Manufacturing Hub

Hosted by Vlad Romanov & Dave Griffith

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Aug 2026

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We bring you manufacturing news, insights, discuss opportunities, and cutting edge technologies. Our goal is to inform, educate, and inspire leaders and workers in manufacturing, automation, and related fields.

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August 20, 2026Episode 2571 hr 15 min

Ep. 270 - How to Start a Systems Integrator: Scope, Hiring, and the Bottleneck That Is You

Most people who start a systems integrator expect to keep doing the engineering. Dylan DuFresne explains why that stops being true inside two years. Ask ten people what a systems integrator is and you get ten answers, so Dylan DuFresne starts from first principles: a third party that connects systems which used to sit isolated. The market then splits in two. One is the generalist who has seen a hundred platforms across a thousand facilities and knows how they behave together. The other is the specialist who lives inside one or two stacks. If you know what you are building, hire the specialist. If you are still deciding, the generalist saves you money. Abelara exists because of a pattern Dylan hit repeatedly during more than a decade inside other integrators. By the time a client calls, the platform is chosen, the budget is set, and the outcome is locked in, even when that platform cannot deliver it. His answer was to move upstream into architecture, change management, and business process work with VPs and C suite sponsors. His first question is always why. Why this site, why this machine, why this platform, and what outcome is attached to it. With no clear scope of work, Abelara declines to bid or sells the consulting engagement that produces one. When scope is fuzzy but workable he prices it all in and writes explicit exclusions and assumptions up front. His test before a proposal is one question: what does done look like. A striking number of buyers cannot answer it. He also corrects an instinct: a $200 sensor may beat a $30,000 camera technically and still be the wrong call, because the expensive option is a known quantity and carries less risk. Scaling gets treated as line balancing applied to a company. Find the bottleneck, find the gap in skills or availability, and staff it. Each hire moves the constraint somewhere new, and the hardest part is emotional: letting go of work you enjoy and are good at. On AI, Dylan predicts integration goes back to being integration. A generation of integrators drifted into custom coding, with companies of 400 and 500 people building MES and SCADA stacks from scratch, and he expects code generation to strip that work away. Writing a tool that pulls PLC data to the cloud is easy. Running it reliably and securely 24/7 for a year is not. About Dylan DuFresne Dylan DuFresne is co founder and lead architect at Abelara, a manufacturing transformation firm that works with plants as coach, consultant, and integrator. He spent more than a decade inside systems integrators covering robotics, PLCs, SCADA, HMI, recipe management, and ERP integration before starting Abelara with co founder Glenn. He also wrote The Phantom Pallet, a manufacturing fable about data, trust, and transformation. https://abelara.com Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 4:30 What a systems integrator actually is 9:00 Why Dylan and Glenn started Abelara 14:00 Following the customer or picking platforms first 20:00 Consulting versus integration work 25:00 Why integrators get brought in too late 32:00 The $30,000 camera and business trade offs 36:30 Scope of work and what does done look like 43:20 Handing projects to the team and subcontractors 52:10 First hires, bottlenecks, and forecasting 57:40 AI and the future of systems integration 1:05:40 Predictions, career advice, and books References The Phantom Pallet by Dylan DuFresne: https://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Pallet-Manufacturing-Fable-Transformation-ebook/dp/B0GGYCK5PR Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone: https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/041346430X About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: System Integrators: https://www.joltek.com/blog/system-integrators Consulting, Upskilling, and Systems Integration: https://www.joltek.com/blog/humble-beginnings-consulting-upskilling-systems-integration Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

August 13, 2026Episode 2561 hr 13 min

Ep. 269 - Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace: Digital Transformation SMB Manufacturers Can Afford

