Reimagining Efficiency in the Manufacturing Sector with No Code Technologies

Discover the seismic shift transforming manufacturing as we chat with QuickBase's visionary who journeyed from the assembly lines of Ford and Jeep to the cutting edge of digital innovation. Immerse yourself in a conversation that promises not just insights but a roadmap to the future where low code and no code technologies are not just buzzwords, but the engines of change driving efficiency and agility amidst a global pandemic and a workforce in flux. Anthony uncovers how embracing these digital disruptors can automate the mundane, promote real-time decision-making, and match each task with the ideal talent—ensuring every employee is not just a cog in the machine but a dynamic player in the complex manufacturing orchestra.

In a world where the only constant is change, this episode serves as a beacon, guiding businesses through the digital transformation with practical, ground-level applications. As we celebrate Anthony's contributions, the takeaway is clear: stay curious, keep learning, and connect with innovators like QuickBase that share the same ethos. This is not just another tech talk; it's an invitation to join the revolution where no code unlocks potential, and low code rewrites the rulebook, all while providing a glimpse into a future where industry meets ingenuity, head-on. Thank you, Anthony, for casting a light on the possibilities that lie ahead for those willing to harness the power of simplicity in the complex world of manufacturing.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Hey everyone. I am so excited for this chat today on the future of low code in manufacturing. We have a true industry expert and insider from QuickBase Anthony, how are you?

Speaker 2 0:14

Good, glad to be here, thank you.

Speaker 1 0:16

Well, I'm excited to have you here. You're a wealth of expertise. Maybe introduce yourself and your background at QuickBase. And for those who aren't familiar with QuickBase, a quick word on the team and your mission.

Speaker 2 0:30

Yeah, absolutely A little bit of background on myself. My name is Anthony O'Freddy. I grew up out on the East Coast, went to school out in Massachusetts and then was hired directly out of college for Ford Motor Company. So I started my career in manufacturing at a very early age, Went into Ford, worked in manufacturing, launched large assembly lines around the world, mostly in high speed, high frequency DC welding lines. So all the welding that you do, that you see on commercials and whatnot, that's what I did.

Speaker 2 1:03

And then I left Ford after many years of being on the road and then I joined Jeep where I created and built out the iconic Jeep Wrangler down in Toledo, Ohio. I did that for seven years and where I became more and more interested in low code and then in QuickBase and what it could provide. So, getting more into the conversation later on, Evan, what we can talk about is well, QuickBase provides is a solution to a lot of the problems that I had down in Toledo with disparate data solutions. And then I left Jeep. During COVID I went to Amazon. I worked at Amazon for a couple of short years launching their last mile delivery network and then I joined QuickBase. I've been to QuickBase now for about a year and two months.

Speaker 1 1:53

Oh, fantastic, and I love my Ford and my Jeep back in the day, so it's great to have a true insider in the manufacturing industry. How did you make the job from being very hands-on operations on the assembly line even into this world of software low code, no code solutions what was that leap like for you?

Speaker 2 2:16

Well, so it was a really interesting journey. What occurred when I went from Ford to Jeep is I actually went from engineering, where a lot of the systems that you dealt with were your CAD system, your Kotea, your PLM system. We use Team Center, very basic standard industry procedures and platforms. So when I went to operations, so that was the leap. So when I went into engineering, into operations, and I ran the body shop at the Wrangler plant, I realized that those platforms and those solutions weren't exactly there. I mean, we did have a quality system, you do have your factory information systems, your MES systems, but when it comes to your daily work and it, when it comes to your making sure you continue, some proven methodologies are all squared away. All of that is done in Microsoft Office. So, from 2004,. Yep, yep, that's how it happened, yep.

Speaker 1 3:18

Well it's. You know the manufacturing industry is well served by lots of software vendors, but what was it about low code and manufacturing that really sparked your interest and curiosity? How did that personal insight kind of happen with you?

Speaker 2 3:37

So the breaking point happened when we were really launching our lean manufacturing 2.0. So lean manufacturing has been around for a while inside of the auto, but when you really take it from engineering and you try to take it from management and you try to get the actual operators and everyone else involved with it and try to become and enhance and embrace more of a Toyota production system, that happened between the years of 2014 to 2018 for me, and all of that change behavioral as well as procedural when it came to a lot of the documentation was all done in paper and getting all of that paper if you can imagine just 600 people in my department that are working 24 hours a day the amount of paper that was generated and the amount of data that needed to be collected was astronomical.

