Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast

Former plant manager and reliability consultant Joe Kuhn discusses the shift from emergency to proactive maintenance culture in manufacturing facilities. He emphasizes the importance of balancing emergency and planned work, strategic maintenance planning, and celebrating reliability heroes to prevent future disasters.

IndustryWeek Senior Editor for Technology Dennis Scimeca discusses how manufacturers are not widely using generative AI, focusing more on AI like machine learning. They also touch on the disconnect between manufacturers and the term IIoT, as highlighted in the IW Technology Survey.

Join Laura Davis, EIC of New Equipment Digest as she talks about her choices for 10 of the latest new products to hit the manufacturing industry. Learn more about the products mentioned in this episode.

Glenn Jacobs is the Mayor of Knox County, TN. Heavy industry in the State of Tennessee is booming, especially automotive, and Knox County has added more than 2,500 jobs and seen $217 million in capital investment under the leadership of Mayor Jacobs. In this podcast, Plant Services chief editor Thomas Wilk gets in the ring with Mayor Jacobs to talk about several projects that are growing this manufacturing and industrial base.

Kiteworks CISO Frank Balonis, a 20-year veteran of IT support and protecting manufacturing data, joins Smart Industry’s Scott Achelpohl as a follow-up to an April article he wrote for SI in which he riffs off cyber threats that threaten the factory floor—both industrial OT and IT—and which methods of data intrusion require the most urgent action. The proof is in numbers from Kiteworks: The average cost of a data breach in manufacturing has reached a staggering $4.47 million per occurrence. Much has been said about OT and IT defenses in manufacturing environments, which often are at the very least fragmented to combat the threat, so these companies are vulnerable to this kind of financial loss should they suffer an attack. Frank discusses for how stealing private data is the objective for a majority of the malicious cyberattacks in manufacturing, with the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report indicating private data is compromised 58% of the time in cyberattacks in the manufacturing sector.

IndustryWeek's annual IW U.S. 500 list of the largest publicly traded manufacturing companies in the country offers a glimpse into the health of the overall industrial economy. Editors have worked tirelessly in recent years to rid the list of companies such as Apple, Nike and Monster Energy that seem like industrial producers but in reality farm out the hard work of manufacturing to their supply chains. Editor-in-Chief Robert Schoenberger discusses who's up, who's down and describes a manufacturing sector stuck in the blahs, waiting for anything (well, one very-specific something really) to spark some excitement. Listen to hear about: Why some materials producers are having great years while others suffer How one product and one company is sinking the healthcare sector What's up with Ford, General Motors and Tesla

Matt Doherty, managing director of workplace management with Sikich, discusses what California bill 533 could mean for all employers in terms of providing a detailed workplace violence prevention plan for their companies.

You know the stereotype of frontline industrial workers when it comes to soft skills: they're poor communicators with great ideas and a lot of rough edges. But how true is that stereotype really, in an age where good soft skills are required for the average plant worker to succeed on the job? And for managers who do want to polish their skills, what methods are proven to work? Join Lisa Brownlee, the owner and founder at Leader’s Imago, for a conversation on these topics and more. Lisa holds both BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering. She worked for 11 years for a major engineering and manufacturing company in Columbia, SC, and is also a Lean 6-Sigma Master Black Belt. Her experience spans operations, continuous improvement, training development and delivery, and product assurance. 

Environmental phenomena, regulatory standards, expanding consumer demand - and disappearing generating capacity have combined to create an impossible dilemma for manufacturers that depend on electric utilities. 

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers insight into how to get your team to support communication, accountability, and asking for help when they need it.