JBT Corporation: Cory Flemings

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Cory Flemings of the AGV Division for JBT Corporation shares the business’ rich history of going from food machinery to autonomous technology.

 

 

Danny:

I have Mr. Cory Flemings here from JBT to join us on the first Executive Series under IndustrialSage. Cory, thank you so much for joining me today.

Cory:

Pleasure to be here, thanks very much.

Danny:

Well, so for those who aren’t familiar with JBT, who are you guys? What do you guys do?

Cory:

Who is JBT. That’s a very good question, especially within the realm of material handling. JBT is actually named after a guy named John Bean who was an industrial fruit tree sprayer back in the 1880s. We go way back. And he partnered up with a guy in 1921, I think, who was an almond manufacturer and they created this company called The Food Machinery Company, which many of us have now, if you say the name FMC, go, “Oh, I know FMC.”

So FMC came through two world wars. We’ve built landing craft in World War II. We built the MM13 fighting vehicle in Vietnam. We did the Bradley fighting vehicle. We got into oil and gas. In fact, the fruit tree sprayer became sprayers for de-icing fluid on aircraft after we started flying jets after World War II. You’ll still see JBT sprayers out there when you’re getting sprayed to take off in the wintertime. You’ll still see us doing that kind of work.

So then JBT got its name when the FMC gas guys and the technology guys broke off and long story, but right around the turn of the millennium they took the food machinery companies, the AGV division, and then our aviation assets that does everything around commercial airlines and loaders and unloaders and de-icers and so forth, generators, and they spun that part of the company off back to its original founder’s name, John Bean. So we’re known as JBT, John Bean Technologies. And that’s where we came from.

Danny:

That makes a lot of sense. So that’s a lot, you’re touching a lot of different industries. What are kind of the main industries that you guys focus in?

Cory:

So corporate JBT, we have really two big divisions. Food division, which is subdivided into protein and liquid foods. So we freeze half of the world’s frozen food. Our machines do, at least. We just do a lot in canning and frozen foods and in juicing. I think we squeeze 50% of the world’s orange juice globally. And then, there’s the aero tech division. So Jetway, when you walk onto the airplane, that jet bridge, the Jetway brand is actually a JBT brand.

Danny:

That’s super cool, yeah.

Cory:

Then if you look down you see the loaders and things that you look out the window of the airplane, a lot of that equipment is actually JBT. So we have aero tech as another division of our company, and the AGV division is part of the food tech division. So the food tech division is all kinds of industrial machines for food processing, commercial food processing. The AGV division, then… Ironically, we don’t do a lot in food: we do a lot more in manufacturing in automotive and things like that. So it’s kind of interesting that we’re part of the food technology outfit. But nonetheless, we do a lot in beverage. In the automatic guided vehicle world, any time you’re dealing with pallet of heavy loads, full pallet sized units, that’s the kind of equipment that we have to work with.

So in the world out there right now there are really two subsets of the automation world for automatic movement. You’ve got the AMR community, you hear a lot about, and the AGV community. And there’s a large perception that the AGV community’s kind of getting old-fashioned and so forth. AMRs are autonomous mobile robots that use a different type of navigation technology, but the vehicles generally speaking are small. They’re carrying 60 pound loads, tote size. Whereas AGVs are carrying full 2,200 pound pallets. The vehicles themselves will weigh 12,000 pounds. So obvious safety implication of moving 10,000 pounds through a rack system, you don’t want to run into things or certainly not people ’cause it will really leave a mark.

Danny:

Yeah.

Cory:

Whereas the smaller AMRs? It can hit somebody and stop and it’ll body check you, but it’s not going to leave a mark so to speak. But there’s certain blending of those two communities and as the world moves forward there’s a lot of change that’s in store for us all as we move forward in the future.

Danny:

Yeah, it sounds like, so it’s a lot of Star Wars stuff that we’re seeing, right?

Cory:

There really is a lot of that going on. There’s a lot of 3D vision we’re getting out of the automotive industry, right? Several years ago we were thinking about autonomous cars that were using 3D vision. A lot of that 3D vision is being imported into our industry that we can put onto vehicles, whether they be small AMR vehicles or larger AGV vehicles. There’s a lot of that new 3D vision going on. There’s radar, there’s all kinds of different… sonar technologies… How do we find obstacles in 3D space to avoid them and figure out a path to get to point A to point B the quickest? It’s really interesting.

The other thing that I see happening in the market right now is, for many many years we had forklift companies out there in the market. They’re also trying to figure out, how much longer will I be able to continue to do manual forklifts? So they’re all jumping into the autonomous movement as well. Whether you’re talking about the European companies or some of the American companies here. So our company JBT is also getting involved in working with the OEM fork truck suppliers in automating their equipment as well. So there’s a lot of automation. We’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg that’s coming.

