The Manufacturing Executive

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022, terminology like "generative AI" became a regular part of our vocabulary overnight. Just a little more than a year later, it's hard to open your favorite news source without seeing headlines about generative AI, machine learning, deep learning and so on. But what does all of this terminology really mean? And for the manufacturing leaders listening right now, how does it all apply inside of your businesses? In this conversation, CEO and Co-Founder of Allie Systems, Alex Sandoval, will help you make sense of it all.

It's hard enough to get a business of the ground and sustain it across one generation. But it's another to grow and evolve a business across three generations. Market needs change. Technology changes. The people inside of your organization (and your customers's organizations) change. There's so much to balance between staying true to what got you where you are today and being willing to evolve and adapt. In today's conversation, Greg Hartwig, a third-generation manufacturing business owner, will take you through his family's version of this story.

In this episode, CEO of Encube, Hugo Nordell, will tell you that it's a labor of love to go from design intent to what the actual manufactured outcome will be, without breaking the bank. And one of the things standing in the way today is the decades-old technology that much of the design engineering community is still running on. As he'll tell you, especially in light of the labor crisis, a rapidly changing supply chain and sustainability requirements that manufacturers are facing today, the industrial sector is ready for a fundamentally different approach to unlocking productivity growth.

I've consulted well over 200 B2B manufacturing organizations throughout my career on marketing strategy. And without question, one of the biggest problems I've observed time and time again is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing. In today's conversation, Founder of Brjr.io John Joyce will talk about why these silos emerge, what dangers and missed opportunities they create, and the role your marketing and sales technology stack can play in tearing them down.

In a post-COVID world, a few forces have been converging to set the stage for what Elias Stahl envisions as an on-demand supply chain, rooted in America's urban core. In this conversation, Elias, CEO & Co-Founder of HILOS, will talk about: - A new wave of advanced additive manufacturing technology - The struggling urban centers of America's big cites - The desire to create more control over the supply chain - And the opportunity all of this creates for American manufacturing in the years ahead

More often than not, great leaders don't have all the answers. And in fact, a big part of what makes them great is their willingness to embrace that simple fact. Tom Brown is a manufacturing leader who was never the resident expert in his organization. But owning that is exactly what helped him drive the company's success. In this conversation, he'll tell you how he did it, though the lens of what he calls The Three Pillars of Impact for manufacturing leaders.

There's nothing worst than making a big investment in technology, just to learn that you're not sufficiently equipped to deploy it. From the many conversations I've had with leaders in the robotics space, this is one of the fears that seems to hold back manufacturers from getting started with automation. What if the robot crashes? What if the system gets stuck? Once my integrator walks out the door, will my people have the skills and documentation to run it? In this conversation, Malachi Greb, Founder and CEO of Elite Automation, will talk about what you need to look for in an integrator so that you'll hit the ground running, with the support your need and without the in-house robotics expert that frankly, most manufacturers simply don't have.

It's no secret that the Boomer generation is pouring out of the manufacturing workforce. And as they go, we're not only losing their hands, but also the years of knowledge tied up in their brains. Pair that with an increasingly transient younger generation of workers and what you have is an institutional knowledge problem. In this episode, Yushiro Kato, Founder & CEO of CADDi, talks about the role of digitizing our data inside of manufacturing facilities – for accessibility, for security, and to protect that invaluable tribal knowledge.

The past decade or so in the manufacturing sector has brought lots of hype about robotics along with it. But sometimes the flexible systems that many small and medium-sized business leaders were promised have been too complex to effectively deliver on the jobs to be done on the plant floor. Colin Riggs and Diane Abruzzini Riggs, Co-Founders of Rigorous, have set out to change that. They're passionate about local economies and helping smaller manufacturers access the robotics technologies that will let them stay competitive. And one niche manufacturing application at a time, they're working to make that happen.

Lots of business like to talk about things like "work culture" and "core values". But for many of those businesses, these are just aspirational concepts. My guest today, Doug Eisenhart, is the President of a manufacturing organization that truly lives and breathes its core values, and has built a work culture second to none. Doug will talk about how creating this kind of strong organization health internally translates into customer success. Because when your people are all rowing in the same direction, and they're owning and embracing their roles, amazing thing start to happen for your customers too.