People B4 Machines, powered by Eclipse

Is the real factory bottleneck human or digital? Or are humans the weakest link in Industry 4.0

• Eclipse Automation • Season 1 • Episode 3

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In this episode of People B4 Machines, Amanda Cupido explores the root causes of factory bottlenecks with Industry 4.0 expert Mike Nager, Solutions Center Director at Festo Didactic. Together, they discuss whether humans or digital systems are to blame, emphasizing the importance of integrating technology with a skilled and adaptable workforce. Mike shares insights on upskilling, the evolving role of soft (or "durable") skills, and the future of manufacturing in a rapidly changing technological landscape. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on balancing innovation with humanity in the age of smart manufacturing.

For more bold questions and sharp insights, visit www.peopleb4machines.com. Remember, the future isn’t fully automated—it’s people-powered.

Mike Nager:

No one is going to school anymore for four years and thinking that they know everything for the next 40 in their jobs, and that includes the top suite, or it should. And if it doesn't, you know, there's big big problems. People before machines.

Amanda Cupido:

Conversations on the chaos of factory automation from Monday morning to the very near future.

Mike Nager:

Eddie Clipped Podcast.

Amanda Cupido:

Welcome to People Before Machines. Conversations on the chaos of factory automation from Monday morning to the very near future. I'm Amanda Cupiod, a speaker, author, and entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology and humanity. This episode, we're discussing factory bottlenecks and getting to the bottom of who or what is to blame. I'm joined by one of the top 100 influencers for Industry 4.0, Mike Nager. He is the Solutions Center Director for Festo Didactic and is known for bringing unique insights from his experience inside over 500 manufacturing facilities. As an electrical engineer and author of multiple books, including All About Smart Manufacturing and the Smart Student's Guide to Smart Manufacturing, he has established himself as a leading voice in, you guessed it, Smart Manufacturing Transformation and Workforce Development. Thanks so much for being here, Mike.

Mike Nager:

Oh, thank you, M. for the invitation. I'm very happy to be here. Exciting topic, and it's great to get the word out.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah.

Mike Nager:

I appreciate the platform.

Amanda Cupido:

Well, your experience bridges technical and human elements of modern manufacturing, which is why I'm really excited to talk to you about this and dig into whether it's humans or digital systems that are causing bottlenecks in Industry 4.0. So right out of the gate, what do you think?

Mike Nager:

Yeah. Oh, you're starting off hot. So uh yeah, let's just dive right into it. So so I would say it's not an either-or situation. So I would not place the blame solely on the technology side of that equation, and uh, nor would I place it on the human side. I think it's how the humans and the people are interacting with technology. And the challenge is that it's uh changing so quickly, it's hard to keep up uh with those changes and those demands. So um I don't place blame on humans or on the technology, but how do we integrate both of them? Because it's going to be very critical moving forward that we have the ability to use these technologies in a great way.

Amanda Cupido:

Right. So when we talk about that integration piece, let's first then talk about the human side of that of that equation. Is it outdated mindsets that's holding people back? Or what would you say on the human side is preventing them from keeping up with the speed and being able to work seamlessly?

Mike Nager:

Yeah. Uh, you know, a large part of it is just the pace. So, you know, in in the last two years, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning has exploded into the main public. It's no longer even, you know, a side institution. And how does an organization make sure its employees have the right skill sets and the right knowledge to be able to harness these new powers? And that's where the challenge is, because organizational charts have been around for a long time. They tend to be very static in how they are constructed, and the ability to make a very agile human workforce hasn't been the priority up until this point. And I think that's the real challenge. How do we, from an organizational standpoint, shift our organization to one of continuous learning, fast deployments, and cover all the stakeholders? So the company still has to make a profit while it's figuring all this out. Employees need to have a sense of security that they're not going to be replaced either by a piece of technology or by a person that has a little bit more familiarity with that technology and that they're in it for the long haul. So, you know, it always comes down to people. You know, that that's the bottom line, and that's what we're experiencing today, I believe.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah, I agree. And we'll talk more about the technology side of things later, but I want to dig in onto the people side of things. So when you want to give people that sense of security, I mean, it's hard when we all know AI learns faster, is more cost effective, can help with efficiency and the bottom line. So how do you tell people and make them believe they're worth upskilling, reskilling, investing in? And that goes for both the top floor and the factory floor.

