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An industry-leading media platform, publishing compelling content for industrial & manufacturing professionals.

  1. 10/22/2022

    Dematic: Deidre Cusack

    Deidre Cusack of Dematic shares key lessons from business mentors, and how she sees automation and customer behavior evolving supply chain. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m Danny Gonzales, and today I’m joined by Dee Cusack who is the chief technology officer at Dematic. Dee, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Dee: – Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Danny: – Well the pleasure’s all mine here. I’m very excited. For the audience who’s watching, we had a very lively pre-recorded discussion that we’re going to wrap in, and I’m excited to get into it. For those who are unfamiliar with Dematic right now, who’s Dematic, and what do you guys do? Dee: – Dematic is part of the KION Group. Dematic has actually been in existence for 203 years, and we are essentially the engine that goes behind ecommerce. We do supply chain automation, started in the early years with simple machines like conveyors and racking and so forth. Today we really are a very complex solution provider, full integrator in the supply chain automation space with obviously a big impact on software and robotics and all the latest technology. That’s what we do. Danny: – Excellent. Well ecommerce has done nothing but absolutely exploded. It was a huge growth trend before this thing called Covid came along, but then certainly afterwards it’s just been this massive explosion. I’m sure that we’re going to get into some more of the insights and different things that are happening in the industry with that a little later on in the episode. Right now I would love to get to know a little bit more about you. I’d like to know more about Dee. Dee, tell me, how did you get into this space? Take me back. Is this something that you said, “Hey,” —maybe when you were a kid? “I want to go into supply chain; I want to get into the technology space.” How did this all come about? Dee: – I’d love to say that I had this vision when I was four, but that would be stretching it a little bit. Danny: – You were six. Okay, I got it. Dee: – No, but I started my career in R&D. I have a couple of engineering degrees, and I’ve always been interested in how to apply technology into markets, and particularly market niches to help a business grow in a rapid and profitable way. I started my career in R&D. I then went into business development, and then more on managing entire businesses, P&Ls that were global for a variety of different markets. I did that for about 20 years and decided to come back to my roots a little bit more. A friend of mine, a colleague of mine that I used to work with called me up and said, “Look, there’s this wonderful company that I’m working with called Dematic; we’d love for you to come in and look at some of the opportunities.” And so the opportunity to go and lead the technology in a meaningful way, particularly with the software that the company had and to really develop a strategy to help the company grow in a sustainable way but also bring our solutions to the next level was really compelling for me. As I started to learn more about the company and the industry, I started to get more and more excited about it. And just coincidentally, you said ecommerce exploding, I joined Dematic just about the time that the lockdown started with Covid. I can tell you, it’s been an exciting ride, really trying to keep up with the pace of the market but also the changing demands in the marketplace since being part of Dematic. I just can’t say enough good things about the industry, the company, and some of the path forward and what’s coming ahead. Danny: – Wow, it’s fascinating that you jumped on right before Covid. What a time to jump into a company like Dematic at that time because we know that trends were clearly pushing towards ecommerce and the need for automation, robotics, AI; all this technology was coming in. There was a need for it and a clear growth trend, but then certainly thereafter, I mean, nuts. It just went crazy. So lockdowns were in March; you started in February, March-ish? Dee: – I started in March; that’s right. Danny: – Oh, my gosh. Dee: – Just about the time that the lockdown started so as you said, a lot of the trends were present before Covid, but what happened with our customer base was that everything got accelerated. The need for, how do you work? Everyone was putting demand on ecommerce, and people were working remotely, so we had to figure out how to do a lot of things remotely that we used to do in person, at the same time enabling new capabilities for our customers so that they could then service their customers. It was a very challenging but very fun time to be part of the business. You had to be very agile, very nimble in terms of your thinking. I mentioned earlier, Dematic is 203 years old. We’ve been doing certain pieces of the business for a long time, but it was a very conservative business. Now all of a sudden you interject this crisis, and now people need to apply their thinking in a slightly different way. It was really exciting to see it come together. Danny: – Absolutely. Well, and slightly, and then in other areas completely radically different. As you mentioned, it was interesting; internally from an organizational standpoint, having that thinking shifted, and you mentioned–the whole work from home idea and how do we transition that? But at the same time, in an industry where your customers are—how do we shift that for them as well, and then also oh, by the way, I think the numbers were saying in 2020, ecommerce growing by 40%. You have segments that have never really done this, or they were starting to pilot programs, and then said, “We have to accelerate this.” Exhilarating to say the least. Dee: – It was; it was. But I would say one of the cornerstones of Dematic has always been an entrepreneurial spirit, so I think everyone approached it in the way of, well, how can we make it work? China is still closed to a lot of travel externally, so a lot of things that were normal ways of doing business, we had to find different ways to accomplish the same criteria. How do you lend expertise? Now you do it virtually. Now, people start seeing on the screen the same picture, but through virtual goggles. It was just a different way of experiencing it. It taught everyone how to be a little bit more creative in terms of how do you accomplish a task? Danny: – Absolutely. I love how you said the entrepreneurial spirit. That’s something that’s not—when you talk about bigger organizations, corporations they tend to trend opposite, actually the exact opposite of that. I think that’s definitely a great silver lining of something we’ve learned, but that was already part of the culture to begin with. There was a lot of insights and innovations that came because of that that was already instilled in the culture. I don’t want to dwell too far too long on the whole Covid change and everything. I’d like to learn a little bit more, too, about you and your background. One of the questions that I love hearing answers from executives is just the—throughout your career journey you’ve obviously seen a lot. We were just talking about, obviously, some big changes. Throughout your journey, typically there’s a lot of people that have big influences on your career, both positive and negative. We’re going to focus on the positive side. Could you share a story of somebody that has made a measurable impact in your career? I know there’s a lot, probably. Maybe if there’s just one, I’ll even say two that come to mind that you can share with me. Dee: – Sure. So many people have had an impact on me in a positive way, and I tend personally to always look at an experience and try to learn something from it. Even just sitting in a conference room, I’ll look at who’s effective and who’s not effective with what they’re doing, and I’ll try to learn from the people that are effective, but also from the people that aren’t effective. I think as this is going on, and I replay it later on–– which is, how can I apply some of those same learnings to me? One person that I’ll call out—and I could call out 10 easily without thinking about it—was a leader of mine. I worked for him while I was at ABB. I worked for him for a number of years. He was masterful at not only the way that he interacted with customers, but the way that he interacted with people in general. If you met him, you would say he just enjoys people, and he’s so effective at building teams and building common alignment around the people. He was such a positive influence with me, and one day I said to him, “Not everyone has your same gift to go up and to compel an audience with such ease. It just comes so naturally to you, and you’re just so good at it.” And he said to me, “Yeah, what you didn’t see is last night in my hotel room, I was practicing for six hours.” He basically taught me through a number of different lessons as I learned with him watching how he really helped align his teams. These were all pretty strong leaders that all had very unique ideas, but what he taught me was, this doesn’t happen—nobody gets there by accident. What it takes is hard work and alignment and really getting the right people and understanding how they can work effectively together. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned through playing sports as a kid and so forth. He really brought it home and applied it in also a corporate environment where, again, there are people who are good at it; he was masterful at it. He had a tremendous—and he also was the most giving person. I had a women’s network that I had started at ABB, and I had asked him to participate in this network a couple of times, b