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s several reasons for that. It’s a super exciting time in this space as you look at that evolution of how we buy. And you can call it “the Amazon effect” or what have you: really logistics and supply chain having… there’s a huge critical need from that, from the ability of where maybe five or 10 years ago you would traditionally send goods and your products to a distribution facility, then it would go to another large distribution facility to a retail outlet, like a Walmart, but now we’re having these areas where we’re going more direct and it’s creating this, maybe it’s a little bit more stress on the system, if you will.

Cory:

It’s a lot more stress. And you called it the Amazon effect. I’m thinking of Jeff Goldblum in the first movie where he’s looking in the rear view mirror and the dinosaur’s chasing him down. “Must go faster!”

Danny:

Yeah, exactly!

Cory:

And that’s really the way it is. There’s so much pressure, the Amazon effect of “It’s got to be there tomorrow.” I mean 10 years ago, you go through a warehouse they could deliver in two days or three days. Anymore and it’s got to be there within perhaps hours or certainly tomorrow and it does create a lot more stress on the supply chain.

Danny:

Exactly, so it’s not even just the finished goods out the door, it’s the whole supply, the whole supply chain infrastructure. I can’t talk, wow. I love that visual. I think we’re going to steal that now. We’re going to have Jeff Goldblum with the, that’s awesome. That’s perfect-

Cory:

Was it “Jurassic Park?”

Danny:

“Jurassic Park”, yeah yeah!

Cory:

“Must go faster!”

Danny:

Yeah, exactly. So how are you guys sort of addressing that? Obviously AGVs and AMRs really have, obviously there’s a lot of efficiencies you can pick up. How are you guys, what are some concrete examples or solutions that you guys have been able to solve challenges for customers to be able to bring in that efficiency?

Cory:

Wow, that’s a pretty wide open question. Many people would I guess would be surprised to find out that many of the hospitals that they go to actually have behind the walls are automatic guided vehicles running behind the scenes.

Danny:

Really, I didn’t know that.

Cory:

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

Right.

Danny:

So like the corridors?

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. So there’s the logistic system and then they have more specialized or efficient ways to move material through a hospital if it’s just a heart pump that needs to go from the equipment room to room 324, there’s no sense in sending a whole barge up there. Those are some interesting applications we’ve seen. They’re all over the automotive market. It goes without saying. Most recently like drywall.

You think about any factory that has manufacturing you can’t turn off. So you start building or generating gypsum, liquid gypsum to make gypsum board, you don’t want to turn that machine off. Injection molding plastic, glass manufacturing, metal manufacturing, those kinds of industries where the machine just runs whether you’re ready for it to come out or not, it’s coming out. We’ve got vehicles we’ve built now for the gypsum industry that will handle 10,000 pound loads and those big stacks that you see at Home Depot or Lowes we’re picking those things up and maneuvering them around in the manufacturing plant, and we can even load trucks with those things. So we’re seeing some very interesting new applications we’re coming out with.

Danny:

I’ve got an interesting question. As far as adopting this new technology and sort of rolling it out, what does that look like for an organization that typically says, we’ve got a, we want to roll this solution out in our warehouse. This is a very sort of, I know you can probably answer this 300 different ways, but what’s the typical rollout type period for something like this?

Cory:

That’s a good question. In fact, I was just talking through this yesterday. How long does it take from the time the light bulb goes on to the time we can get a purchase order? Yesterday we kind of went through, an average process can be about seven months. “Wow, seven months, why does it take so long?”

It starts with a rough order of magnitude. One of our sales people will come, they’ll walk through the facility, what do you want to do, da da da da da, and the first question we’re trying to answer collectively with the customer is is there even a project here. Can we get a rough order of magnitude of how many vehicles we would need, how much it’s going to cost to justify through return on investment there’s a project here, or there isn’t a project here? If it’s a seven year return on investment, you know, nice meeting you let’s part friends and move on.

The next step then would be to go to a budgetary process. We’ll say okay, let’s validate the rough order of magnitude budget by running it through some engineering, coming up with a concept, a budget, a layout, answering most of the technical questions and it’s going to be plus or minus 10 or 15%, it’s going to cost this much. Does that still meet the return on investment requirements that we have?

At the end of the day, I often say we don’t sell equipment we sell investments. The investment that we’re going to provide to a customer is going to be competing at the CFO office with some guy who wants to paint the ceilings white ’cause it’s going to make it more efficient. And the return on that is 24 months, instead of 25 months or something, so they’ll paint the ceiling instead.

