's the podcast that you all did a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 3:With Ed and Gautam it was great and Ed is great, so you're going to do great. Corey Got it. With Ed and Goda it was great and Ed is great, so you're going to do great. Corey Got it. But you know it's amazing. You know, using Harding and the integrations that we are doing, you know it increases the efficiency. You know of the deployments that we're doing. It's very simple. Who knew you could have highly custom off-the-shelf Right, what a combo that is Right.
Speaker 3:I mean that's the mecca. So I mean we're excited as a partner and as an SI. But at the end of the day, the time's money and it saves the customer money, which I think is great. As an SI, you know, it's always good.
Speaker 1:I actually just brought up an example from somebody else that came to me a few weeks ago looking to source and they need to have a custom connector cable made for like a battery pack for one of these robots and it seems like an insane amount of money and time. That's going into a very minute part of the actual system and I can imagine that they're probably not very happy with the bottom line of that project. Like every time that that problem comes up, which shouldn't even be part of the process at all. It's a connector which, again, many people think of as a afterthought until something goes wrong or they're like I can't find this, what the heck? Why is it so hard to get connectors?
Speaker 1:That's also one of the first ways that I found out about Harding. I had just connected with Amanda on LinkedIn recently and then somebody complained about connectors and I just connected the two and I was like wait, I think I just talked to someone from a connector company and then it made me a whole lot more interested in connectors and learning about them and I'm like why haven't I heard about this before and with Harding.
Speaker 3:They're highly flexible. I mean there's nothing worse. Whenever you're locked in you have to rip out wire. You gotta put it back in. Maybe you have a line changer and upgrade. It's expensive and it's tough, but with harding I mean it's, it's a plug and play.
Speaker 2:It's a really, really beautiful thing on on the si side yeah, when it comes to like plug and play, that's kind of like the right, the right answer. And whether it's like ethernet, power, signal or data, or whether it's on the cabinet, the robot, a camera, a sensor, it's all kind of the same concept. It, whether it's on the cabinet, the robot, a camera, a sensor, it's all kind of the same concept. It's when you want to install, you know you can do it quickly, flexible and it's going to work At the end of the day that's what you need Hardwire and stuff, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:And the other thing that I learned recently on Harding is that you know, with an SI or even an end user, you have varying levels of engineering the expertise on your team, so they can do it, or they can hire Harding or NSI with the design and implementation, so it's like you don't have to have an SME that can do this, which I think is really really beautiful and on the workforce side, right On the labor side, it really alleviates a lot of challenges that I think a lot of folks are facing is having to have an SME to.
Speaker 2:You know folks are facing is having to have an SME to you know, rip out wire and reconnect it Like. One of the other things, too, is if you're designing pieces of whatever system or the building it is, they're not always designed in the same location, right? You could have the cabinet designed even overseas, you could have the robot designed in Europe, you could have the conveyor system motor designed in, you know, michigan. But it all has to come together, right? So if each piece is individually tested before it arrives and then you have a tested cable assembly to plug it all together, it just goes a lot more smoother. You know, and that's really the reality in many cases is equipment coming all over the place?
Speaker 1:Are you guys seeing Ali more of this being brought in as an efficiency factor in new installations? Or are you guys also working with customers to retrofit their existing equipment to be more modular? Or, as you're coming in and making upgrades and things, is that something that you guys are looking at saying, hey, actually, if you went ahead and took this hardwired thing and connectorized it, then you can also do more in the future? Or maybe that's just part of. I'm going to stop now?
Speaker 3:No for sure. I mean we. You know we have a lot of folks that want to become more modular, nimble to market. Maybe a line needs to be upgraded, it needs to change. They're running a new product, right, we need to be nimble as well with our customer, but at the same time not really high on price. Right, we need to get in there. We need to be really efficient and with Harding, it helps us really do that. You know we don't have to take a lot of time. You know to have to plan and all of this stuff. It's a plug and play and, again, the time is money and it makes us very efficient and thus very competitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and how do you actually make money on your projects?
Speaker 3:You know, it is nice. Yeah, it is nice.
Speaker 1:Allie, maybe you can speak to this a little bit. I'm coming from a smaller systems integrator that maybe has less like established procedures that are super efficient each time, but, like every time you're integrating something new, there's a number of things that can go wrong, and small systems integrators, I think and I've heard this enough they sometimes underbid because they don't know how much hours they're going to actually spend on something that seems easy but then it turns out to be complex.
Speaker 1:A huge cost of these types of projects is not the products right, it's reiteration the iterations the revisions, the engineering hours and then also the man hours and actually trying to get it to work when it's on the floor, right, your factory acceptance, testing and all that kind of stuff. So I think you know, from a cost standpoint, sometimes looking at spending a little bit more so you can spend less time making the thing work, that's actually a huge value, oh yeah. How do we more efficiently like evaluate that tradeoff, aside from just the salesperson going it's going to be easier and cheaper and you're going to save money?