    39 min

  2. 09/24/2022

    ThruWave: Pieter Krynauw

    Pieter Krynauw shares his career history and how ThruWave is applying millimeter wave tech to save retailers millions in fraudulent returns. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I’m Danny Gonzales, and today my guest is a company called ThruWave. I have Pieter Krynauw who is the CEO. We met at MODEX in 2022, and so I’m super excited to have you join me today, Pieter. Pieter: – Hey, thank you. Nice to be with you guys. Danny: – Well this is exciting. You guys have some really interesting technology. There’s been several awards that you guys have won over the last several years. For those who aren’t familiar with who you guys are, who ThruWave is, give me a little bit of a high-level of who you are and what you do. Pieter: – Yeah, sure. At a high level, we’re a small start-up based in Seattle. We’ve just developed some amazing, ground-breaking millimeter wave ocular vision technology that can sense through cardboard, plastic, at very high speeds making it a great solution to inspect packages that move along a conveyor. We construct a 3D digital image of what’s inside a cardboard box or a plastic tote providing the ability to verify quantity, condition, content for our supply chain customers. We use simple hardware technology like this, and then it’s all software to analyze and support our customers. Danny: – Excellent. That’s pretty cool. I remember we demoed it; I think we did some video content there. It seemed like it was very interesting technology. We’ll get into that here in a little bit more in the episode, but right now we’re going to pivot, go to one of my favorite sections just to learn a little bit more about you, Pieter. I want to learn about your background, how you got to where you are, hear your story a little bit. Take me back; how did you get into this space? Was it something that, did you go to school for engineering? What was that? Pieter: – Yeah, it’s a long journey and a longer story. I grew up in South Africa. After college I moved to the UK, probably had a plane ticket and £100 in my pocket. Might’ve been a little bit more, but it didn’t feel like a lot at the time. I had some software and computer networking training at the time. This being the late 90s, I was able to find a really nice job at a small data company in the UK, and I had the opportunity to work with just some fantastic customers, a wide variety of customers in the UK which was really fantastic for me as a young person, young professional. I returned to South Africa after about two years in the UK, did an MBA, and I was fortunate enough to get an opportunity with Honeywell. We had a large contract with South Africa’s largest petrochemical company, so I jumped straight into the fire. I worked myself up, sideways, up again, into various positions in South Africa, the Middle East, China, and into the US working in a variety of roles, mostly in process automation, industrial process automation. Honeywell then acquired a material handling company a few years after I got to the US. I went over shortly after to lead that business. That’s the short story of how I got into the supply chain space. Danny: – Excellent. Through that journey—obviously we got the short, we got the abridged version. Totally get it. I’m sure there’s a lot of things that probably, a lot of left turns and right turns and then circles and go back up. Typically, like with anyone’s career, there’s a lot of people that have had a major impact and helped to shape who you are today. I know there’s way too many to go over, but who is one person that comes to mind that really helped to create and helped you to be the Pieter of today? That could be a lesson or a scenario. What is that for you? Who is that person? A person. Pieter: – That’s also a difficult question. I think maybe living and working in so many different locations, parts of the world, every location leaves something with you. The experiences and the exposure you later realize is a blessing that very few people get to have. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with just some fantastic professionals, individuals, over many, many years. If I really want to think back to what made me who I am, I would have to go back to my dad in two ways, one probably good and one probably bad. The good part is that he just showed me the work, the integrity, ethics, hard work, and I got that from him. But I grew up in a small town, never really moved, and I think that also wanted me to be a little bit more adventurous and go do a few things that maybe I didn’t think at the time was possible or that I had the capability to do. That part I think also shaped me. Then I’ve also got to say, from moving a family so many times, my wife has just been tremendous. I think I was enabled by her sacrifice to put her career on hold so many times. Very difficult to pinpoint the exact influences, so those would be two. Then I also would like to think that I’ve taken some of the good things from everybody that I’ve worked with in the past, and then maybe also avoided some of the bad things that I’ve seen in people that I maybe didn’t like that much. A combination of things, but my dad and my wife would be two ones that have really influenced my career. Danny: – Certainly. That’s great. Let’s jump a little bit now to your transition. You said you spent a lot of time with Honeywell, and there was a lot there. You moved to a lot of different countries, had a lot of different exposure across the industry. Let’s talk about ThruWave and how that started, how you got involved, and what did that journey look like? Pieter: – That’s a really good question. Obviously I was very blessed to work with a really great American multinational company that afforded me a lot of opportunities. I really liked moving from oil and gas, petrochemical into supply chain, really loved that transition, and I just see so many opportunities for technological advancement, automation, improvement, things that maybe oil and gas learned many, many years ago that can transition into the supply chain space. I really just love working in material handling and supply chain. After a couple of years running Intelligrated, I came across ThruWave, and I was blown away by the technology and just what this team of scientists were able to develop. I’ve never really worked in a start-up environment, and I thought the combination of those two things—doing something I haven’t done before, getting into some awesome technology—was just a great opportunity for me to do something that I haven’t done before. Danny: – Yeah, absolutely. It’s a night and day difference, going into very established corporate to start-up. It’s very entrepreneurial. Did you have that in your background at all? Was that something that was—is that spirit embodied in your family, or is that a new venture for you? Pieter: – I’m not sure; I guess working within a large multinational I think afforded me a lot of support, but I think to some extent also the places that I worked were so far removed from headquarters that you’ve got to do what you need to do to be successful. Roles aren’t always as defined and as clear, so working in the middle of nowhere you’ve got to do the project management, the sales, the service, the support. You’ve got to have a little bit of a self-starting nature and some entrepreneurial capability, I think, to be really successful. I think I learned that even though I worked in a fairly large company. Danny: – Excellent, very cool. Alright, so talk to me a little bit about that moment when you decided that, hey, I’m going to make this transition, and I’m going to jump onto the start-up. I imagine typically that’s a very challenging and difficult decision to make. Obviously there’s a lot of unknowns. It’s exhilarating, but it can also, I imagine, be a little terrifying, both sides of the spectrum. What was that like for you? Pieter: – Maybe I look at it a little bit differently. I think through my past career moves, I’ve always brought excitement and energy from trying things that I wanted to develop in myself firstly or tried to take on challenges that I haven’t done before. One of my first big moves was moving from South Africa to the Middle East. New culture, new location, new teams, different macro-environment. That was really exciting, although for me that was a sideways move at the time. Stepping out and growing into a company like ThruWave, I think the excitement and the challenge and the opportunity overshadows the risk or the doubt. I think from my point of view, that’s how I’ve always looked at things. I think if you’re going to look at everything that’s going to go wrong or if you’re worried the challenge is going to be too big, then probably it’s not a good move. Probably you’re not going to be successful. I tend to get energized by that, so I don’t think much about what can go wrong. Danny: – That’s great. I love it. The always positive optimist, it embodies a true visionary. Great, so ThruWave, you had this opportunity. How did ThruWave come to be in existence? Where did that technology come from? What’s the origin story? Pieter: – The founders of our company all came out of University of Washington where they’ve worked under Matt Reynolds and developed the basics of the technology. Then it spun off from there to really focus on the commercial application in the supply chain space. So out of UW, and it’s been a fairly long journey to really develop a technology solution that’s viable for supply chain customers. Danny: – The technology that you have, what exactly does it do? Pieter: – We use millimeter waves; it’s in the invisible spectrum. It’s totally human-safe. Thi