So what we’re trying to do is just constantly keep an eye on the economic picture as we’re going through the process. The customer meanwhile, if they’re a publicly traded company, they’ve got to have three bids minimum, so they’re going to grind through the sausage manufacturing process of getting other customers to bid and trying to compare three differently solutions and that process takes some time, and finally you get to the point where they say we think we want to go with you, now we need a firm budget.

Then we have to go back in and really nail the number and really get it down, and that whole process, site visits that the customer might want to make visiting our headquarters, that can take somewhere around seven months on an average basis. Can we do it faster? Certainly, but for planning purposes think about seven months is what it takes from the start to the time when you’re ready to pull the trigger and then it’s going to take another six to nine months to get the system built and installed.

So it’s a year and a half process to the time the light bulb goes on to actually get it installed and running. Something to keep in mind while you as an executive are thinking through that process sometimes we get frustrated on the supplier side because it just takes so long for customers to make the decision. Six or seven months can go by and we look at that and say you could be saving $2.5 million a month.

Danny:

You could have started that at this.

Cory:

Right.

Danny:

Yeah.

Cory:

And it’s a $14 million delay.

Danny:

Yeah, yeah.

Cory:

So that’s kind of a rough picture.

Danny:

It’s great, it’s interesting. Especially as we see more of these solutions really and as the industry makes the “digital transformation,” the big powerful words. As we are moving into this space just to get an idea of that. Now, one other question I’ve got for you is I know we’ve got MODEX that’s coming up I think you guys are going to be there. We’re going to be there. What have you guys got coming down the pipe that you’re going to be… Anything you can reveal and share with us beforehand?

Cory:

We’re starting our second freezer facility and 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, those of you who have these 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 something that comes through the wall and the vehicle stays in the freezer and keeps working. Revolutionary really, it’s been something the freezer companies have been asking for a long time and we’re starting our second facility now in the freezer market.

Danny:

That’s awesome, ’cause maybe I’ve been to one or two freezers and you’ve got minutes. You cannot be in there for super long.

Cory:

Exactly.

Danny:

I think I’m sure there’s some sort of OSHA regulations and different things in there, so it’s fairly regulated. It sounds like an amazing solution where you guys can really increase that efficiency. I imagine the ROI on that has got to be.

Cory:

The cost efficiency certainly right because if your people can’t be in there as long, it takes that many more minutes for them to do the job and it costs that much more. So it’s a real sweet spot for AGVs to work.

Danny:

That’s awesome. So, all right, I’ve got another little question. I didn’t ask you this beforehand, so we’ll see. With technology, particularly with AGVs and AMRs, there’s this whole, in robotics and AI, and technology in general, from a workforce standpoint, there’s a whole question and debate about are these taking people’s jobs. “Are they replacing us?” You must come across that.

Cory:

Sure.

Danny:

In sales prospects. How do you address that?

Cory:

Yes. They are taking people’s jobs. Yes, but then the age-old question is where are the buggy whip manufacturers these days? There aren’t any buggy whip manufacturers any more.

But the problem that we all have to deal with is if company A and company A are competing, let’s just pick two off the top of my head, Maybelline and Revlon are in competition with one another. They both produce the same thing. If one gets an advantage in terms of efficiency through the supply chain, the other’s going to take it on the chops.

I remember a very interesting time, it was 10 years ago, I heard a VP from Procter & Gamble actually, he stood up and he said, “I came to my job and I asked this question. How long does it take from the time we buy, let’s just take Pert Shampoo. How long does it take from the time we buy the bottles and the paint and the raw materials and the pallets and the plastic and the stuff that we need to the time we get our money back from Walmart?” So the cash to cash cycle. Asked the studio audience. And I thought, probably six weeks or something like that. Now P&G, I hope this isn’t still the case today, but it was 43 weeks. And that’s not really the point. “The real point is,” he said, “What percent of our attention do you think, our corporate attention was fixed upon the process of the work in process?” So making the stuff. “90% of our attention was on the manufacturing process. We’re automating the manufacturing and so forth, right. And how long do you think that process took? 90 minutes.”

So in this 43 week period of time, the supply chain I’ll say, 90% of the company’s attention was focused on the 90 minutes that it took to actually make the material. That was just really revealed to me the supply chain is where, so you have two companies manufacturing the same thing and they could be any two companies doing any two commodity products that you go to the Walmart and you see on the shelf. Company A, company B? The one who gets more efficient, from 43 weeks down to 22 weeks, their costs can go down or their profit is going to go up. One or the other. They’re going to put the other guy out of business. So to your question, what do you do then if your competition puts in AGVs and they reduce their labor and they get more efficient? What’s going to happen to you if you don’t?