Speaker 2:I mean from our side. Right, the connector costs money, yeah. Right, the minute you connect and disconnect it, you physically have paid for the connector itself without any of the advantages. Right, the flexibility, the installation time savings or even the after-service maintenance of replacing something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All that aside, which is normally why people would use a connector for the installation time, but just that once testing, disconnecting, you've paid for that connector. So we've looked at it many different ways. People ask what is your labor rate? It depends how fast do they do this. If you boil it all down to keep it very simple one connection disconnection, you've paid for it.
Speaker 3:And on that too, I mean on the parts side, like we all remember, a few years ago what happened with all the parts that weren't Still happening sometimes I mean again it's off the shelf Like. It's easy for maintenance, it's easy to redeploy if and when anything goes wrong. So that's really valuable too.
Speaker 1:We were talking a little bit in our earlier conversation and I know you weren't there, ale but there's differences culturally between how we do things in Europe and in Asia and here in North America. Is modularization and connectorization more popular in Europe and are we now catching up, or is it just all over the world? We're finally realizing that, hey, we should be doing this?
Speaker 2:Or is it because Harding is bringing the options now? I would answer that, maybe not, it's not. Maybe not geographical type it is, but it isn't. If you know what I mean. The sooner a piece of equipment becomes more complex, yeah more data, more ether, and that connectorization's benefits are more worthwhile. If you have just a very simple machine that doesn't have modules in it, maybe connectorization doesn't make sense, but that's not the case in many cases so. I think in other areas we're more advanced in complex machines or smart machines, right Do you see?
Speaker 2:now, Right were more advanced in complex machines or smart machines, right that you see now, right, as everyone's getting in that phase, connectorization is truly global.
Speaker 1:Well, now it's all about getting that data. Yep, and I think we saw in the keynote earlier today with Siemens they gave an example project where there was time or cost savings in the efficiency and things like that, but then there was also a huge time savings in the time it takes to actually access the data. And I think now we have to think of time speed to innovation and in a whole other abstract layer now, Like up in the cloud, it's not just what we make and how quickly we make it on the floor, but then how do we actually start to get these preventative, predictive insights? And, yes, probably maybe it's that they're building more new smart plants in places where it is easier to justify the investment because labor rates are higher and so on, and that's where you see the earlier adoption of this. But now I think that we're getting to a point where, like even the existing facilities that have been around forever, they're upgrading enough and doing it like piece by piece, that this is coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if someone's going to go through the time upgrade, we're going to make it better yeah Right and smarter, so then connectivity can come in during that upgrade.
Speaker 1:Are there any on your side, Allie? Great solutions, innovations in sort of the software and data layer that you guys are excited about or that you're introducing, or something new that you've seen, or like a fun application Software in?
Speaker 3:the data layer. I mean, yeah, I really think and everyone uses these words right, machine learning and AI, but what I'm really excited about is leveraging those in order to optimize what's on the floor, right, how are we going to increase the OEE of this machine? Leveraging all of this high tech? Right, and it's still really, really new. But absolutely, we are looking into that heavily over at Gray Solutions.
Speaker 1:I bet you are and I think about OK. So when I say software and data and stuff, I know this is more like probably play on your side, but our friend Samuel Janes, oh gosh.
Speaker 3:I have to always give him a shout out.
Speaker 1:He's the best he's the coolest, and he's the coolest and he made the music for Automation Ladies that sounds great. Because many engineers have all kinds of other talents. He's very talented and letting them play with some of that which I know he makes, like spot dance he does and all kinds of cool stuff like that.
Speaker 3:The handler, the spot handler.
Speaker 1:Yes, allie said that she used to be afraid of Spot, but then I think at the manufacturing happy hour at Automation Fair last year she got a little up close and personal and then we saw Sam get in the Uber with Spot.
Speaker 3:Oh listen.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:He packs that thing around like a carry-on, you know, but it is now wrapped in all black. So if you weren't horrified oh, that's now worse Are you still scared Allie A little bit Okay. I mean horrified. Oh, that's now you worse. Are you still scared, ali? Uh, a little bit. Okay, I think you might be there tonight, so okay, well, um, I'll give him another chance.
Speaker 1:He's real sweet, yeah, real sweet so, yeah, we are headed to and we're pretty excited about, uh, another manufacturing happy hour co-hosted by our friends at harding and gray solutions right, that's right. Which really they are. Just whether you have business to do with them or not, which you probably will in one way or another, they are fun and you are invited.
Speaker 3:Both of them.
Speaker 1:They are very open and welcoming. I feel like I feel that kind of culture from both of your companies and I guess I like to talk about feelings more than technology.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we know how to get time Work hard, play hard.