Siemens says a small manufacturer can start production optimization for $2,000 a year. Martin Valkysers and Flemming Kongsberg explain what that buys you. Most digital transformation advice assumes a budget and an engineering bench most plants do not have. Flemming Kongsberg, who runs the SMB focus inside the Siemens CTO organization, discards the usual revenue and headcount definitions: an SMB is any manufacturer without the skills to absorb a complex digital change, and that includes some very large companies. He describes one customer running 900 devices across 17 locations where 90 percent of the machines are 30 years or older with zero connectivity. Siemens research also found 40 percent of SMB customers have no IT department. Martin Valkysers frames Siemens Xcelerator as the open digital business platform tying hardware, software, data, and services together, with more than 600 partners today. The SMB starter package is where that becomes concrete. Instead of asking a plant with no IT staff to assemble something from hundreds of apps, Siemens curated roughly 10 to 12 into one bundle covering device connectivity, Performance Insight dashboards for OEE and quality, and a slice of Mendix. A partner installed it in a lab in 24 minutes on an ordinary Windows machine, against the roughly 60 hours a traditional Industrial Edge deployment takes. It is $2,000 per year for three machines with the first three months free, and PROFINET, Ethernet/IP, and the standard protocols are supported, so competitor PLCs connect too. The most useful argument here has nothing to do with buying anything. Flemming makes the case that reaching for AI before you own your data is a losing move, because a model built on information everyone else can reach produces no strategic advantage. You also do not need AI to build a Pareto chart of where your quality losses sit. Martin adds the discipline that gets skipped most: be clear about the problem before you pick the tool. About the Guests Martin Valkysers is Head of US Market Launch and Growth for Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens' open digital business platform spanning industrial, building, grid, and manufacturing sectors. He has been with Siemens roughly 12 years, previously leading a US operations consulting team focused on lean manufacturing. Flemming Kongsberg leads Global Technology Partners at Siemens Digital Industries Software and runs the company's SMB focus in the US. Before Siemens he spent nearly eight years at Amazon Web Services building partner infrastructure and strategic ISV alliances. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Martin Valkysers on his path to Xcelerator 4:20 Flemming Kongsberg from AWS to Siemens SMB 7:10 Four challenges facing manufacturers 13:40 Why data comes before AI 18:00 What Siemens Xcelerator actually is 22:30 Partner ecosystem: build, service, sell 31:40 Inside the SMB starter package 35:50 What the package costs 38:20 A 24 minute install and non Siemens PLCs 45:50 Redefining what counts as an SMB 53:50 The future of industrial marketplaces References Getting Started with Production Optimization: https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/industrial-edge/production-optimization-get-started/ Operational Efficiency Pack for Small Manufacturers: https://news.siemens.com/en-us/siemens-small-manufacturers-operational-efficiency-pack/ This episode is sponsored by Siemens is a global technology company operating across industrial automation, digital software, smart infrastructure, and mobility. Siemens Xcelerator is its open digital business platform and marketplace. https://www.siemens.com About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/digital-transformation-in-manufacturing Edge Computing and the AI Value of Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

August 6, 2026Episode 2551 hr 8 min

Ep. 268 - David Nichols of Loupe on Claude Code, AI Retrofits, and the End of the SI Moat