Mike Nager:

Yeah. So people are pretty astute. You know, they see what's happening in their day-to-day work life. So if if they are being invited to upskilling training seminars, they're given the time, you know, one week or two weeks a year, solely dedicated to keeping their profession and keeping their skills up to date, you know, those actions are a lot more powerful than any words are going to be, you know, from a stockholder meeting or or from a chairperson. So it's really about rolling up the sleeves and saying, okay, this is the situation that we're in, and we're only going to win together. So everyone has to be, you know, brought up to speed. And by the way, you know, we I've I talk a lot about the skills gap and learning technical skills and knowledge, and a lot of times it's at the plant floor level, it's at the machine operator or the engineering level. The same challenges are hitting the uh executive suite right now. You know, people that are CEOs, CFOs, directors, they are all being challenged in in a very similar manner. So we gotta we gotta keep that in in mind that it's a company-wide phenomenon. It's not just at the lower levels of the organizational structure.

Amanda Cupido:

And what advice would you have for the those leaders? Whether they have to advocate for themselves within their organization, or do you recommend they go external to do some of their own upskilling?

Mike Nager:

Yeah, yeah, I definitely do. I mean, you know, the further you are up in the hierarchy, you do have the privilege of being able to determine, you know, a little bit more of your direction as an individual, and you have to set the tone right off the start. But okay, I'm a great CEO of a great company and and have a lot of accolades, but you know, this AI thing is something completely new. And uh I'm gonna go to a forum or to a conference and and learn how we can in you know most impactfully bring that into our organization and allow the people that are working in the organization to be part of that journey. So those top positions have a lot of attention on them. So it's super important to show that type of dedication because no one is going to school anymore for four years and thinking that they know everything for the next 40 in their jobs, and that includes the top suite, or it should. And if it doesn't, you know, there's big, big problems. Right. You know, that the top jobs are supposed to set the direction for the entire company. It's not supposed to be a trickle up type of thing, like, oh, we want to bring this technology into the plant floor, and we got to convince our bosses and the CEO that we need some IoT sensors, it should be the opposite way around, right? And I don't see that very often to be quite blunt. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah. And what about emotional intelligence, humility, these aspects that we as humans like to say, well, we've got this over AI. You know, do you find that these kinds of qualities are something that we should be focusing on as a differentiator and really leaning upon as we try to find our place in all of this?

Mike Nager:

Yeah, Amanda, you bring up a great point. So, you know, if you look at the big picture, we have automation that is doing more jobs. And in the terms of physical jobs, robots and cobots and automated guided vehicles are taking over a lot of those physical jobs. When we talk about mental jobs, you know, think of things like accounting and finance and moving figures from one form to another or from Excel to SAP, that is being taken over by AI. So the idea is that all repetitive tasks, whether physical or mental, are probably going to be automated sooner or later. You know, some of the easier ones will be sooner, some of the more difficult ones will be later, but that is the clear path that it's going on. So if you have humans now in the mix, in the workforce, and they're no longer expected to act as a robot, either physically or mentally, then all these soft skills that you mentioned come to the forefront because teams are going to be formed in thinking about more of the why questions than the how questions. The how questions are going to be automated, right? How do you get this widget to do it? How do you move these figures from one software platform to another will be automated. But forming that effective teamwork to figure out why you should be doing something, why you should change direction, why the company should take a risk in a certain area requires all those skills that you just mentioned. In fact, they're so important. I don't know if you're familiar with the manufacturing institutes in the U.S. There's 17 manufacturing institutes. One of them is called America Makes, and they think that the term soft skills should be renamed to durable skills. And they have on their website a nice pinwheel of about eight different subject areas of what we normally would call soft skills, things like leadership, emotional maturity, cultural awareness, you know, all these kind of big buckets. And they've split them down into maybe a hundred very precise soft skills, if you want to use the old terminology, that people need to develop. So that's definitely something to look into if you're interested in this. The soft skills, ironically, are the things that are becoming more important as the technology progresses, right?