    25 min

  3. 09/03/2022

    Ambi Robotics: Jim Liefer

    Jim Liefer of Ambi Robotics shares his view of prioritizing customer desires and workforce quality of life when implementing ai and robotics. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I’m joined by Jim Liefer who is the CEO of Ambi Robotics. Jim, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Jim: – Absolutely. Thanks for having me here, Danny. Danny: – Well I’m excited to jump into our episode, learn a little bit more about you. Learn a little bit more about Ambi. It sounds like you’re a robotics company, based on the name. I’m just going out on a limb there. Jim: – We are an AI Robotics company. That is absolutely right. Danny: – So tell me a little bit about—what exactly are you guys doing? What are the problems that you’re solving today? Jim: – Yeah, so Ambi Robotics is an AI Robotics company, as you guessed. We are developing solutions that empower people. Primarily we are in the world of supply chain at the moment, so we are enabling those humans to work smarter. If you think of it in the way of right now the work that they do out there in the parcel world, in that industry, and also in the fulfillment world for retail operations, they are moving packages and parcels around. Our technology allows them to become robot handlers instead of package handlers. That is what the technology does, and that is where our focus is today. Danny: – Excellent, alright. Well sounds good. Sounds like a lot of the companies that we’ve talked to, there has just been such a huge acceleration of automation, robotics technology to solve a lot of the challenges that are going on now that were honestly present before the pandemic, but certainly accelerated afterwards exponentially with the, you mentioned specifically in the parcel or warehousing. Ecommerce has exploded. Then there’s nobody there. The labor has dropped. Jim: – Yeah, it’s a couple of things. The way that I always think of this is that all of us consumers, we’re on this path anyway of moving from brick-and-mortar shopping into ecommerce, going on our phone, having something arrive at our door basically. Then when the pandemic hit, it just accelerated that 5 or 10 years. I also, the way that I’ve seen this at least here at Ambi Robotics is that during that time where everyone was sort of in their bunker during the pandemic, there was a lot of progress made, a lot of progress made on the AI side, a lot of progress made around robotics and configurations. As you’ve said, Danny, there aren’t humans anymore, so it created this moment where the customer sort of has to find this solution because we can’t serve the need anymore. That’s the journey through the pandemic as I see it. Danny: – Oh, sure, absolutely. I’m excited to jump into that a little bit more as we get a little bit later in the episode. Right now—it’s one of my favorite parts. This is when I want to get to learn a little bit more about you. We get to learn more about Jim. Jim, so tell me. How did you get into this industry? How did you get into this space? Take me back. Jim: – Okay, well as you can see I have a few years on me, so we’ll go way back. Danny: – You don’t look any older than 25. Come on, man. Jim: – So I actually started as a computer operator for a bank. I also was mainframe systems operator, had the overnight shift. I was the sole operator, by the way, for this bank. I had this huge amount of responsibility on me to make sure that all the systems were working every day when the bank opened. Eventually I moved from that heavy set of responsibility into the world of 3PL. I worked for a third-party logistics provider, air and ocean freight and all of that around the world. UPS acquired that 3PL in the early 2000s, so now I became a UPS-er. Through all of that time at UPS on the technology side, I was exposed to different systems and what we were doing for customers. Then I moved from UPS over to Walmart ecommerce as VP of operations at Walmart. Had a lot of responsibility for the ecommerce fulfillment buildings and supply chain for Walmart ecommerce. All of that time, I was in the chair of looking for solutions to the problem, the problem being solving for process, solving for new volume, solving for the labor side. That is where I started on the big company side, and then after six holidays at Walmart, I moved into the exciting world of start-ups and eventually made my way to—the first start-up at AI Robotics was Kindred, and I was there helping them with that product that would serve the apparel industry. Then made my way over here to Ambi about 16 months ago as the CEO here at Ambi Robotics. Danny: – Well that’s awesome. Congratulations on that. It sounds like an interesting progression, an interesting journey into that. Throughout that time period, maybe if you could share with me a story or somebody who’s had an impact on your career. It could be a mentor; it could be somebody who gave you some great advice. I know most of the time people have a lot, and they struggle to pare that down. Share with me, who’s that one person for you? Jim: – There were many. I had many people along the way. I would say the person who changed the way I think about being in the professional world and also being a leader is a gentleman who came to be my manager in the late 90s, came to that 3PL that I mentioned. He had this perfect blend of challenging the team, uplifting the team, and protecting the team. His name is Gene, and so I always say there is Gene-isms that I talk about all the time. I hear his voice in my head. I hear him saying different things that make me much more of a servant leader and being humble. He changed everything I think about leadership Danny: – I like it. Share with me; what’s a Gene-ism that you can share with us? Jim: – Well an easy one is, catch people doing something right. He was a big believer in, don’t wait for the moments when you have to tell people, “Hey, you did that wrong,” but catch them doing something right. That’s one. I can give you a second one. The second one is—and it’s very corny—but he said, “Anytime you’re pointing your finger at somebody, there’s three fingers pointing back at you,” which, a lot of people say that. He would always say that, so don’t blame others. Many of those things that just—overall how to carry yourself and look out for the team just meant a lot to me always. Just speaking of that, we have an amazing team here that I think of every day. Caring for this team is my top priority. Danny: – That’s awesome. I love that. I especially love that you call them Gene-isms. You obviously are able to quickly rattle them off, and I like it. Corny or not, there’s three fingers pointing back at you when you point at—I love that. I’m curious. I think I know the answer to this, but how is that—obviously it’s influenced your style, your leadership. You mentioned servant leadership there. You mentioned that that was, back when you were at the 3PL. Was that before UPS acquired them? Jim: – Yep. Danny: – Okay. Were those Gene-isms, as you progressed and you moved up the ladder so to speak, was there a point where it just clicked and you said, “Hey, I need to go ahead and put these into play,” because a lot of times you’ll go through this stuff, and it takes time to absorb. Then there’s a moment where things shift. You say, “Oh, wow, I completely understand from a leadership standpoint how viable and important this is.” Jim: – Yeah, so it’s a combination of things. First meeting Gene and all of those things that are Gene-isms, but also the way that he thought about employee engagement and surveying and so all of those things to take care of the team. Then as I told you in my career when I moved to Walmart, Walmart is the place where I heard that term, servant leadership. By the way, Gene and I worked together in several places. The 3PL, we worked together at UPS. He then came to Walmart after I was at Walmart. The point of that is, it’s a build. I had that foundation, those things I learned from Gene, and then also all of the way that Walmart leadership works and thinks about the customer, so layering that in. There’s a strong customer component. One of the Walmart sayings is that the customer is always right, so I believe that strongly. Then when you tie into the other aspects of Walmart of everyday low cost is another big one for Walmart. Respect for the individual and servant leadership, those components, it just made sense to me. I couldn’t think of leading in any other way, and I think it’s served me really well to this point around being humble, servant leadership, passion, all of those things. Danny: – Oh, I love it. I think that’s one of my favorite stories I’ve learned, especially that you have some terminology around it. Gene-isms, that’s very catchy. I’m definitely going to be stealing some Gene-isms. I’d love to hear more later down the road. Well very cool. Let’s pivot a little bit now. Let’s go back to Ambi a little bit. You were talking about, obviously we’ve got a lot of issues with supply chain, with labor. You guys are helping to solve some of that. I guess a big question that I would have is, there’s been a huge influx of robotics companies. If you look at the last several years, it was growing and emerging. One big thing that jumped out to me was, we were at MODEX in 2020. There were AMRs everywhere, AMRs, AGVs, everything. Robotic arms, cobots, Spot was there, of course. Going back in 2018 it was a little less, and further, and there’s a huge emergence of it now. What is your biggest point of differentiation from the crowd, so to speak? Jim: – Okay, so we’ll weave this together. You have the technology comp