David Nichols of Loupe explains what actually changed in automation engineering this year, and why control retrofits just got far cheaper. Nearly twenty years into building high performance controls, David Nichols is blunt about what AI did to his business: what used to take six weeks now takes two, and his team ships roughly five times more software per sprint. An engineer dropped the raw documentation from a failing robotic cell into a folder, asked Claude for a state diagram, and got a reverse engineered flow chart in thirty minutes that beat anything the customer had. The error recovery gap causing the downtime was visible right there in the chart. A SASE member handed a model a hundred page ethernet specification and got working code for every function, plus tests, on the first try. That was a six week project. It took a day. The implication is the sharpest part of the conversation. Software rewrites used to be the dumbest thing an engineer could propose, because software was expensive and full of unknowns. That logic has inverted. If a rewrite takes a week and produces better documentation, better tests, and better coverage, then brownfield modernization stops being a risk calculation. His words: open season on old controllers. For an industry sitting on Windows 7 machines and undocumented cells one PC failure away from stopping a line, that is a different economic picture entirely. Vlad walks David through the full project lifecycle, and the answers stay practical. Discovery becomes a context gathering exercise where interview transcripts and a drawer full of legacy PDFs turn into control diagrams and proposals in days. Development becomes worth treating as a real software engineering project, because source control, digital twins, and automated testing are exactly what these models are fluent in. David is equally direct about platforms: the bottleneck in automation was never technical, it is cultural. His analogy is a shop that insists on carburetors because that is what the technicians know. The close tackles the chat's harder questions, including what is left of a software moat once building software is trivial. His book pick is Richard Rhodes and The Making of the Atomic Bomb. About David Nichols David Nichols is co-founder of Loupe, a West Coast automation engineering and systems integration company he started in 2007. Loupe does high performance controls work across aerospace, semiconductors, and metal cutting, built largely on the B&R Industrial Automation platform. He also founded SASE, the Society of Automation Software Engineers, a free community of roughly two thousand engineers. This is his fourth appearance on Manufacturing Hub, following episodes 29, 53, and 127. https://loupe.team Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:45 Loupe, 20 years of controls, and the SASE community 8:40 Carburetors in industrial automation: culture, not technology 11:20 The ChatGPT moment versus the Claude Code moment 20:20 Inside an integrator: six week sprints become two 21:30 Reverse engineering a robotic cell in 30 minutes 26:10 A 100 page ethernet spec turned into working code in a day 27:50 Does this change who gets to be a builder 40:40 AI across the project lifecycle from discovery to handoff 49:00 How to actually get started, and what to prompt 53:20 If software is no longer a moat, what is 57:50 Predict the future, career advice, and the book pick References SASE: https://sase.space Claude: https://claude.ai Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com Acquired Podcast: https://www.acquired.fm About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Control System Modernization Strategy: https://www.joltek.com/blog/control-system-modernization-strategy Edge Computing and AI Value from Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

July 30, 2026Episode 2541 hr 2 min

Ep. 267 - Ujjwal Kumar of Siemens on Deglobalization, Reshoring, and Adaptive Manufacturing

Deglobalization is rewriting where factories get built, and Ujjwal Kumar of Siemens explains what has to change on the plant floor before reshoring actually works. For thirty years the manufacturing playbook was labor arbitrage. Move high volume, low mix production to wherever disciplined labor was cheapest, then ship it back. Ujjwal Kumar, President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas, argues that model has quietly stopped making sense. Demand has fragmented into high mix, lower volume, regionally specific production, and the factories in Suzhou running on robots and autonomous systems no longer carry a cost advantage over the same operation in Chicago. When the labor content collapses, the business case for distance collapses with it. That single shift explains more about the current reshoring wave than any tariff headline. The trigger was not one event. Supply chain disruption after COVID proved that geographic proximity to supply was a profitability advantage, not a nice to have. Then came the political shock: vaccine access turned out to be governed by country of citizenship rather than global distribution, and leaders across every region started sorting industries into a folder marked critical. That folder now holds semiconductors, steel, power generation, defense, space, and life sciences. Ujjwal walks through where the money is actually landing right now, including AI data centers in remote locations that demand autonomous and remote operations, power generation across fossil, renewable, nuclear, and hydro, and a level of greenfield life sciences investment in the United States he has not seen in decades. The life sciences point is the sharpest one in the episode. Drug manufacturing left as mass produced batch operations and is returning as cell and gene therapy, personalized medicine, and precision biologics, which means lot sizes of one and R&D sitting physically next to production. The design it here, build it there model taught in business schools simply does not survive that. About Ujjwal Kumar Ujjwal Kumar is President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from the Michigan Ross School of Business, he began his career at General Motors in Detroit and went on to spend ten years at GE and seven years at Honeywell Process Solutions before leading Teradyne Robotics, one of the largest physical AI based robotics platforms. He oversees the Siemens automation portfolio spanning discrete, process, and intralogistics automation, and he continues to mentor MBA students at Michigan Ross. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:00 Career path from General Motors to Siemens 6:10 What deglobalization means for manufacturing 9:00 COVID, vaccine quotas, and the reshoring trigger 13:05 Labor arbitrage versus automation arbitrage 15:50 Attracting the next generation of factory workers 19:35 Why semiconductor reshoring will take years 23:00 Tribal knowledge and the documentation problem 26:00 Where the investment is going right now 32:30 Adaptive manufacturing and the AI hype question 35:30 Platforms, ecosystems, and Siemens Xcelerator 43:20 Careers, AI, and advice for engineers References Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace: https://xcelerator.siemens.com/global/en.html This episode is sponsored by Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare, and it supplies industrial automation hardware and industrial software to manufacturers worldwide. Its Digital Industries business covers discrete automation, process automation, intralogistics, and the Siemens Xcelerator platform. https://www.siemens.com About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Understanding Supply Chains: https://www.joltek.com/blog/understanding-supply-chains Manufacturing Challenges with New Machinery and Plants: https://www.joltek.com/blog/manufacturing-challenges-new-machinery-plant Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