So the whole idea of competitiveness is really what’s at stake. If we can figure out a way for people to take orders at McDonald’s by using a kiosk instead of paying people to do that, it’s happening, it’s a reality. It’s business getting more efficient. There’s really no other way to say that. Now the question then is, how do companies deal with if we’re going to reduce the head count by putting a system in, what’s the most humanitarian way to do that? Is it to just tell them “Oh, by the way Monday you don’t have a job.” Or is it to let the natural attrition of a company as people retire take those assets away and not replace them. That’s what many companies do.

Danny:

That and retrain all kinds of different solutions around there. I was just curious about that. You always get different answers, so I like asking… asking the question.

Cory:

I don’t want to try and dodge the issue.

Danny:

No, it’s a real issue.

Cory:

It is.

Danny:

It’s a real thing, and it’s funny that you bring up the whole McDonald’s thing ’cause that’s exactly what I was thinking in my head is that that was a couple of years ago with the whole minimum wage piece and it was like, okay well, we’ve got, we’re kind of hitting that nexus of technology. At the end of the day, it’s a business right? I mean there’s obviously, you want to make sure that you’re balanced, of course, but at the end of the day it’s like, you mentioned the competition and the technology piece is there, it’s driving innovation and if we don’t have that, your competition’s really going to drive that innovation and really that’s what drives innovation and growth and how – was it John Bean Technologies? – went from a fruit sprayer to de-icing planes.

Cory:

International conglomerate.

Danny:

Yeah.

Cory:

Yeah, exactly how they did it.

Danny:

That’s– Love the innovation. I love what you guys are doing. It sounds super cool with, I love the whole, the new freezer products that you’re rolling out with. That sounds like an amazing solution that I can see a lot of companies benefiting from. That’s just kind checking the boxes on a lot of things there. So anything else, any parting words?

Cory:

Look at the way we ship freight today. If you open up the back of any given over the road freight company’s doors it looks like McLaughlin’s closet because they’re trying to maximum the cube. I’ll just suggest that in 10 years or less the way we do that will be completely different because what if you could automate your cross dock? What if you when you pulled into your depot you didn’t have men on forklifts. AGVs were just swapping loads from truck to truck and the trucks took off again. That’s another area that we see a lot of potential.

Danny:

Absolutely.

Cory:

And it goes on. The opportunities to do those kinds of things given the smarter and smarter computers and faster processing power just gets more and more lucrative we see in the future.

Danny:

Yeah, case in point, didn’t Google a couple weeks ago talk about how they cracked quantum computing or something to that effect that they had actually like solved an algorithm or something with that.

Cory:

And that’s part of the frustrating thing about being a human being today, right? Is if you’re in business, it’s a full-time job just trying to keep up with what’s going on around us. There’s so much change that’s so fast. It’s very difficult to just keep up.

Danny:

Yep, it is, but it’s also exciting.

Cory:

That’s right.

Danny:

There’s so many amazing things. So Cory, I really appreciate your time coming by the IndustrialSage studios and kind of chatting a little bit. If anybody would like to learn a little bit more about your solutions, and it sounds like you’ve got some really cool stuff, where’s the best way to learn more about those or get in contact with you?

Cory:

Our website, JBTC.com (John Bean Technology).

Danny:

Excellent.

Cory:

And we have a whole section there on automatic guided vehicles and give us a call, we’d love to take care of your needs.

Danny:

Excellent, Cory, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Cory:

My pleasure.

Danny:

All right, so that concludes our first Executive Series interview here with IndustrialSage. I loved it, I hope you enjoyed it as well. Learned a lot about it. We’re going to be doing more of these as the year rolls out. Where we’re going to take a deep dive and sit down with some executives and learn about what they’re doing, the innovations they’re bringing to market, hear their stories and hopefully, you can learn a little bit about what they’re doing maybe that’s in your industry or not, and really take some of these things at heart and see how you might be able to apply it in your business.

I just loved hearing how JBT has a rich history from 1883 now to 2020 as we move into this new decade. All the amazing innovations from a chemical fruit sprayer using it as de-icing. We’re talking about AGVs and AMRs and robots and all kinds of crazy cool “Star Wars” stuff and it’s amazing where we’re going as the industry just continues to change.

So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. Listen, if you are on any of the podcasts stations we’d love a review. Hey, share some love with us on our social media channels. If you’re not a subscriber, you need to subscribe at industrialSage.com. That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

 

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