Amanda Cupido:

It's fascinating. And I wonder how education institutions will now follow this. Like, are we going to have degrees in humility? Because that's what people are going to be hired for.

Mike Nager:

Right. You know, I I I did read something that was funny, you know, for for years, you know, the the smartest people in the world in the country were advising young people go into coding, you know, learn about, you know, coding computers. Well, that's like one of the first things that's being replaced by by AI now is, you know, those coding skills. But, you know, how do you prompt an AI to get the correct output? You know, maybe maybe there's some English major uh that really knows the command of language and knows how the structure works, uh, will have the highest paid skills in the future. You know, it it it's it's very ironic.

Amanda Cupido:

It is. Yeah. I I taught a course um about for communicators teaching them how to use generative AI. And part of their homework was to also show how did they prompt, how did they revise, and then how what was the final answer? And so showing that kind of workflow, like there's, you know, a new way of learning and marking and grading now and education on that front. So I I agree with everything you're saying. And I'm and I'm excited. These are the kinds of things I'm really looking forward to seeing. How does it evolve? And um, what a neat time to be alive to witness it.

Mike Nager:

Yeah, yeah, it certainly is exciting. I mean, um, you know, I've been watching the space for for years. I've been in the manufacturing marketplace for 25 years plus now. Right. And there was pretty steady progress all during that time. But the last five years, I mean, things have really noticeably exploded on the technology forefront, especially.

Amanda Cupido:

Leaps and bounds, I'm sure. Talk let's talk about the capabilities of machines as a whole, though. We've been talking a lot on the human side, so let's flip over now to the machine side. Do we do you think that we're overestimating the capabilities of machines as we start to plan and look ahead into the future on these sorts of things?

Mike Nager:

Yeah, there is a little bit of that going on. You know, uh people that are outside the the factory, you know, might might have one of two extreme positions when they think about it, if they think about it at all. We have a great awareness gap in this country about manufacturing right now. But if they did think about it, uh they might think about dirty, dangerous, and dull types of positions and and atmospheres and environments. Or they might think it's something like there's no people walking around and and everything is automated and you got robots on the floor and on the ceiling, feeding machines that do everything themselves. And for most places that is is not the case. Uh there's some technology, of course, and we know that's increasing you know, across the board, and it will continue to do it. But machines jam, robots get lost, these things will improve over time. But you need people to know, you know, that big picture why question again of of why we want this production run to go smoothly and you know figure out how to do it. So and by the way, most manufacturers, you know, are not the the large ones that you might think of, you know, off the top of your head. They're they're gonna be 10 and 20 and 50 person enterprises that that are are are the majority of the manufacturing operations in the US and across the world. And there's a lot of need for for smart, skilled people inside those uh types of companies.

Amanda Cupido:

Right. And I mean, you have such a connection to younger people who are coming into the industry. What does it take to really change the stereotypes that are around it? And you talk about a lack of awareness. Like, how do we increase that awareness?