July 18, 2026Episode 2531 hr 27 min

Ep. 266 - Automate 2026 Reality Check: AI, Virtual PLCs, Ignition, and Plant Modernization

After several weeks away from the podcast, Dave Griffith and Vladimir Romanov return to Manufacturing Hub to unpack their experiences at Automate 2026 and discuss what the event revealed about the current state of industrial automation. Automate showcased an enormous range of robotics, industrial AI, machine vision, software, cloud connectivity, and emerging automation technology. However, some of the most revealing conversations were not about futuristic factories. They were about PLC 5 migrations, aging SLC systems, obsolete PanelView terminals, industrial networks, basic data collection, and how platforms such as Ignition actually connect to plant floor equipment. Vlad shares what he learned from demonstrating a complete packaging line environment built around a CompactLogix PLC, an industrial computer, Ignition, and production performance data. The demonstration was designed to show how manufacturers can use OEE, downtime information, and machine states to identify production bottlenecks and determine where capital investment could deliver the greatest return. Instead, many attendees wanted to understand the underlying architecture, where Ignition runs, how it connects to PLCs, what protocols are required, and whether it can replace traditional HMI and SCADA platforms. Dave discusses his experience inside the Ignition ecosystem booth, the FactoryStack cloud demonstration, the advantages of MQTT in a difficult trade show network environment, and his Automate panel on software defined automation and the factory of the future. He also introduces Elephant, an industrial log analysis and contextualization tool being developed to help users identify meaningful patterns across Ignition gateways, reduce system noise, compare facilities, and diagnose intermittent problems. The conversation then moves across the industrial automation stack. Dave and Vlad examine virtual PLCs from Siemens, Phoenix Contact, and other vendors, including where software based control may provide value and where it may add unnecessary organizational complexity. They discuss AI generated PLC code, the limitations of translating functional specifications into reliable control applications, and why tools that produce 80 or 90 percent of an automation solution still require experienced engineers to validate the final result. They also explore AI assisted HMI and SCADA development, Ignition 8.3, MCP servers, high performance HMI design, and the risks of providing AI agents with uncontrolled access to production systems. At the MES layer, they question whether manufacturers should build custom applications through vibe coding or focus instead on creating clean, contextualized, well governed data that can support many future applications. The central conclusion is that AI tools, virtual controllers, cloud platforms, and dynamically generated applications will continue to improve. However, manufacturers still need reliable controls, secure networks, maintainable architectures, experienced people, and ownership of their operational data. The companies that establish those foundations today will have the greatest freedom to adopt whatever technologies emerge next. Dave and Vlad also preview the 2026 Ignition Community Conference in Sacramento, upcoming Manufacturing Hub conversations, new demonstrations, and several projects the community will see throughout the remainder of the year. Join us for a detailed and candid discussion about Automate 2026, Ignition, industrial AI, virtual PLCs, HMI and SCADA development, MES, MQTT, data architecture, and what manufacturers should prioritize next.