    37 min

  4. 08/20/2022

    Lanco Integrated: Bob Kuniega

    Bob Kuniega of Lanco shares how the industry’s lean practices wax and wane, and how manufacturers need to improve their recruiting methods. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by the president and CEO of Lanco Integrated, Bob Kuniega. Bob, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Bob: – Very welcome, Danny. I’m glad to be here. Danny: – Alright, well I’m glad to interview you. We met, we were at the ASSEMBLY Show. We were talking about this before, in Chicago in 2021. My dates are all—with all the Covid stuff, time has just gotten all messed up. But yeah, it was the ASSEMBLY Show in Chicago. I think we met you guys there. You guys have some pretty cool technology and solutions. I think you guys were showcasing a solution with a partnership you had with I think Stäubli at that point. And so anyways, caught our interest, started talking, and here we are. For those who aren’t familiar with Lanco, could you just give me a quick high-level of who you guys are and what you do? Bob: – Sure, great. So Lanco, we make custom automated assembly and test machines really for the assembly and the testing of small to medium parts. Been around over 35 years; we have over 8000 machines stationed around the world. What we do is we work typically with an end customer who has a product and wants to get it to market and wants to automate the assembly end or test processes. We’re doing the concept. We’re doing the design. We’re doing the build and then the eventual validation and certification and tests that the product is meeting form, fit, and function. We typically, because of the size of the products we handle and the expense of our solutions, we’re focused in on a couple markets. It’s medical; it’s consumer electronics, automotive, some commercial industrial so a lot of these specialty applications that can warrant the complexity and the cost of these automated systems. Danny: – Sure, absolutely, okay. Well I’m sure that you guys have experienced quite of—like a lot of companies in this space, in the automation space, just quite a huge boom relative to Covid. I know there was a lot of, the industries were moving towards a lot of automation anyways, but certainly basically gas got thrown on that fire. Bob: – Yeah, absolutely right. Covid, while it was an unfortunate thing for the world, it was a boost and a refocusing, I would say to our business. We were fortunate early on to build a number of very rapid solutions for Covid test card kits, so more the self, home versions. That really shifted our market segmentation and what we’re working on. But as a result of that and as a result of supply chain disruptions and rebalancing, especially in this market in the Americas, you’ve got a lot of manufacturers who have decided they’re not going to go to a low-cost country and then have that disruption, so they’re forced to build local to their customers. But then depending where you’re at, probably now anywhere in the world, it’s tough to get people, and it’s expensive to get people. That whole shift, that was the gasoline that put on the whole industry. And in general our end users have really lost this ability to do the integration themselves, so they’re looking for us and our partners, our manufacturing partners to put it together and give them the solution they want in the end, which is produce their product to serve their customers. Danny: – Yeah, totally makes sense. That’s a story that we’ve seen and we’ve heard play out constantly. What’s interesting, too, is as things shift, we’re seeing new trends and different things. I think the labor piece was something that was really interesting. I think that everybody thought coming out of summer, 2021, I know the big thing was, the federal unemployment is helping to keep people out, and as soon as that’s over, we’re going to be back to normal. And then all of a sudden it was just like, wait a minute. People aren’t coming back. Wait, what’s going on? It’s a super interesting thing as we continue to progress. It’s like the story continues to evolve. We’ll circle back on some more of this stuff here in a minute, but what I want to do at this point is just get to know a little bit more about you. We want to know about Bob. Bob, tell me; how did you get into this industry? Take me way back. Did you study this? Did you go to school saying, “Hey, I’m going to go into engineering”? What did that look like? Bob: – Well like many people, I guess you take a bunch of turns. It’s never a straight line. Danny: – Exactly. Bob: – I am a recovering engineer; I will admit that. But really, I first got into it because I wanted to be a pilot in the military. It was circa Top Gun-ish things, and for various reasons I attempted to go in a couple of times. The engineering was a big of a fallback and a level of interest. My degree is actually aeronautical engineering. Danny: – Okay, that’s very cool. Bob: – I ended up not going into the military. I ended up going to work for Boeing, so I was designing and making airplanes. Had a couple cool jobs there. But the aviation industry is a little bit cyclical. I was living in Seattle; probably more opportunities if I got laid off at Boeing if I was in Southern California, but in Seattle there were some periods when Boeing laid off people, and the lights were out in the city of Seattle. I ended up joining an industrial distributor at the time who was selling PLCs and sensors and VFDs and data acquisition systems. So I was selling back to Boeing, to some of the departments I worked in. That got me into the manufacturing side. I eventually went from a distributor to a manufacturer and then spent a good part of my time on the manufacturer side working for a number of public and private companies, domestic and international experience, things like that. For the bulk of my career I’ve been in and around this manufacturing space. It’s kind of come full circle. As a manufacturer I would sell to some of our customers. I would sell to people like Lanco. And now I’m in a position to take a leadership role within Lanco and building that bridge between the manufacturers I once worked for and the customers I would occasionally service and that bridge and putting a whole solution from various manufacturers together to common customers and markets I’ve had experience with. Danny: – Oh, that’s very cool. I have to ask you this follow-up question because you completely piqued my interest on this. Do you have your pilot’s license? Bob: – I’ve got hours; I don’t have it yet. That’s a post-retirement thing for various reasons. Quite honestly at my time at Boeing, I would sit up in the cockpit, and it’s kind of boring being a commercial airline pilot. The military route is gone. They’re not recruiting as many pilots anymore. It’s almost more boring now, because it’s so automated, than it is being a bus driver. Danny: – That’s very true. So I’m a general aviation pilot, so I have a small 1979 Grumman Tiger. It’s funny when you talk to—you hear some similar things about all the commercial pilots. They like, “You literally take off; you just hit buttons. You’re on autopilot, and we’re just kind of monitoring things and talking to air traffic control.” You get into general aviation, you get to do a lot more things and play around with it. It’s kind of like a glorified bus driver, is what I was told. Bob: – What I was always told because I would occasionally go on delivery flights or revenue-generating flights, and the pilots would say it’s 99.5% boredom and 0.5% sheer terror. Danny: – Yeah, it can be polar opposites, no in between. That totally makes sense. Well that’s good. I’m glad it’s mainly more boring than terrifying. Okay, well cool. Sorry for that pivot; it just piqued my interest. I was very curious about that. Going back into your career and how you started and progressed and where you are now, throughout that process, can you maybe share with me somebody or something that had just a really big impact in your career? It could be an event; it could be somebody, a mentor. I know normally there’s a lot, but if we could focus on one thing, what would that be for you? Bob: – I would say—I had mentioned previously that my first job after Boeing was working for an industrial distributor. One of the vendors that we represented, I went and worked for them, and then we eventually got acquired by Danaher Corporation. We were their first acquisition that became a platform which became their motion group. So I was there in the nucleus of that. I’ve got a lot of respect for Danaher. They’ve got some spin-off businesses as a result of the success they had which was the core Danaher businesses. But immediately when we got acquired, you got immersed in what they call DBS, Danaher business systems, and they had their own educational system. It was a lot about lean, Six Sigma thinking, some concepts of strategy deployment, and so it was about actually putting a fact-based, process-oriented, results-driven type strategies together. In terms of, that was eye-opening for me. And they’ve been wildly successful as a company. I appreciate my time there, and I’ve taken that plus little pieces all around my career and used it as I’ve gone forward. Like anything, when you use it more you get better at it. When you make some mistakes, you learn from that. But I would say that was, Danny, from a professional standpoint, a really pivotal time in my career. Danny: – Okay, another follow-up question, that’s great. You mentioned lean, Six Sigma. I’m curious as we pivot a little bit now into current challenges and things that are going on right now, obvio

