Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast

Karen Griffin is the Vice President at Hargrove Controls and Automation, and she's also the new chair of the Control Systems Integrator Association (CSIA) Board of Directors. When Karen took the role of chair in May 2023, she said, “I'm incredibly excited to help lead CSIA as board chair and proud to be the first woman to hold a position. The future looks challenging, but bright for system integration, and I'm honored to have a hand in leading the industry into it.” Karen recently spoke with Plant Services editor in chief Thomas Wilk about why plants need a good integrator partner to help identify where data is stored or siloed and to help bring datasets together to really draw insights from that data on how to improve operations.

With October's Manufacturing Month nearing its close, IndustryWeek invited people who participated in a recent survey about why they chose careers in manufacturing to share their stories.  Larry Gates, a process engineering manager for Fortune Brands' Fiberon division, talked about moving from design to the shop floor where he felt he could be more creative. Salvador Martinez joined us from Costa Rica where he's been a process engineer for 40 years, most recently as a freelance consultant.  Both had participated in a single-question survey that simply asked why people chose careers in this industry. While many people talked about the desire to work with their hands or family connections to the manufacturing world, other responses focused on the ability to find creative solutions to problems. One of the most frequent answers was the sense of job satisfaction that manufacturers gain from seeing a finished product and knowing that they contributed to making it -- something that's a little less obvious in many fields. 

Mike Barrett is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Eurofins TestOil. He's currently working to help reliability practitioners maintain the health of their rotating equipment through same-day oil analysis services. Mike also specializes in helping teams develop programs, or providing guidance and support in getting a program back on track. Mike  recently spoke with Plant Services editor in chief Thomas Wilk about his experiences, as well as what makes programs work, what trouble spots programs run into, and where you might want to take a look at improving your own oil analysis program.

Welcome to a special Manufacturing Month edition of Production Pulse, IndustryWeek's bi-weekly livestream show. Joining us to discuss the importance of recruiting young people into the manufacturing workforce were Rolland Abramah, superintendent of the Randolph Central School Corp. in Winchester, Indiana; Brant McCormick, plant manager of the Silvertowne Mint in Winchester; Jasper McConnell, a senior in Randolph schools and an employee at student-run machine shop Falcon Industries; and Lori Mesi, coordinator of Pathways Education programs at Dublin City Schools near Columbus, Ohio.  Mesi brought a group of Dublin students to Honda's central Ohio manufacturing plant late last month in advance of Manufacturing Day and works with students who want to pursue careers in advanced manufacturing. And, as mentioned, Randolph Center Schools runs Falcon Industries and offers machining and welding programs for students, putting them in touch early with local companies who may become future employers for those students. 

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 new podcast series, 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 on how best to incorporate data into company decisions.

The United Auto Workers has been on strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis for about two weeks, taking down three manufacturing plants and 38 parts distribution centers. UAW President Shawn Fain plans to address the union's membership tomorrow, either to announce progress toward a new four-year deal or to escalate the strike by taking down more manufacturing plants. Joining IndustryWeek to discuss the topic were Dave Green, director of UAW Region 2B covering Ohio and Indiana, and Lynne Vincent, a management professor who studies labor relations and other organizational issues at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Speakers discussed how the union needs a big win here, not just to show its current members that it can deliver big economic gains after two decades of concessionary deals, but to show workers at Telsa, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia that joining a union could deliver better wages and benefits to them as well. 

In this episode of Production Pulse, we're talking generative artificial intelligence (AI). Two weeks ago, we spoke to our colleagues from other Endeavor Business Media manufacturing brands. This week, we're talking to Mauricio Casares, the smart industry guru at Schneider Electric who determines how and where that industrial giant spends much of its technology investments. As with the editors, Casares says most AI manufacturing applications use traditional machine learning techniques, but his companies and others are finding ways of using ChatGPT-style systems to boost productivity and drive operations. 

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 new podcast series, 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 on how to upskill your department without hiring additional workers.

Kevin Clark is the VP of Marketing and Customer Success at Falkonry. A veteran of asset management, experienced as a practitioner and educated as an engineer, Kevin brings over 30 years of experience to the fields of engineering, maintenance, and predictive analytics. As a veteran and advocate in the industrial space, Kevin plays a key role in advancing manufacturing and encouraging new technologies as a thought leader, keynote speaker, and M&R expert. He has served through decades of leadership in the Society of Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP), International Society of Automation (ISA) and as a long-standing board member of Purdue University’s Polytechnic Industry Advisory Board (IAB). Kevin recently spoke with Plant Services editor in chief Thomas Wilk about artificial intelligence's impact on the worlds of operations, maintenance, and reliability. 

ChatGPT is going to change everything! Generative AI is going to make every job in America obsolete by the end of Labor Day Weekend! Even fast food workers are worried that a teenager working in a parent's basement will be able to flip 500 hamburgers an hour using generative artificial intelligence tools.  OK, maybe the hype hasn't gotten that extreme, but as is typical when a technology is hot, many tech people are trying to ride the wave, adding the word "chat" to long-standing features or promoting their integration of large-language-model tools into their software. So, manufacturing technology editors are getting inundated with pitches about how software that lets people create iambic pentameter sonnets about poodle grooming will soon change how factories make things.  For this session of our Production Pulse live video series, Bob Vavra from Machine Design and Mike Bacidore from Control Design joined us to discuss how generative systems really could impact factory floors. Some conclusions: Manufacturers are pretty savvy to what AI can do as they've been using it for more than a decade for quality control, predictive maintenance and to manage production settings on machines Generative AI systems have more potential to revolutionize design and management but fewer obvious benefits for the shop floor There are some solid applications hidden amidst the hype