Speaker 1 4:34

Yeah, I bet. I mean we've moved from these manual processes to adopting more digital and connected systems, but digitization isn't enough, is it? There's an agility that's needed. And how does low code, no code kind of introduce more agility, flexibility into the various processes in manufacturing?

Speaker 2 4:54

That's a really great question. So what we what no code and low code provide is the building of the applications and the connections to the sources of record. So as you go on your journey of digital transformation, you realize that there are a lot of disparate systems that are within side of your network and the biggest piece, the biggest problem, is the hours that it takes to connect all those systems manually. So no code and low code actually will go out there and they'll connect it through an API. They'll connect it in through either a file share where they can go out and grab it from a secure file transfer. So there's a lot of different opportunities that no code and low code can help with the saving of all of that non value added activity of downloading a CSV file, re-uploading it into a Jordan Excel file.

Speaker 1 5:47

Yeah that, what drudgery that is. Sorry folks who are doing that today. Let's shift gears a little bit. Talk about the talent side in manufacturing. Everything is changing. The workforce, of course, is changing worse, worse management. Huge challenges there. What are you seeing on the front lines of manufacturing? If you will in, you know, attracting that talent, nurturing that talent, equipping that talent for you know, this next wave of industry 405, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 2 6:17

So in my experience, what's occurred is especially with COVID and I don't want to harp on COVID too much because the digital transformation was happening regardless. So what happened? Is it accelerated the digital transformation. What I mean by that is normally in manufacturing. It's a very generational industry, right? So you have your grandfather that worked there, you had your father that worked there, your mom that worked there and then you work there.

Speaker 2 6:43

What happened with COVID is that the folks that had 30 years in which was a lot they all kind of retired. They said you know, I've had, I've done my time, I'm going to retire out. But during COVID they never had the chance to pass on their tribal knowledge, never had a chance to pass on all the lessons learned in the skills. So the new workforce is coming in and it's completely different than what your, what the legacy was. And the legacy was manual operation, looking at your standard work instructions and performing your position. New workforce comes in, especially with this new.

Speaker 2 7:20

What do I consider? Dot com 2.0, uber Eats you've got all of your set your own hour type of industries and that really drove a lot of what I would consider transitory workers that would come into the environment even though your generations worked there. They still know they had another choice on the outside. They had another choice to set up their own hours, to make almost as much money but yet still be flexible on what they wanted to do in their workplace.

Speaker 2 7:51

So you're ending up with a lot of these pushing and pulling on the on the actual labor force, and one piece of the puzzle if I take a little bit of a tangent here, sorry, but one piece of the puzzle is that the legacy people, when they left, they weren't really mobile enhanced. They never had the. They were never brought up with pulling down an application and then doing the work right there on their phone immediately and then fixing or finding their answer within a few seconds. Now you have a new generation that's coming in and their expectation is that it's a mobile workforce, that you're connected to the machine, you're connected to the business. So you, when you bring those people in and then you put them back into a 1990s technology or a platform where everything is disconnected and you're using Excel as your enterprise platform. That is not acceptable to the newer workforce. So hence, they're going to try to try to, they're going to try to do something else and that's. That's the push and pull I see on the on the new workforce today.

Speaker 1 8:55

Yeah, I remember logging into those green terminals with the green glow and CRTs I guess we used to call them. What a change. I mean the expectations of modern workers and Gen X, from Gen Z, millennials, has completely changed. And it's also mobility, right. I mean work from anywhere within a plant or work from offsite through a mobile app, through an iPad, and you know how is that transforming the application space as well?

Speaker 2 9:32

What you're able to do is you're able to really bring in the edge computing. You really can get as close to the process as possible in that instant. With the mobile technologies and IoT, you can bring in instantaneous feedback. And not only can you bring in the instantaneous feedback back to the business, but you also can bring it back to that operator because your mobile. You don't have to walk away from your job station, you don't have to walk away to another area to find out a piece of information. It's all right there. So it's actually making the workforce more efficient, rather than detracting and trying to find some a print in a file account somewhere or trying to find it on a share or drive.

