#193 - Martin Cloake, CEO Raven AI - on the power of creating a culture of continuous improvement

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable people on the manufacturing floor to boost continuous improvements and focus on what matters. My guest is Martin Cloake, CEO of Raven AI.

Martin is an experienced executive and award-winning technology entrepreneur with a background in Manufacturing, Data Science, IP, and Operations Management. He holds multiple patents and is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

He's a problem-solver, relentless resourceful, and always assumes something can be done. When he saw the massive investments in Industry 4.0 increase, but most companies failing to get the benefits they'd aspired for he decided to found Raven AI.

Raven is on a mission to help manufacturers accelerate Continuous Improvement, improve the service to their customers and increase profits. How? By spotting opportunities and providing real-time guidance that empowers and engages manufacturing teams.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Martin to my podcast. We explore why many manufacturers have a false sense of what they think has happened, vs what actually happened. The result of this: they can't solve their most pressing problems because they can't pinpoint with accuracy what these actually are. Martin shares how he's solving this problem and what choices he's made on his journey to do so in a remarkable way.

Here are some of his quotes:

The gold standard that I always thought of for technology was GPS for your car. So one of the things that GPS does is that it doesn't drive your car, it doesn't dominate your attention. Every once in a while, it gives you a little insight. And then based on that insight, you're way more effective.

So there's this idea where as humans, we are awesome at solving problems, we're awesome at collaborating with one another. Where technology and data can help is to sift through data to make sure that if we're standing in front of a problem, we're standing in front of the right problem and the most important problem.

So I always saw that there's this opportunity to combine what we are best at with what technology is best at.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That to succeed in creating momentum and successful adoption we have to go at the speed of humans
2. What it takes to sell your SaaS solution to people on the shopfloor (vs the boardroom)
3. How creating remarkable software starts with people that care about what they are building - and people that are empowered to make decisions
4. That people often think going small and incremental is easier than doing things that are big. Fact is - Doing something big is far easier to get people on board and excited about the journey.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Martin Cloake
• Website Raven AI