    30 min

  5. 07/23/2022

    CHL Systems: Michael Giagnacova

    Michael Giagnacova of CHL Systems shares on building relationships in business; and seeing challenges as new opportunities.   hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello and welcome to the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Mike Giagnacova, the CEO for CHL Systems. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Mike: – Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Danny: – Alright, well I’m excited to get into today’s episode. For those who aren’t familiar with CHL Systems, could you give me a high-level, like who you guys are and what you do? Mike: – Yeah, so we design and build solutions that move, make, and pack the products that feed our country. That’s the short clip of what we’re involved with. Danny: – Excellent, alright, well I’m excited to get into that a little bit more as I suspect you guys—there’s a lot that’s been going on in that industry. We talk about food and packaging and just moving all that, so a lot of things that have been going on. But before we get into all of that, this is one of my favorite parts of the episode where we get to learn more about you. We get to learn about Mike. So Mike, tell me; take me back. How did you get into this industry? How did you get into this space? Mike: – Yeah, so I was kind of born into it. My father owned a company that designed and built custom machinery, one-off machines. You would come to us; you would have a need for something that you’d have to custom design and build. So at a young age I started working as a machinist, working for my dad in that industry. Then I went to night school, Drexel University, for industrial engineering and worked during the day for my father. Then when I graduated there, I went to the University of Pennsylvania. We are just outside of Philadelphia. The Wharton School had a management program, so I took that. I went through that, that application. Then from there, worked in various manufacturing jobs learning how to make products, learning how to market and sell them. Those early days of being a machinist really have, I’ve carried them all the way through my career. Understanding manufacturing has been a huge part of my career. Danny: – Yeah, absolutely. What I think is interesting is that you said your dad owned that business, right? He was creating machines, and you’ve got a lot of, I’m guessing, some entrepreneurial genes or certainly some learnings from seeing your father doing that. Talk to me a little bit about that. Is that accurate? Mike: – Yeah, it’s pretty accurate. My dad was—he’s still alive—a true inventor, a great engineer. He went to Drexel as well, so we have a family history of Drexel grads. He was a true inventor of custom technology. You just couldn’t help but be a part of that. That’s who we were, and so some of the technology that we would use was cutting-edge. No challenge was too big, so to your entrepreneurial thing. The greater the challenge, the more exciting it was. And so yeah, I have a piece of that in me, too; not as much as my dad, but enough to get me into trouble. Danny: – Yeah, that’s always the rub right there. Enough to get you into trouble. Well let’s talk about some of that trouble. What trouble has that gotten you into? Mike: – Yeah, so I’m 59. I’ve been in this industry since I was a teenager, and been in different management positions pretty much all my life. There’s a lot of learning. You’re dealing with a lot of people. How you work with people, how you learn from them, there’s always an experience to learn. It builds who you are. That entrepreneurial spirit, for me, is really probably more driven around growth. How do you continue to grow a company that’s conservative, but at the same time it’s controlled growth? You’re not just swinging 20, 30% one way or another, and then you’re dipping back down. I think probably through my years of experience, the biggest challenge is going to be, how do you build a sustainable growth model that builds a company in manufacturing? You’ve got to remember; when I started manufacturing, the percentage of manufacturing to service was 80 manufacturing, 20 service. Now that has switched to maybe 5% manufacturing, 95% service. That’s a huge dynamic change in manufacturing. Danny: – Yeah, absolutely, and it’s continuing to evolve, it seems like just certainly on a yearly basis. Certainly with Covid there’s been a tremendous amount of change with that. Still in the same vein of your journey with this, who has had—if you could talk to me about somebody who’s had a big impact on your career? I know there’s a lot, but is there somebody that comes to mind that really has helped to shape you, to help you, to where you are today? Mike: – Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it depends upon the lens that you look through. If you look at the entrepreneurial spirit, there’s no doubt it was my father. I grew up in that. From a management standpoint, I worked at a company for a number of years called Harold Beck and Sons. They made electronic control drives. There was a manager there; his name was John Miller, still alive. His management perspective was just rock-solid. He didn’t get too excited. He didn’t get too down. He was really focused on, how do we make everybody better? He was probably my manager when I was maybe 30; I’m 59 now. To this day, I still use phrases that he shared with me back then. From a business environment, I’d have to say he was a big impact. In my personal life there’s plenty of guys that go to my church that I’ve worked with that really come alongside me, help me with my walk. Those guys are rock-solid. They may not be CEOs or famous people, but their impacts are huge. Danny: – That’s awesome. That’s great. Alright, so let’s move to… pivoting here a little bit. What, on a daily basis, what keeps you super energized? What gets you, in the morning when you wake up, you say, “Okay, we’re tackling this, or “We’re doing that”? What is that thing that pushes you along? Mike: – I wish it was one thing. The challenge is, it’s multiple things. For CHL, I think one of the main things, and one of the real benefits that I really get out of working here is the people. Really strong technical craftsmanship-type people here, and so they really get me fired up because they’re the people you work with every day. I enjoy that; I enjoy interacting with them. I enjoy being a part of their day. The growth model, how do you scale and grow at a respectable rate? We just opened an office in Texas, so we’re leaning into that space. Those things fill that entrepreneurial spirit in you. Danny: – Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about industry challenges and things that have been going on. Obviously there’s a lot of things going on right now. There’s a lot of things that were going on because of Covid, stuff that was going on before Covid. What are those challenges that your customers are facing right now? Mike: – Yeah, so probably the biggest challenge that a lot of our customers are facing is the labor shortage. If you go back through 2020, 2021, through the height of some of the Covid period, a lot of our customers, they may be protein providers. They may have 500, 600 people in the plant. Just to keep their level of headcount up, it was a challenge. Moving forward, what’s that challenge going to be? It’s going to be continuing to find ways to automate, to help those workers out, to take some of the jobs that are really difficult on them, and how can we automate that? That’s a place where we can help them. As of just this last week or two, the price of fuel, that’s going to be a huge problem for all of us. We’re all going to deal with that challenge. That’s the people that work here and the people that work in those facilities. They’re going to pay more for gas. But beyond that, everything that we use that has petroleum, the price is going up. Plastics, stainless steel, anything that has that in its processing is going to affect everyone. Danny: – Yeah, unfortunately. Hopefully that’s going to be a—we’ll see. Hopefully that’s a short-term bump. I don’t know; we’ll see. There’s a lot of craziness going on right now, but let’s talk about how you’re solving some of these challenges for your customers. You mentioned a little bit earlier on, you have a partnership mentality when it comes to your customers. Talk to me about, what does that look like, and how are you solving those challenges for your customers? Mike: – Yeah, that’s actually a great question. The mindset of partnering with your customer is huge for us, and what does that mean? If you’re working with a customer that is going to engage in some level of automation, for that to be really successful, it has to be a close-knit communication, a trust both ways. It can’t be, hey, I’m just going to take the lowest bidder. You’re going to get the job, and do it. There’s got to be a long-term partnership that goes back and forth. Especially with automation, it depends upon what it is. It can be robotic automation. It can be hard machine automation that you’re going to design a specific machine that can do that. But educating everybody, especially the customer, on what does it mean to own this automation? And so when you look at that, that’s a long-term play. That’s not one order, and I’m out, and I’m going to go to the next. When you really work with someone as a partner, the trust factor is huge, but also the outcome at the end. In our industry for a number of years, a lot of customers were, they made a lot of decisions just on the return on investment. Well, you’re starting to see that change a little bit. You’re seeing some of that in years of return extending out. The real benefit