Speaker 1 10:15

Yeah, well, well said. Talk a bit about data fluency, data science, efficiency with the use of data. Of course we all understand it's important, but you know the workforce isn't necessarily as skilled in data fluency as it used to be. I mean, I studied computer science and electrical engineering. My son wouldn't touch that with a stick, although he's very good in math and he's very good in science and he's an interest. You think low code and no code will open up, you know, new opportunities for workforce that maybe weren't coding in C or C++ but can still leverage low code, no code solutions.

Speaker 2 10:52

So the best part about low code and no code is that it's the folks that are, I would say, millennial generation.

Speaker 2 11:02

Gen Z love it.

Speaker 2 11:05

My entire coding team were folks underneath the age of 30 that were coming into the workforce either out of college, were trained in Excel, but also understood there was a better opportunity out there.

Speaker 2 11:22

The beauty of what no code and low code provides them is the autonomy that they're used to on their own projects, building out their own creativity, so, and not having to know like all the lines of code and building everything out. So anyone in any background can actually build out a simple application in a few hours time using no code, If you want to bring in a little bit more advancement into it and add in a lot of creativity and formulas and the same stuff that you were trained in in Excel and the experiences that you have in Excel are the same formulas that QuickBase has and other no code providers have, and the transition from that platform into no code is a very, very simple one very low barrier for entry, low friction. I think there's a huge upside to no code and low code for a variety of different reasons, the first one being is the fact that it's extremely adoptable.

Speaker 1 12:20

Yeah, great, great point. I mean time to market is everything these days, and the tech stack has fundamentally shifted from even two, three, five years ago and will continue to shift as new applications, both core system personal productivity apps and gen AI tools come to market. You also need kind of a tech stack on demand. How do you fit in this brave new world of changing tech stacks?

The Future of No Code Technology

Speaker 2 12:46

No, that's a great question and what I've been seeing is the traditional 75, 25% model. And what that means, evan, is like 75% of your tech stack is going to be your larger platforms, your sources of truth, your ERP systems, your MES systems, your PLM systems all of those are going to be like your 75%. And then the 25% was your point solutions, your business productivity sources, your Microsoft office. So, and that's how traditional IT has been utilizing their spending, pretty much like okay, 75% is going to go to this, we're going to have these amounts of service contracts with it and 25% will be used to support the office worker and the individual employee on the line. And that's changing because no code is actually going to take some of that point solution. Take that out of the equation. Take some of the Microsoft office gray work, all of the things that are going to be back and forth and sharing an email and all the rest of that stuff.

Speaker 2 13:50

What I'm seeing, and what I believe I have done in other industries at Jeep and as well as Amazon is that it's gonna go from 75%. That's not really gonna change. You're still gonna have your core platform, you're still gonna have your big players in that area, but on the other end, that 25%, you're really gonna see a 15% no code and then a 10% Office Productivity apps, and that no code piece in the middle is what's gonna connect the other two together. So all of that gray work, all of that information, all of that data normalcy and efficiency and fluency is gonna pass through that no code layer and that 15% even though it's probably only two or 3% now, it is going to in time, because no code is extremely adoptable and easy to use it's gonna start eating into those point solutions that are out there and you're gonna have a set at 75, 15, 10.

Speaker 2 14:39

And that is the way that the industry is going at this point in time.

Speaker 1 14:44

Wow, fantastically interesting and so much change ahead. And maybe talk about the integration opportunity and automation in terms of the bottom line. I mean, how are you able to measure how the manufacturing processes are improved? Maybe availability, reliability, talk maybe ROI that you're seeing out there with your customers a quick patient.

Speaker 2 15:08

Absolutely. It always comes down to the bottom line whether or not you're gonna make a commitment. If the company's gonna make a commitment inside of a no code solution, I can tell you that the ROI really is inside of productivity enhancements, and the first productivity enhancement that a person or a company is gonna see by adopting a no code solution is gonna be right around non-value added activities of their employees. So with a no code solution, without a no code solution, let's start with that. Without a no code solution, your team my team was spending 10 hours a week per person downloading data, correlating it, making sure that it was normalized, making sure that it was validated and then putting it into arts and charts and making sure that there was an ability to actually make trend charts so that your continuous improvement was either working or not working. You can actually see it. But all of that data that went into it, all that time was 10 hours a week per person. I had 52 engineers, so it's a huge productivity cut. I mean, if you're on a 40 hour work week.

