Executive Series Highlights

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In today’s executive series episode, we want to take a moment and reflect on a few of our past executives and highlight some of their insights.

 

 

David:

Hey everyone, I’m David Caron with IndustrialSage. Today’s executive series, we want to take a moment and reflect on a few of our past executives and highlight some of their insights. Let’s start with Cory Flemings of JBT, who had some great insights about automated robots AMRs and AGVs growing in the workforce. Even in some environments we may not expect like hospitals or subzero freezers.

Cory:

Many people would, I guess, be surprised to find out that many of the hospitals that they go to actually have behind the walls are automatic guided vehicles running, running behind the scenes.

Danny:

Really–

Cory:

For example Ohio State University, they have, I think, 64 vehicles at the facility and they, it’s really an intralogistic system of the hospital.

Danny:

Yeah.

Cory:

You’ve got food to deliver, you’ve got dirty laundry to take out, you’ve got trash to take out, you’ve got surgical cabinets that need to move, supplies come in from the supply room that need to be distributed through the hospital. There’s a logistics system that’s completely automated in that hospital, that actually has elevators that go from the basement all the way to the 23rd floor. Greenville, South Carolina has a hospital that’s completely automated.

Danny:

And that’s all behind the scenes kind of thing–

Cory:

The patients don’t even know that they’re there.

Danny:

Okay, interesting.

Cory:

What we’re starting to look at now is moving with AMR assistance to move into patient rooms using these kinds of AMR vehicles as well. What’s rather new in the marketplace is a vehicle that will actually work in minus 20 degrees centigrade temperatures. Think about how much it costs your labor if you have to, those of you who have at least freezers know how much you have to pay for labor to go work in a freezer all day. So these vehicles live in the freezer and they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They get charged by, getting charged through the wall. The chargers can be outside the freezer, they plug up on the thing that comes through the wall and the vehicle stays in the freezer and keeps working. Revolutionary really, it’s been something that the freezer companies have been asking for a long time.

_______

David:

Next, we had Tim Vargo of Exide who discussed business sustainability and addressing the desires of different generations within the workforce.

Tim:

Everybody’s always looking for the easy solution and so lithium has come on board here over the last decade or so, people are saying “Lead acid is dead, lithium is the solution.” Kind of forgot lithium’s got a lot of stuff in it that people don’t like either and isn’t good for the environment and oh, by the it’s not something that’s completely recyclable yet and may never be.

Danny:

Really.

Tim:

And so, um, so we’re, we’re dealing with a couple of things, we do lithium today, we buy lithium cells, we assemble them, provide solutions for a variety of different energy needs from backup power to motive power for forklifts and that sort of thing. But, it’s a complicated problem because the industry isn’t old enough yet to have developed the full recyclability. So we’ve got to be good stewards of that product as well, though, and that’s exciting. Now that I’m old enough to remember people saying that when I was young, the work ethic had gone down the drain and we didn’t have the same work ethic. And I’ve been around long enough to hear that from my kids and now my grandkids and what I would tell you is we find a great workforce out there today. They’re easily motivated, provided you are giving them reasons to work from where they like to work and how they like to work. And so challenge for old guys like me is to try to figure out how you can make sure you’re providing a work environment for today’s employees

Danny:

Yeah.

Tim:

Differently than we had in the past.

Danny:

Yeah.

Tim:

And I think our company’s doing a really good job of that.

_______

David:

Matthew Putman of Nanotronics shared his timely insights on this era of rapid technological advancement and COVID’s impact on that development within the supply chain.

Matthew:

We’ve had for your life and mine, you’ve heard something called Moore’s law, which you’re familiar with. If you’re familiar with Moore’s law, that basic idea is that you have computational power that increases at the same price at the same time, price and costs for us comes down as things get faster and better. But there’s also something that’s happening that is a bit dangerous and a challenge. Is that to make those electronic devices, the factories to build them are exponentially getting more expensive. Our fabs, which is fabrication factories to build semiconductors, they cost over $20 billion to make now. To build a factory, it’s unthinkable for any other generation or any other time. Any other time meaning even 10 years ago, this was unthinkable. So a huge challenge is to bring about some of the changes that I was mentioning earlier in order to make factories much, much less expensive. If you don’t do that, the barrier to entry is going to be huge. You can imagine the barrier of entry for you to create a podcast or for us to write an app that might be interesting for our phones or for the computer, the barrier to entry is only our imagination and what we want to do with it. Barrier to making a factory right now can be billions of dollars.

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David:

Finally, we’ll leave you with a teaser from next week’s executive series interview with Tom Galluzzo of IAM Robotics. You’re not going to want to miss this episode.

Tom:

If you think about people shopping in the United States every year, for instance, people do, customers do 40 billion hours a year of shopping. And that’s effectively, going to the grocery store, mostly going to the grocery store and grocery shopping once a week, couple of hours. And if you add all that up, all that labor, it takes that the customers are basically doing for free, their own last mile fulfillment, if you will, by doing the shopping, 40 billion hours is the equivalent of like 20 million full time jobs. And so what happens if you were to move all of our buying goods online, that 40 billion hours, so that 20 million full time jobs, it just cannot be replaced.

Danny:

Yeah.

Tom:

There isn’t enough unemployment in the country to be able, and the vast number of people looking for jobs, but not, they’re not interested in going through this kind of shopping and ecommerce work. So what that means is that as things continue to move online, you have to automate it because there just isn’t enough people in the workforce.

 

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