    32 min

  6. 06/25/2022

    RightHand Robotics: Vince Martinelli

    Hear from Vince Martinelli of RightHand Robotics about his career journey, from coffeeshop management to startups and warehouse robotics. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Hello and welcome to the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m joined by Vince Martinelli who is the head of product and marketing for RightHand Robotics. Vince, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Vince: – Yes, thank you Danny. Nice to talk to you. Danny: – Well I’m excited to jump into this conversation. I don’t think that we’ve had you on the show before. I know that we were talking about it a little bit before how I think we did a quick interview at MODEX in 2020, and I think you guys were part of that. That was fantastic. But first time on the Executive Series, so we’re excited. Vince: – Yes, thank you. Danny: – Before we jump into learning about you which is one of my favorite parts, if you could give me just a high-level on RightHand Robotics, who you guys are, what you guys do. Vince: – Yeah, so RightHand Robotics builds what we call a data-driven, intelligent picking platform for predictable order fulfillment. Now let me break that down just a little simpler, everyday language. Simply, it’s a configurable autonomous picking machine, and it can move individual products in a warehouse such as from an inventory tote. It might be coming from an ASRS-type system like AutoStore into an outbound order or a box. At that junction between the inventory storage system and picking the products flowing out of the building, the robot can move items. One thing that’s cool about that is an ecomm facility may have 50,000, 100,000, a million different products. Enabling a robot to pick and handle all those different things reliably is the secret sauce of what we do. Danny: – Wow, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic and super needed, obviously right now with ecomm growing exponentially, solving the big labor challenges, all kinds of stuff that I’m sure we’re going to get into. But before we do that, I want to—this is the part of the show where we get to learn more about you, and really this is one of my favorite parts. Tell me, how did you start your career journey? How did you get into this space? Were you always in robotics, in product or marketing? Tell me how things started. Vince: – Yeah, so coming out of college, my background’s in materials science, really semiconductor physics and so on. I got out of MIT, and I go into a semiconductor industry for different things. I learned a lot about designing of complex processor systems. Flash-forward another, I don’t know, key moment years later—well first off, I switched from R&D side of the world to business side and product and sales and some marketing and all these things when I joined Corning and got into the fiber optics business. Again, my interest there was more about the material science of the glass and how you make these things, and it was all cool. To cross over and work there, I kind of grudgingly took a job on the business side. Danny: – Oh, you went to the dark side. Vince: – Yeah, on the dark side, exactly. That’s the phrase. Found out I really liked it because there’s a part of communicating to people how that technology works and what you can do with it that I found I had some ability to take these complex things, talk to the PhD guys in the research lab, translate it into ideas and things that customers could gravitate to. There I worked on new products, so one thing that’s been consistent throughout my whole career is I’m always working on new products. While fiber optics was used for telecomm, we did things like work with a partner company to build a fiber optic gyroscope that was used in car navigation systems. So again, you never heard of that. Danny: – Wow, very cool. Vince: – 25, 30 years ago you could buy a Nissan car, one of the high-end models in Japan, and it had a fiber optic gyroscope as part of the navigation system with the fiber coming from Corning in the States here. That was really a cool application that was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time looking for new market segments where fiber optics would be useful. Eventually that led me into some optical networking systems work and so on. The next big step was, I joined a start-up. So early in my career I was with big companies. This seems like a very logical step coming out of school, nice, steady career path. I meet a guy—we’ll talk about an influence that I had. I meet a guy on a flight, and we start talking about his company. It turns out they were potentially a customer of ours, but they were a start-up. I eventually joined there, but I learned a lot about networking and systems there. Now I know about how to design processor things, and I know a lot about networks. Years later when I start getting into retail and warehouses and fulfillment centers, all these things kind of come together. These are just networks and processors of a different scale and type. I probably spent, now, the better part of 25, 30 years just working on networks and processors and designs. It’s really fun. Danny: – That’s awesome. That’s pretty exciting and very interesting career path and challenge, going from materials sciences and then going over to product design, development, marketing, sales, all of that. I think that was pretty interesting about using fiber optics for a gyroscope for navigation. That’s interesting. Vince: – Yeah, and one other part—again, just to layer it in here, somewhere on that path—actually one other side bar is, after the optical networking company—I was with the company, we had an IPO, things went great, and I thought, “Wow, I’m going to go chill for a while.” I traveled, got married, and I opened a coffee shop. You might not have had that in my bio, but for a while I had a coffee shop near the beach north of San Diego, and that was exciting. I learned some capacity planning and supply chain issues and things from that business. It was there, the other thing I learned is a coffee shop, at least ours, was 365 days a year, and I could be there from 12 hours to 20 hours a day. Somewhere along the way my wife encouraged me to consider a new career path other than the coffee shop, and I bumped into a friend around that time who let me know about this company called Kiva Systems. A mutual friend of ours had founded the company, and I said, “Wow, I remember. I played baseball with a guy,” so anyways I reach out to Mick over at Kiva and scrambled, and I got a job there, joined when they had one customer. It was about 35 people. No one had dreamed of putting robots in warehouses really at that time. It seemed kind of crazy, so I took a chance with them. That turned out pretty well over time. So that’s a major crossover point. I went from coffee shop to warehouse robots in one jump. Danny: – That’s pretty awesome. What happened to the coffee shop? Did you sell it, close it down? Vince: – I sold it, and then eventually—the one positive outcome of that is, now I can make a really good cappuccino, and I’ve got a fall back plan if all this start-up stuff ever fails. I can be employed somewhere. Danny: – Hey, there you go. I love it. So you’ve got definitely an entrepreneurial gene or something in there for that. Was that something that came from family? Was it your parents or family members, they have businesses or anything like that? Vince: – Now that you mention it, if I think back when I made the decision to leave Corning and go to a start-up, this company called Sycamore Networks—I have an older brother, and he was part of Cisco Systems in the early days. In fact, he turned them down. He had a chance to join before their IPO, thought it was too risky and crazy. But he joined soon after, so before Cisco Systems became the giant networking company everybody knows, he joined when they were about 300 people or so. Anyways, when I was looking at that decision myself, he said, “Well, there’s no guarantees. Big company or small, there’s really no guarantees,” and he could explain to me in the early years of Cisco, there were good days and bad days and strong quarters, and there was always the concern that it may all fail at some point. You never know. But anyways, he encouraged me to take the leap there, and I think that made a difference. Again, I’m not necessarily saying either of us were entrepreneurial from the get-go, but when faced with the opportunity, maybe we have a little higher risk tolerance than most people, I guess. Danny: – Well I think that’s for sure. That certainly is a very common theme, and you have to. You have to have that. I’m curious; how has that—I think that that experience probably, there’s a lot that that has helped to influence the second part of your career as you’re moving in that risk-taking or that ability to see new things or other things that others might not. Is that something that you see now? Vince: – Yes, in fact it’s dawned on me in the last few years that I’m sort of an angel investor. I invest with my time at these companies. This will be my fourth start-up. The first three have two successful exits and one that we didn’t quite get there. You’re really betting with your heart, your soul, and your blood, sweat, and tears. I try to be pretty careful about which things I join and participate in. I think, again, the Kiva experience—of course, we got bought by Amazon. I worked at Amazon for a while. We actually helped redesign their template fulfillment center with Kiva as the engine, the picking engine in the middle. That was a great experience, nothing but favorable things from my point of view and my time at Amazon. Then you look at RightHand, and you say, “Oh, wow, this is another level of, could the robots make the item?” That first move