June 18, 2026Episode 25235 min

Ep. 265 - Automate 2026 Survival Guide: Booths, Networking, and a Production Line Demo #scada #mes

Automate 2026 lands in Chicago next week, and Dave and Vlad break down how to work the show floor, where to network, and what to expect from their live booth demos. Automate is the largest automation trade show in North America, and a four day event rewards preparation. Dave and Vlad share tactics refined over five years of attending together. The floor opens at 10:00 AM on Monday, and registration lines have swung from a five minute wait to nearly two hours, so arriving early matters. Monday morning and Thursday are the quietest days to reach specific vendors, while Tuesday and Wednesday draw the heaviest crowds. The hosts also favor the official show app over a paper map for finding booths and session rooms across multiple halls. The real value of a show like Automate often lives in the networking. Dave points to the A3 networking event on Monday, a ticket of roughly 45 dollars, and the Manufacturing Champions happy hour on Tuesday organized by Chris Luckey and Jake Hall. Vlad's advice is structural: build a checklist before you arrive. He researches each company, finds the booth number, and tracks every connection in a spreadsheet so the week becomes a series of deliberate meetings instead of aimless wandering. For anyone with ten or more booths on their list, setting up meetings in advance is the highest leverage move you can make. The centerpiece of the conversation is the live demo Vlad built for the Teguar booth. It pairs a Rockwell CompactLogix PLC with an Ignition gateway running on a Teguar industrial PC, and it simulates a food and beverage packaging line with five assets: filler, capper, labeler, case packer, and palletizer. The line overview screen shows real machine states including faulted, starved, backed up, and running, and the whole point is to make the bottleneck visible. When the case packer needs six bottles from the labeler but the labeler cannot keep pace, you watch the downstream asset flip between starved and running in real time. It is a practical illustration of why line balancing and constraint analysis drive real ROI on a production floor. Under the hood the stack is modern. The Teguar IPC runs Ubuntu with Portainer managing containers for Ignition 8.3, Ignition 8.1, and a MariaDB database for alarm history. Ignition 8.3 ships new drivers for Rockwell, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and Omron controllers along with OPC and MQTT, and each asset carries ten randomized faults written in both Ignition and PLC logic. Vlad built it for everyone from engineers to the decision makers running SCADA and MES projects. Dave and Vlad will also shoot content at the Siemens booth on Tuesday and the Horner Automation booth on Wednesday, and Dave is moderating a Wednesday session on software defined automation and the factory of the future. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome and Automate 2026 preview 1:50 First timer tips and arriving early for registration 3:10 Networking events worth attending: A3 and Manufacturing Champions 4:40 Building a trade show checklist to maximize your time 7:00 Manufacturing Hub at the Siemens and Horner booths 9:50 Vlad's live production line demo at the Teguar booth 15:40 The line overview screen and five packaging assets 17:30 Fault handling and finding the bottleneck 20:10 Inside the stack: Ubuntu, Portainer, Ignition, MariaDB 23:50 Random fault simulation and PLC driver options 27:00 Who should come see the demo 29:40 Vendors Vlad is tracking and closing thoughts References Automate 2026: https://www.automate.org Ignition by Inductive Automation: https://inductiveautomation.com Horner Automation: https://hornerautomation.com About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Connecting an Allen Bradley PLC to Ignition: https://www.joltek.com/blog/connecting-allen-bradley-plc-ignition Manufacturing Line Speed Optimization: https://www.joltek.com/case-study/manufacturing-line-speed-optimization Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

June 11, 2026Episode 2511 hr 4 min

Ep. 264 - Why AI Loves Automation: Siemens on Digital Twins, Guardrails, and Orchestration