Speaker 2 16:09

Manufacturing is never on a 40 hour work week but if you're on a 40 hour work week, you take 10 hours a week.

Speaker 2 16:14

That's a 25% productivity cut. So at minimum you're just starting at 75%, which is not where you wanna be. So with the no code solution and what I was able to do with QuickBase is I was able to regain that 10 hours per person per week because all of that CSV gray work went away. I didn't have to worry about that. I didn't have to go make sure that I could make my resourcing plan every week, had enough time in there so that they could do their continuous improvement trend charting. I didn't have to worry about that anymore because it became instant. It became real time. It became a dashboard inside of QuickBase rather than an Excel sheet that I had to print out or copy and paste into PowerPoint.

Speaker 1 17:01

Wow, so exciting. That's really amazing to hear Talk about some of the practical applications of low code, no code, in manufacturing. I think of things like supply chain management, safety compliance, increasingly important resource planning and more. But what did you see?

Speaker 2 17:19

personally, Well, the first thing that I saw was shift to shift communication was greatly enhanced. Rather than going through email Every morning you would spend a few minutes going through your email, and probably half hour really of going through your email and make sure that if anything was hot and it would be labeled hot on your subject line you followed up with. But sometimes you had to spend time going through those varied information. So when you have all that communication and those follow-ups done in a workflow, then you can actually have all those activities in front of your face as you walk in. So that really helped out with that piece. Another. So that's shift to shift communication. The other big piece that really helps out is on the job training and on the job skills are typically tracked inside of Excel.

Speaker 2 18:14

So if you wanna know if you have a veteran on a job or if you have a new person on a job that doesn't have any experience, you would have to go dig up your Excel sheet let's see if it was up to date and then walk out to the line and say, hey, wait a minute, there's an unskilled person or untrained person on this job.

Speaker 2 18:30

We need to counteract that and before you knew it, if you're running a high speed manufacturing line, you've already built 500 units by the time you realize you had an untrained unit or untrained person on your job and it may or may not have made a mistake because they were untrained, and that's part of that transitory labor issue that we were running into. But with no code, one of the things that you can do is for very quick return on investment, very quick adaptation. You can build out a job skill tracking and training matrix where you can see if you have the right person on the right job at the right time. Instantaneously you could build in workflows so in case there is a person that somehow got assigned because it was an absentee issue, you can see that right away on a dashboard and then make an action or a corrective action to you. So those are the two big pieces.

Speaker 1 19:23

So much opportunity, so many use cases I can imagine, which we don't have time for. But what are you excited about over the next few weeks, couple months? I know you get out in the field talking to customers and partners a lot. What's on your mind?

Speaker 2 19:40

What's on my mind right now is it's even easier to build inside of NoCode, especially QuickBase, because we have a Geni tool where you can actually take chat GPT not you can take, but we've taken chat GPT. We've actually incorporated it into our Geni tool so that you can type in common language, like I have a problem with tracking safety audits in my facility and we make car parts and then if you type that all in there, it will automatically configure an application with all of the connected tables, all of the workflows, the reports that go along with that, and then within three minutes sometimes 10, within three minutes you will have a fully ready to go application that you can start working it right away. So that's what's exciting over the next few months Is that piece right there, the Geni piece, Because it's gonna be a huge enabler over the next year, next two years, for sure.

Speaker 1 20:36

So exciting. It's amazing to see you're just getting started and you had so much value delivered today. Well, thank you, Anthony, for joining. I really appreciate your insight and your enthusiasm, and good luck out there. There's a lot of work to be done. That's great to see the tremendous value you're adding.

Speaker 2 20:57

Thank you very much. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 21:00

Thanks and reach out to QuickBase everyone. I'm LinkedIn, twitter and beyond. They have some amazing content, very educational stuff, so lots to learn and take on. Thanks, folks, thank you.