    41 min

  7. 06/04/2022

    PFS: Mike Willoughby

    Mike Willoughby of PFS discusses his winding tech career, and how he’s seen the ecommerce market evolve since even before the internet. hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m joined by Mike Willoughby who is the CEO of PFS. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Mike: – Oh, it’s my pleasure Danny. Thanks for having me on. Danny: – Well I am excited to jump into today’s episode. So you’re coming in from Dallas, Texas, and for those who are unfamiliar with the weather going on right now, we were talking about beforehand, you’ve actually got snow going on there. Mike: – We do. It’s unusual. Texas is not known for having a lot of snow events, but this is our second this year. We were actually talking earlier about the one we had last year, so we’re definitely not getting a repeat of that, thank goodness. Nobody wants to spend a week with spotty power and the kind of freeze that we had a year ago. So just some nice, pleasant snowflakes going on outside my window. Danny: – That sounds nice, not like what you guys had last year. So glad it’s— Mike: – Definitely not. Danny: – And like we were talking about here, it’s crazy because it’s 70-something degrees over here. Whatever you got’s coming over here, so we’ll see what happens. – Have fun with that. Danny: – Thank you. Alright, for those who aren’t familiar with PFS, what do you guys do? Mike: – Well, so PFS provides order fulfillment services, to put it simply. We provide for our clients a premium order fulfillment solution, so if you think about brands that care a lot about their unboxing experience, what it really means to get, say, a Chanel health and beauty product or a high-end luxury jewelry item, you’re probably not expecting that to come in just a plain brown box with a bunch of air pillows around it. You’re probably expecting that it’s got some boutique-caliber experience. We do that for our clients. It’s a very non-Amazon kind of experience where you would equate that with, if you were going to a boutique and you were going to shop that boutique, you’re going to carry that package out. You’re probably spending a decent amount for the product itself, and the experience that you’re going to have when you actually receive that product yourself if you’re shopping in the store, you want to have as much of that as possible if you’re going to receive that package on your front door delivered by a courier. We provide a fulfillment experience across both the way that we manage the order as it comes into our systems, the way that we process payments, ultimately the way that we take the product out of our fulfillment centers, package it appropriately for each brand that we support, and then tender it to a carrier to get it to your doorstep and then provide the customer service that goes along with that, if you have a question about your product. And we want to do that in a way that reflects the brand, that we are not in the way of that at all. You’re never going to see the words PFS on any kind of packaging, on an invoice, your interaction with a customer service agent. Our intention is to be on-brand and reflect the brand that we’ve been entrusted to support. So that’s what we do. Danny: – Excellent, very cool. So yeah, very different than a traditional Amazon experience where the experience is the big piece of value, right? Mike: – Right. Well, you know with Amazon it’s all about efficiency, and they do an amazing job of creating an efficient transaction. We want to be efficient, but at the same time we want to create that exceptional experience. It’s the mission of the company to provide exceptional experiences for our clients and their customers. Danny: – Very cool. Well, I’m excited to get into that a little bit more because this sounds a little bit more unique than some of the other companies that we’ve been talking to where it’s all the same sort of thing. Obviously you’ve got different packaging sizes and whatnot, but it sounds like this is very much different. So we’ll get into that here in a second. But now is the section, the time where we get to know more about you. We want to learn more about Mike, so Mike, tell me. How did you get into this space? Take me back. Did you go to college for this? Did you, as a kid, say, “This is what I want to do”? What was that? Mike: – Yeah, I think probably like a lot of entrepreneurs, like a lot of business leaders, my journey is a bit of a winding journey, and I certainly didn’t—was sitting in my first grade class think, supply chain, logistics, transportation, those things sound cool. I want to go do that. In fact, it wasn’t until I was actually in college, my sophomore year, that I stumbled on technology as something that I really loved and that I had an aptitude for. One of the things that I think we’ll probably talk about is influencers. Who influenced you in your life? I think about a professor who recognized something in me and said, “You’ve got a real knack for technology.” And we’re talking about early 80s when I was at university, so technology wasn’t the kind of immersive, ubiquitous sort of experience that we all have today. That’s what got me started on the current journey that I’m on is an aptitude for technology and for solving problems using technology. I went and got my degree in information systems. I started my career with a consulting business that I started while I was in school. I really started that business out of necessity because I was in love with my girlfriend at the time and wanted to get married while I was still in school, and the only way that was going to happen is if we could earn a living while we were actually trying to finish out our degrees. I decided I better start a business and make some money. I did that by doing some work around the oil field, helping oil and gas businesses that were in the area of Texas where I went to school, and just put that sort of expertise to work and started to help people solve technical problems doing some programming, doing systems administration, that sort of thing. That small business grew into my first business that was all around custom programming consulting, that sort of thing. I sold that business to my partners in 1994 and started a software company that was oriented around commerce. We didn’t call it ecommerce at the time. In fact, the software that we actually created was a CD-ROM based application where you put a catalog on a CD and shipped it out, and along with that your pricing tables and everything went out for the specific customer. It was an early version of ecommerce, but it wasn’t HTML and browsers. It was based on CD and an application that we shipped. But a couple years after we started that company, it became obvious that the internet was going to take over providing content. Instead of getting a CD-ROM, you could actually just go to a browser and pull up the content. So we converted our application into an ecommerce application, and really the timing was perfect because it was the dot com boom at the end of the 90s. And so one of my biggest customers was a company called Priority Fulfillment Services, we now refer to as PFS. They were using my software to help their clients solve ecommerce problems in the late 90s, and we were so successful that the CEO of the company at the time came to me and offered to buy my company out in order to have access, exclusive access to the software that we were providing. And in 1999 it seemed like the perfect time to join a company whose focus was on ecommerce. That’s what got me into logistics is the application of technology to this ecommerce problem. I guess the rest is history as far as PFS is concerned. The last 22 years have been an amazing journey as we participated in dot com boom and a lot of bleeding edge kind of things to what does it look like to have a mature model and to do ecommerce 22 years later when it is rapidly becoming the way that people want to interact with the brand? Danny: – I think that’s a fascinating story. A couple of questions that I wanted to circle up on, I think it’s very interesting about the, particularly around the dot com, the 99 boom. But there was also not just the boom; there was also the bust. We had a lot of failed dot com companies that came in. And I am curious; did PFS, when did they start? Mike: – Priority Fulfillment Services was actually started by a wholesale distributor called Daisytek International in 1994. Danny: – Okay, alright. Mike: – And the purpose was to provide fulfillment services to the kind of clients that Daisytek had which are IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, basically high-tech products and consumables. And so we provided fulfillment services, customer care, and order management back in the mid-90s. As the company grew, as the subsidiary grew, we started to have brands approach us that had an idea to sell online but had no clue how to actually deliver a product that was sold online. So they were asking us to solve those problems around actually fulfilling orders that they were taking through their websites. And so we started to have clients that have product categories that were way different than anything Daisytek had. We had investment bankers that were working with Daisytek who came to the parent company and said, “We think this subsidiary that’s doing $30 million a year is probably worth four or five times as much as the parent company,” which everybody thought was ridiculous. How is that even possible? But they were right. We did a spin-off of PFS in 1999. I joined shortly before the IPO, and they were right. This $30 million fulfillment services company that was not profitable had a billion-dollar market cap