AI can finally write back to the plant floor, but only if you can trust it. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how orchestration makes that safe. Industrial AI has reached a turning point. Manufacturers can already collect data, contextualize it, and surface insights, but the hardest step has always been turning insight into action on real control equipment. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how an orchestration layer finally closes that loop. Annemarie frames the tension clearly. Automation depends on determinism, while large language models are probabilistic by design, so the goal is to bring that discipline into AI and validate any suggestion before it changes a set point. Most executive conversations start with return on investment, and two forces are making the case easier to prove. The workforce shortage has stretched the expected payback window from 18 months toward 36 months, and when a line cannot run for lack of people every idle minute costs thousands of dollars. The other driver is overall equipment effectiveness, since most plants run near 70 percent OEE and even a fraction of a percent of gain can justify a project. Energy is a standout case too. A BorgWarner sustainability effort used a digital twin to flatten demand peaks and reportedly paid for itself in under six months, even as data center growth pushes electricity demand higher through 2040. On trust and safety, Annemarie borrows a principle from industrial safety. Just as fail safe IO modules rely on two channel evaluation, every AI suggestion is validated against a state machine, a workflow, or a physics based digital twin before the orchestration layer passes it to a controller. With virtual commissioning and soft PLCs a change can be tested virtually, approved by a human in the loop, and only then written to control, an approach PepsiCo and NVIDIA echoed at CES when they called the digital twin a must have. Making AI real, the pair argue, comes down to discipline, clear scope, acceptance criteria, and focused 90 day challenges, plus the change management and user experience that drive adoption. Their favorite quick win is preventive maintenance driven by machine data, which both BorgWarner and Maersk tied to millions in savings. About Chris Stevens Chris Stevens is President of US Automation at Siemens, where he leads a roughly one billion dollar business spanning software, services, and hardware. He brings more than 25 years across Siemens Digital Industries, starting in the field selling assembly and test equipment, moving into the software and digital twin world, and returning to automation to bring the hardware and software sides of the business together. About Annemarie Breu Annemarie Breu is a senior technology leader at Siemens Digital Industries focused on automation software deployment and customer technology partnerships in the US. She began at Siemens about a decade ago as a systems engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with consumer electronics manufacturers on virtual commissioning and digital twins. Her work today centers on bringing the determinism and reliability of automation into industrial AI. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and Automate 2026 preview 2:50 Meet Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu 9:30 The first AI question is always ROI 14:00 Workforce gaps and OEE drive the business case 19:30 Energy management and the data center demand surge 23:20 Data, sensors, and contextualization requirements 28:00 Guardrails, hallucinations, and two channel validation 32:40 The digital twin and the human in the loop 37:40 How partners and integrators move up the stack 45:30 What it takes to make AI real on the floor 55:50 Preventive maintenance as a quick win 59:40 Predictions, career advice, and book picks About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Edge Computing and the Value of AI in Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data IT and OT Architecture Integration: https://www.joltek.com/services/service-details-it-ot-architecture-integration Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

June 4, 2026Episode 2501 hr 3 min

Ep. 263 - Why Industrial Protocols Win on Business Not Technical Merit, with Horner Automation

Industrial network protocols decide whether a machine talks or stays silent. Chuck from Horner Automation breaks down how they win, fade, and converge. Chuck has spent 36 years at Horner Automation and lived through what the industry once called the fieldbus wars. Before Horner became known for its all in one controllers, it spent a decade building specialty IO modules for GE Fanuc during the era of DeviceNet, SDS, InterBus S, PROFIBUS, and CANopen. His core argument is that most of those early protocols were technically fine. The ones that became standards won on the commercial weight of the companies backing them, not on superior specifications, with EtherCAT a rare exception that succeeded largely on technical merit. Trust is the recurring theme. Industry adopts slowly, and for years Ethernet was dismissed as too unreliable and not deterministic enough for control until Ethernet/IP, PROFINET, and Modbus TCP proved themselves. Today the market has settled around a big four set of protocols, and Chuck does not expect it to narrow further. For high speed motion he points to EtherCAT and PROFINET IRT as the implementations he most respects, since both step away from standard Ethernet at the device level to reach submillisecond timing. The episode is also a reality check on building your own hardware. Chuck and Dave describe how custom development routinely costs teams hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and how the real trap is obsolescence and maintenance rather than the first build. On the product side, the standout is FPD-Link, a serialization technology borrowed from automotive that carries video, touch, and power over one coaxial cable. Working with Safe Fleet, a maker of ambulances and fire trucks, Horner now mounts rugged displays up to seven meters from the PLC while still programming everything as one device. Looking ahead, Chuck argues that every PLC should now be treated as a data device first, because digitizing the process is the prerequisite for doing anything useful with AI. He also flags cybersecurity as the next burden for application engineers, with new mandates forcing both manufacturers and integrators to implement protections that were once optional. At Automate, Horner is showing HMI Connect and a 300 dollar CPU 151 that packs 18 IO points, wireless connectivity, and edge capability into a micro PLC. About Chuck and Horner Automation Chuck is a technical brand ambassador at Horner Automation, where he has spent 36 years across applications, product management, and education. An electrical engineer who started in the automotive industry, he now produces in depth tutorials on industrial protocols for the Horner APG YouTube channel. Horner Automation is a privately held controls manufacturer best known for its all in one PLC and HMI controllers, edge ready PLCs, and rugged hardware for industrial and mobile applications. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Chuck's Background and 36 Years at Horner Automation 9:20 End User Engineer vs OEM Manufacturer Perspective 13:20 New at Automate: HMI Connect and the CPU 151 Edge PLC 21:30 The Fieldbus Wars and the History of Industrial Protocols 24:20 What It Takes to Implement a Protocol Stack 29:30 Why Protocols Win: Commercial Force vs Technical Merit 32:40 Will Industrial Protocols Ever Converge? 40:30 High Speed Motion: EtherCAT, PROFINET IRT, and Ethernet/IP 44:40 FPD-Link: Rugged Remote HMI for Ambulances and Fire Trucks 55:00 PLCs as Data Devices and the Push Toward AI 1:02:40 Cybersecurity Mandates Coming for Application Engineers References Horner Automation: https://www.hornerautomation.com About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Understanding Plant Networks: https://www.joltek.com/blog/understanding-plant-networks-how-industrial-connectivity-evolved Industrial Ethernet Reliability: https://www.joltek.com/blog/industrial-ethernet-reliability Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