Mike Nager:

Yeah. So on one side, you know, the industry itself is is starting to do a good job in addressing that. The first week of October is manufacturing week, and that is manufacturing month in in the United States. And that's where manufacturers are encouraged to open their doors to the public and to invite people in, including students, and maybe including younger students, maybe you know, people that are eight, nine, ten years old, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, into the facility. Because a manufacturing operation typically isn't on Main Street, you know, with glass windows that when you walk by, you can see it. It's not in the the local mall. You know, if you're walking down the aisle, you can look in. It's it's off the side of the highway in an industrial zone to park. Maybe it's a a steel-sided building, few windows. You pass by, you maybe you notice it, but you don't understand what is going on inside unless you get to see it. And that's what Manufacturing Week is is trying to encourage is to people to open up those doors. Uh the books I wrote for students and for teachers and for kids to talk about manufacturing is kind of like a virtual window into that manufacturing operation. So if you can't get out and see one, maybe you'll pick up a book and maybe you know, verbally you'll be able to get a peek of what's inside and and be surprised that you know it sounds pretty cool to do something like that as a career or a job.

Amanda Cupido:

I love that. And October's also manufacturing month in Canada, too. So this is obviously a a wider spread phenomenon that's that's helping to reframe it. And you know, for even these books for kids and for younger, um, younger folks, it's nice, even if they're not gonna pursue that as an industry, but even if they're talking about their parents that work in those environments, that they're talking about it differently. So it's a great recommendation.

Mike Nager:

Yeah. It it's great to keep in mind, you know, that manufacturing still is one of the prime drivers of real growth and wealth. Right. So a lot of other professions and industries will take wealth and manipulate it and you know, change it and do things, you know, with it. But the manufacturing industry actually creates wealth, it takes raw materials and it makes them into something that is more valuable and more useful and can do other things. Right. So that's why governments are always so keen to have a manufacturing facility move into their locale because they know that it's going to spawn this wealth and it's gonna spawn a lot of service businesses and suppliers around it. So you could end up, you know, working in in some way in manufacturing, no matter what your profession is. Right. Whether it's account, you know, it's just not engineers and toolists and machinists, it's accountants and finance and HR. The whole gamut of of professions feeds off this wealth creation that manufacturing offers. Yeah, it's a lot of people. And by the way, we did see that. Yeah, it's a whole ecosystem, and we saw that in a negative way, you know, in the in the 1990s when we started to offshore a lot of manufacturing out of North America to other areas that had less expensive labor rates. And you know, 30 years later you go back to those places that did bring manufacturing in and you can see tremendous wealth generation there. And yeah, not to take away from any of those places, it's great. But if if you visit the towns that in North America that lost that, you see, you know, quite the opposite. You know, it's termed the rust belt in the US.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah.

Mike Nager:

Right? Where everything is is is not so great. So so I think it's an I think it's intuitively obvious now to everyone, which it was not 10 years ago, that manufacturing is really important to have and it's important to have locally.

Amanda Cupido:

And hopefully some of these reshoring efforts that I know so many organizations are prioritizing might help in shifting this once again. But as we continue to talk about the identity and awareness, I think it's interesting to see how so many manufacturers are still holding on to this quote blue-collar identity. Why do you think that is?

Mike Nager:

Yeah, I just think it's momentum. You know, for a hundred years, you know, the the white-collar, blue-collar divide kind of had like a clear meaning and uh kind of made sense. And, you know, organizations were built around it, unions were built around that definition in in a large part. And um, you know, everything is shifting. So the industry 4.0, you know, it's called the fourth industrial revolution. And when that happens, it's just not technology. Everything is is supposed to change, you know, quite a bit. And I think we're just starting to see that start now, you know, especially with the AI becoming so popular and so powerful so fast that the way that you did business in the past no longer applies in the fourth industrial revolution.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah.

Mike Nager:

So I mean, I when you see someone working on the plant floor that knows how to program a robot and debug a programmable logic controller and adjust a sensor and and make sure the database is up to date, you know, so SAP can run the number. That does not sound like what you know you would call a blue-collar job of the past.

Amanda Cupido:

Right.