    48 min

  8. 05/21/2022

    TGW Logistics: Chad Zollman

    Chad Zollman of TGW Logistics shares major milestones of his career, and the challenge of making business decisions as markets regularly shift.   hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});   Danny: – Well hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Chad Zollman who is the chief sales officer at TGW Logistics. Chad, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. Chad: – Thank you, appreciate it. Danny: – I am excited to get into our conversation. So we were just talking before; you are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it’s very warm up there right now. Chad: – Yes, absolutely. It’s swimsuit weather for sure. Danny: – Excellent. Before we get into the first part which I love is getting into learning more about you personally, but for those who aren’t familiar with TGW, can you give me a little high-level of who you guys are and what you do? Chad: – Sure, so TGW is a global systems integrator for our customers. We focus on our core industries which would be fashion and apparel, grocery, and industrial and consumer goods. We actually design, implement, maintain highly automated fulfillment centers inside for various customers in various regions. And that’s not only in North America; like I said, we’re global. So what’s unique from a TGW standpoint, I think is we have manufacturing that sits in Austria and Germany, so we have, on top of your traditional conveyor, your automated storage and retrieval systems that we manufacture, we also have a robotics company as well. Palletizing, depalletizing, automated picking solutions, et cetera, all within our realm and sphere that we offer to our customers. Danny: – Excellent, well it sounds like quite a nice footprint. So the manufacturing and the integration side, you bring engineered solutions, bringing all that together. Chad: – That’s right. Danny: – Excellent. We’ll get more into that because I think there’s a little bit of interesting stuff going on with supply chain right now, and as we get into fulfillment and ecomm and retail and all these things. I’m suspecting you’ve been affected by this a little bit. I’m being a little facetious, obviously. Chad: – Right. Danny: – Let’s jump into you a little bit here. How did you start your journey? How did you get into this space? Chad: – Clearly through my college courses because I have an economics degree, but actually I came in through a family friend. He got me into the automotive supply chain area, so it was in the 3PL industry. I actually started in one of the initial lead logistics operations for General Motors in working for Ryder. That was more transportation-based, so really optimized transportation design and execution. Then that particular solution morphed into just-in-time delivery, and that’s where the warehousing portion came in. Really started working on, from a design perspective, warehouse layouts and effective solutions for just-in-time delivery, and then made my way through the 3PL industry. I worked for another organization, CEVA, for about 19 years or almost 20 years in various capacities, but eventually that led me to where I am today with TGW because the more the supply chain industry evolved, while the 3PLs were providing excellent solutions and there’s a lot of benefit to operations excellence and lean practices, we had more and more customers asking for ways to reduce their headcount, so really looking into automation. And the more my team kept working on solutions for these large customers, the more we saw the need, the want, the desire to understand more about automation. That really led to the interest, from my standpoint, into the automation. TGW reached out to me, so it was perfect timing; worked out really well. Danny: – Excellent. When did you start at TGW? Chad: – Four years ago. Danny: – Okay. Alright, excellent, so 2018. I think I can do math. It’s one of the things I forgot with the pandemic. Alright, so I’m curious. You said economics degree, and then now you found yourself going into supply chain and operations excellence and all. You said you came in through a friend. I’m just curious; initially what did that look like for you? What specifically were you doing in that job, and then at what point were you like, hey, I kind of like this? Chad: – I started outside of an internship. I actually started managing in a warehouse, first shift operation for container sortation, so returnable containers for the automotive assembly plants. After about a year of that, I worked my way into the design team, so that was more transportation optimization, so essentially taking all the suppliers that you normally work with and building out your daily milk runs, your weekly milk runs, and then working through our team who at the time actually provided the transportation services as well as third parties who did truckload provision, longer hauls, and then the assembly plants themselves to coordinate the activities from a parts standpoint, inventory standpoint, et cetera. So it really started, honestly, purely on the transportation side. And that evolved from a single plant to multiple plants and looking at synergies, et cetera. It was an interesting start, and the hook for me was just the logic. It just made a lot of sense, the concepts that the automotive industry was trying to apply, and really they were the frontrunners, I think, in the supply chain and really that lead logistics provision work. Being able to see its impact on the plants themselves to transportation budget, quite frankly, and then as it worked its way into more of the just-in-time delivery into warehousing solutions, you could just really see the benefit. You could really understand it. It just made a lot of sense, and I always enjoyed it. Honestly when I moved away from Ryder into CEVA, it was more on the sales side initially and design, but I got to see more and more customers. Suddenly you see similar problems across customers, across industries, and every problem was new, but at the same time you had the confidence to really work with a customer to solve it, and I think that was the hook. You felt that you brought value to the table, and you felt like there was a high amount of demand for what you were providing. I really enjoyed that aspect. Danny: – That’s awesome, yeah. That’s an interesting transition over from more operationally, engineering, over to sales. What did that look like in terms of being approached; hey, we think this would be a good opportunity for you to sell this? Well wait; I don’t know. What was that for you? Chad: – My initial transition from Ryder to, at the time it was TNT Logistics but eventually made its way over to CEVA that’s known today was just on the design side. Then a few years in after leading their design team, I was asked to commit to the dark side and move into sales. Danny: – You said it, not me. Chad: – Honestly, it’s an easy transition when you talk about the detail and the complexity of the designs because it is primarily engineering-driven and solution-driven. As a participant in that sales process, it was just natural, really, moving from an engineering leadership standpoint over into a sales position. It was an easy transition. I’m a competitor at heart. I love it, so getting into the sales side was fantastic for me. It was perfect and aligned with exactly where I wanted to be at the time, which is great. Danny: – No, that’s awesome. I love it. You mentioned, it’s such a technical sale. It’s very consultative, and it makes sense. You mentioned before a little bit really bringing value to customers. I think that’s where, obviously people talk about the dark side, sales, whatever. I don’t want to be the sales guy that’s always pushing this or that or whatever. But the reality of it is, when you really do have a solution that fits and you do have a customer that you know that you can really help solve their challenge, that is fantastic. Where it gets difficult is when that customer doesn’t know they have that problem that needs to be solved. That can be a little challenging. Chad: – Absolutely, absolutely. It sounds like you’ve been in sales. Danny: – Never, I’ve never done sales, ever. I do love sales. I think it’s a lot of fun, for those exact reasons you brought up. When you can solve a real, tangible problem for a customer or a client, that gets me excited when they say, wow, this is awesome. Look at this; this is great. Chad: – It does, and realistically in our industry right now these are large numbers. We’re not talking small investments. We’re talking material investments that in some instances are really career-changing for individuals making those decisions, and they don’t take them lightly. From our standpoint when you talk about sales cycles, nine months a year, in some cases well beyond that, both parties are making a big commitment to each other. I think you said it; it’s a mutual victory at that point. When you see the value, and the customer sees the value, and you’re really able to reach an agreement at the end of the day, everyone’s happy about it. You’re not really selling at that point. You want to be an advocate for change, and that’s really what the team is really happy about. What I enjoy is really working through just, I’m selling something to someone. It’s a solution that’ll make their business better, that’ll improve overall their company’s health, improve their personal careers as well. I think it’s fantastic. Danny: – Absolutely, no, I think it’s exciting. I love it. Over your career, tell me about somebody who’s had a big impact. I know there’s probably a lot. When I ask, most people are like, oh, there’s so many. Tell me about one that has had a big impact and why. Chad: – Sure, and we talked

    33 min
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    IndustrialSage
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    2017 - 2022
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