Speaker 2:That's our motto right, it's, the American way it's called balance Balance.
Speaker 1:Corey, what are you seeing on the business development side, as probably I don't know the most cutting-edge applications that people are asking for.
Speaker 2:God, it really. Everybody wants everything smaller. So miniaturization, yeah, and more power through a smaller space, if you look at data centers and that sort of thing. So everybody wants more in a smaller space, like I said, whether it's power or signal, and that's really really the trend Everywhere. It doesn't matter what connector, what industry, and we're seeing it all over the place. In addition to everything we talked about the quicker install, all that but but connectors need to be smaller. Right, people are trying to put more copper through smaller cables, whether it's through liquid cooling cables that heat dissipate faster or better.
Speaker 2:Right, there's all. There's new technologies and materials on on things that that transmit or have less resistance. We're looking at all kinds of things like just to make things smaller.
Speaker 3:And on that too, you know one other thing I learned. I really did a lot of research, corey.
Speaker 2:I did a lot of research. All right, let's see.
Speaker 3:I wanted to be ready-ish, let's see. But on the SI side, with implementing robotics, you know less is more right and you guys can really offer less with more. And it impacts all the payload that a robot's able, you know, really to handle. That impacts the throughput, it impacts the end of arm tool, it impacts what we recommend right, which I think again is money and time, and so it's just a cool feature that you guys offer over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that too, and some industries like sustainability is becoming a new keyword. The types of plastics that we buy. Who do we buy? How are they made? That is, I think, the next trend. I think people are talking about it. Some people are implementing, Some industries not so much, but that's the next trend.
Speaker 1:I think people are talking about it.
Speaker 2:Some people are implementing, Some industries not so much, but that's the next thing. Right, you see, we offer metal connectors, but we also offer a lot of plastic connectors, right? So I know that's happening in the connector world, it's happening in the cable world. So I would say that's another trend that we are not just hearing but seeing.
Speaker 1:And less is more. It's obviously getting more, you know, bang for your buck right. More compact, more capability and smaller footprint, being able to do more with less time, being able to do more with less people. I think that is kind of like overarching for whether it's the workforce side of things, the technology side of things, right. But how do we do that without sacrificing quality or experience, right? That's like the ultimate problem to always be optimizing for, right? Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:It is. It is and it's nice that somebody cares about doing it specifically for connectors, because those of us that look at the whole factory like that's not necessarily what you of, like you said you hadn't really, it is now heard of it at the top of mind now, right, yeah, yeah if you, if you walk the show, every booth will have a lot, let's just say a lot of connectors so, now that you've watched,
Speaker 1:this or heard this, or you've heard us talk about connectors, or you've listened to the podcast that we had earlier with Ed and Gota. It's like when you buy a car right and you all of a sudden see that car everywhere. Now I can't help but look at. Oh, I wonder what kind of connector this is right.
Speaker 3:I've noticed the logo.
Speaker 1:Don't go on vacation with me.
Speaker 3:My kids are going to be like, yeah, I've seen you guys, I've just never known what you've done.
Speaker 2:Walk into a cruise boat, cruise ship connectors on the X-ray equipment.
Speaker 1:You're like all right stop that I would like to see the camera roll on your phone from your quality photos? How many of them are connectors and how many are your family? We don't. Allie and I went to a conference last year we spoke at the Ignition Community Conference and Allie went out one night and we were looking at photos and she was like she had all these photos of like what was it? Valves and things on the side of like the gas station. Gas collection systems for restaurants.
Speaker 3:I'm just looking at, like all the stuff that nobody looks at and take pictures of that Me and a Kroger is horrifying. I'm like that was packaged bad. We did a good job on that one.
Speaker 1:That was pretty good, oh the time I used to do machine vision and laser marking and I would look at the date codes on everything like labels.
Speaker 3:So many date codes.
Speaker 1:So many date codes, skewed labels yeah, it really messes with you. The QR codes now offset. Yeah, it's great for all of us to expand our horizons a little bit. And you don't need to be the expert on connectors, because Harding is, and now you know where to find them. So, now that you've opened your eyes to connectors, you'll see them everywhere. Now you know who to call when you start thinking about them and you find an opportunity problem challenge, right. So come to us Automation Ladies. We know the great folks at Harding. We can point you in the right direction or connect with Corey. Follow him on LinkedIn, right. Ale is a master of bringing people together systems, people, friends, whatever. So contact her. And yeah, I can't believe that we're going to continue to have fun talking about connectors for an entire day at Automate, but we will so excited. Thank you guys. All right, well, see you later. And if you are here, well, this is recorded. But we're going to have a heck of a party later today.
Speaker 3:Y'all can see us. Yeah, it'll be fun. I got my cowboy boots on, if you're hearing this later and you are coming to Automate next year.
Speaker 1:Keep that party on your schedule open, all right, thank you so much, guys.