Mike Nager:

Right? It it it doesn't sound like a white-collar uh job. So uh I I think we'd be best just to eliminate that distinction altogether. Be like, you know what? We're employees of this company and we have different jobs to do. Yeah. There's no different class.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah, I agree. You mentioned labor unions. So I just want to follow up on that note because I think it's interesting to start imagining what their role is as we look ahead to the future, where you know, we might have workers that are an algorithm. So, what will be the role of labor unions, you think?

Mike Nager:

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the the there's a great challenge around that because, you know, the guilds, you know, the the unions came up from the guilds that were very tied to a specific technology. And the demand for a lot of positions now is not within the vertical silo of one of these subjects. You know, it's just not mechanical, it's just not plumbing, it's just not electrical, it's just not IT. It's a combination of it. So hopefully, you know, there'll be movement there about how to to rethink that whole classification of of people because it's going to get messier, not easier in the future, I fear.

Amanda Cupido:

Yeah. And and if we continue down this hypothetical now as we imagine parts of the workforce being more tech-based or code or algorithms, what do you think the implications will be for safety culture?

Mike Nager:

Oh, yeah, yeah. So some you know, safety is something that that extremely important. Uh, you know, a whole government organization was developed in the 1970s in the US called OSHA, just because the track record uh and the accidents that happened uh a lot of times in manufacturing plants were so bad that action had to be taken, you know, from a from a legal standpoint. That that is only going to increase. So machine safety is something that I'm involved in personally on the skills training side. It's something that we encourage our university and college clients to look into putting into their curriculum because it's that important. And harmonizing between North America and Europe and Asia, you know, all these different standards, that that's just a full-time job in itself.

Amanda Cupido:

All right. So as we continue looking into the future here, our crystal ball, do you think we'll ever have factories that run themselves?

Mike Nager:

Ah, the lights out factory. Yes. So so when I started uh working around 19 uh 90, uh we we heard that term quite a bit. And the joke is that the lights off factory is 10 years from being reality. Always. And always will be.

Amanda Cupido:

Yes.

Mike Nager:

Right. So yeah, I mean you you you see some of these tasks and and positions and jobs being replaced. And and really, we shouldn't be surprised about that. You know, in in the 1960s and 1970s, there's hundreds of thousands of people that were telephone operators that manually connected phone calls together, and now that is completely automated. And and no one really wants to do those types of positions. No one's clamoring to be a switchboard operator. And you know, the same with stacking bricks and palletizing heavy things. Um, you know, yes, we've thrown a lot of people at that type of job, but you know, is that something that people really want to do? And I I would say no, no, we have to automate that as much as possible.

Amanda Cupido:

All right, I'm gonna leave you with a curveball question before we wrap up today. So if you had to choose between a highly skilled human operator or a slightly unpredictable AI with 10x output, what would you choose?

Mike Nager:

Oh my gosh, some question. Well, you know, there's still nothing more flexible in the world than a human being. Yeah. Uh the ability to to absorb new information to be able to react to e even some mechanical movements, being able to figure out how to do things very, very quickly. It's it's still in the in the human realm. So I I I'm on side people. I think we've got to keep people foremost uh in front of this and not lose uh sight of that, you know. Um I I think it's still a little bit of science fiction to imagine a world where where everything is running, you know, without our help. Um maybe, maybe someday, but you know, I I don't think, you know, in in my work career lifetime it's gonna be.

Amanda Cupido:

I agree. Well, thanks so much, Mike, and thanks to all of you for tuning in to People Before Machines conversations on the chaos of factory automation powered by Eclipse. We're here to challenge the status quo in factory automation because machines don't build factories, people do. The technical producer for this podcast is Ryan Dentinger. I'm Amanda Cupido. If you got something out of today's episode, we'd love it if you share it with a teammate, a plant leader, or anyone who is tired of the automation echo chamber. Be sure to follow this podcast for real talk, bold questions, and sharp insights. And remember, the future isn't fully automated, it's people powered. Talk to you soon.

Outro:

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Amanda Cupido

Host
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Ryan Dentinger

Producer
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Mike Nager

Guest