May 28, 2026Episode 2491 hr 5 min

Ep. 262 - The Human Side of Manufacturing Change: Incentives, Pain Points, and Operator Buy In

Change management is the reason most manufacturing improvement projects quietly stall, even when the technical work is sound and the tools are right. Vlad Romanov and Dave Griffith unpack their own change management war stories from across two decades in industrial automation. Vlad frames change management as understanding risk to the business and to every stakeholder, then putting the process in place that lets the organization absorb that risk. Technical feasibility is the easy half of any project. Getting humans to consistently work the new way is the half that wins or loses the budget. Vlad joined Procter & Gamble at a site rated four on P&G's Integrated Work Systems maturity scale, the highest in North America at the time. Every loss event triggered a structured root cause analysis cascade. Operator, mechanic, operations engineer, and only then the engineering department. He later moved to Kraft Heinz, which had purchased the same IWS toolkit from P&G. The tools were on the shelf. The site rating was effectively zero. He had spent his early career learning to use the tools without having to deploy them, and that gap is where most transformation programs die. Dave's lens is more political. Change management starts with one question engineers rarely ask. What is in it for the person you are asking to change? He tells the Joe story, a lead operator with more than 35 years on the floor who interrupted a connected workforce rollout meeting to point out that his team had cycled through every methodology fad of the last two decades. None had stuck. Dave's team asked what hurt the most. Joe kept training new operators who left for a dollar an hour more down the street. The fix was QR codes on equipment linked to procedures Joe recorded once. Joe went from skeptic to evangelist in one session. Find the operator with the deepest tenure, solve their pain, and let them carry the change. The episode is also honest about what well intentioned incentives do when they miss the mark. Vlad walks through an RCA rollout where management offered a fifty dollar gift card to whoever submitted the most reports each week. The team got a stack of paper. None of it shortened downtime. When real process change goes through a plant, throughput typically drops twenty to thirty percent for weeks or months. That cost has to be visible to leadership before the project starts. Two practical heuristics close the episode. As a systems integrator deploying MES and SCADA across food and beverage plants, Vlad could often predict success within the first demo by how the room reacted. Continuous improvement teams leaned in. Whiteboard sites pushed back. Dave reinforces that change has to start at the top. If the executive sponsor blows off steering meetings, the floor reads that signal. Change management is a habit, not a project, and habits are built small. Pick one workflow, prove it works, and let the next one earn its slot. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and Automate trade show preview 1:30 Booth commitments: Siemens, Horner, and Tigoor 6:00 Dave's Automate session and 4IR booth duty 8:10 Predictions for Automate: physical AI, cobots, and the AI conversation 13:10 Defining change management in manufacturing 22:30 From P&G IWS to Kraft Heinz: tools versus deployment maturity 28:30 What is in it for the person you are asking to change 35:30 The RCA cascade at P&G compared to no process elsewhere 42:30 The fifty dollar gift card incentive that backfired 46:00 The Joe story: QR codes solving real operator pain 58:30 Reading change management success in the first meeting 1:07:00 Start small: the closing takeaway About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Lean Six Sigma: https://www.joltek.com/blog/lean-six-sigma 7 Different Root Cause Analysis Techniques in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/7-different-root-cause-analysis-techniques-manufacturing Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

