30 min
Lanco Integrated: Bob Kuniega IndustrialSage
-
- Marketing
Bob Kuniega of Lanco shares how the industry's lean practices wax and wane, and how manufacturers need to improve their recruiting methods.
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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,
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,
30 min