May 21, 2026Episode 2481 hr 2 min

Ep. 261 - Change Management in Manufacturing: Operators, Tribal Knowledge, and the Industrial Elder

Change management in manufacturing breaks down at the people layer, not the technology layer. This episode explains how engineering leaders actually drive adoption. Ronald Sherrod is a Staff Automation Engineer at Regeneron deploying a global event based architecture and Unified Namespace rollout across pharmaceutical operations. Ron, Vlad Romanov, and Dave Griffith dig into the parts of change management that rarely make it onto vendor decks. Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub for weekly conversations with industrial automation practitioners. Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/digital-transformation-in-manufacturing Mastering the Unified Namespace for Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/mastering-unified-namespace-uns-a-guide-to-data-driven-manufacturing-transformation Ron makes a point that is rarely stated this directly. The organization implementing the change is the one responsible for it. OEMs and system integrators deliver the box. Consultants help interpret it. Auditors do not call the machine builder when something goes wrong on the floor of a regulated pharmaceutical plant. They walk into the manufacturer and ask whether the audit trails hold up, whether the predicate rule was met, and whether the product is safe for patients. That responsibility cannot be outsourced, even when the technical work is. That framing changes how engineering managers should think about RFP scope. If the scope is loose, the integrator absorbs the risk and prices accordingly. If the scope is rigorous, bids come back tight and comparable. Negotiating power changes with the size of the buyer. A large pharmaceutical company can dictate hypercare windows, on site commissioning support, and structured training. A small to mid sized manufacturer often cannot, and the result is the metaphorical Ferrari on the plant floor that only ever gets used for grocery runs. Capital was deployed. The technology works. The operation never adopted it. The episode also goes deep on tribal knowledge and the industrial elder, the technical anchor who carries the institutional history of a unit or process and is often more valuable than the Excel file on a network drive. Senior operators know why a pipe was rerouted fifteen years ago and why a procedure looks irrational on paper but works perfectly in practice. With 59 percent of frontline skilled workers over 55 planning to retire within five years per the Schneider Electric 2024 workforce survey, capturing that knowledge is now a leadership priority, not an engineering task. On planning, Ron walks through how he runs user story workshops with operators, manufacturing leaders, engineers, and developers in the same room, producing a shared data contract that defines what information moves where, who needs it, and why. He cites a successful SCADA deployment that worked because the organization had inertia, operators had asked for the problem to be solved, and the team was closing a real gap rather than chasing a trend. Ronald Sherrod is a Staff Automation Engineer at Regeneron, a chemical engineer by training who moved from oil and gas into pharma and now works on event driven architecture, UNS, and robotics initiatives. Ron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdsherrod/ Timestamps 0:00 Welcome and Episode Intro 1:50 Ron's Career: Oil and Gas to Pharma at Regeneron 4:30 Defining Change Management and Its KPIs 8:30 Change Management vs Operational Excellence 11:50 Who Owns Change Management on Industrial Projects 17:00 Negotiating Power: Large vs Small Manufacturers 20:30 Why Capital Projects End Up Mothballed 22:10 Tribal Knowledge and Learning From Operators 26:00 Why Industrial Projects Fail 29:00 The Industrial Elder and Passing Knowledge Through People 31:30 AI Generated Documentation in Manufacturing 35:50 Project Planning and the RFP Process 47:50 A Successful SCADA Deployment and User Story Workshops 54:30 Predictions, Career Advice, and Smart Glasses About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/ Dave Griffith is a cohost of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/ Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub