Welcome back to the Automation podcast, the world's number one industrial automation product and technology show. Thanks to you, our audience of highly skilled automation professionals. Thank you for being a member of our audience, and thank you for tuning back in this week. Now if you're brand new to the show, my name is Sean Tierney from Insights and Automation. And each week, I invite a new vendor to come on the show to talk products and technologies. And this week, I have a gentleman who started an MES company on the show to talk about what his company, you know, the solution he has and the problems that he solves that many of the very large MES companies just can't do affordably. So I think you guys will enjoy this, and you'll also probably notice if you're a regular that the podcast has been released a day early. I like to do this during Thanksgiving week so that you can listen to it on Wednesday if that's your final commute of the week instead of Thursday, which everybody's busy typically here in the US, busy with turkey and family and sitting down to a nice meal. So I hope you get to enjoy that if you're one of our listeners in the US. So with that said, let me jump into our sponsor's message, and I'm actually sponsoring this myself. So if you know anybody who needs PLC, HMI, or skater training, please tell them about the automation school.com. If you're one of my students in an Allen Bradley PLC or PAC course, you're gonna notice I just added some new lessons to every PLC course. The reason I did that was because I wanna update all the students on what is as of late 2024, the pricing of the paid software, what's available for free trials. I wanted to let you know about some of the simulation packages we're using here in house that I really think you guys will like, including our own free PLC simulator, which I paid somebody to make, and I now give away a free to my students, as well as factory IO and logic designs, PLC logic. So check out lesson 102, and I'm about to drop update to lesson 105, 106, and one 07. So if you're a student, check those out. Just trying to give you guys more options to save money because not everybody can go out and spend $10 on software and hardware to learn PLCs or PAC. So everything from our free option, the PLC application simulator, to the lower cost options of factory IO and PLC Logix. I think you guys will like those. And, of course, we sell those 2 packages at theautomationschool.com. So with that, let's go ahead and jump into our show. And if you don't mind, Ryan, could you please introduce yourself to our audience? Thank you so much for having me on today. Appreciate your time. And, I'll I'll do my best to not go into weird rabbit holes and boring sections. I am the ass, which is easily done. But, my background, I grew up in the Midwest in a small manufacturing town in Illinois. Kinda always been into making things, got into cars very early. Went to school for mechanical engineering in the automotive industry. So in 2009, took my first role with General Motors, spent 10 years in GM, couple years at Tesla in their early days, launching the Model S and building out the Fremont supporting structures in their factory. Did a tangent into a software company for a couple years doing cylinder deactivation controls for gasoline engines, which is pretty cool. And then I had a chance to run a motorcycle factory for three and a half years. So largely automotive, and then I think, you know, bigger company down to smaller company, the 2 themes, all the way to the point of starting one. And we formed PECO because, frankly, we're just sick of using really poorly designed and laid out software that wasn't up to modern expectations. It's the 3rd time that I've been involved in building an MES and hopefully the last. So I would very much not like to do this again. So I would not recommend starting a company unless you absolutely need the product to exist on the other side. So It is a big undertaking. And, you know, I just you were talking and I was like, you know, my Dodge Charger has the cylinder deactivation. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you, when it goes into eco mode and shuts down half the cylinders, you know, I never even hear it. I'm getting older now, but I've had it for 15 years. I never hear it, and I never notice it. So that is some excellent technology. So I just wanted to throw it out there. Basically, don't call the level beyond. It's the individual cylinders. We shut them down 1 at a time instead of 8 to 4. But anyway, yes, neat stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, they they say don't call it a semi hemi, so I won't, if anybody remembered the the funny commercial from way back then. But in any case, so MES now I think all of the audience understands what a manufacturing execution system is, but from your standpoint as somebody who actually ran a factory. Right? Tell us what you what MES means to you. But before we get into that, I want to thank those of you who signed up in our new membership program either on YouTube or at the automation blog.com. In appreciation of your support, you get exclusive access to the videos of episodes that are not sponsored by the vendor. Now to learn more about our membership program, which is only $10 a month, please visit the automation block.comforward/memberships. And with that, let's go ahead and jump back into this week's episode. So there's there's a couple of camps out there, and we can the the definite the formal definition of MES is the command and control layer. So if you're curious, you can look up a spec called ISA 95, and it lays out ERP on the top, MES, SCADA, PLC sensor levels. And there's a lot of issues with that pyramid in in how the systems come together. The theory is correct in the fact that, like, all these things have to play nice. The the the new camp is unified name space. I'm sure you've gotten into that over in in in your world. But the, MES has classically been receiving orders of what to build, structuring when those orders are gonna hit the shop floor, so sequencing and optimizing for that, routing, and then governing that the work is performed, correctly as far as the source of truth or historian of the data, either back to the ERP or to hold in this in its entirety. So the the command and control layer is the easy way to say it. The the problem with that is is it forces you to have to integrate everything. And especially when you start with depending on the legacy system of choice. I mean, a lot of automation systems have been around since the eighties nineties. You get into ERPs, they're just as old. The integration of these systems can be a challenge to say the least. So we, we we have a slightly different take on MES. We violate the the southern boundaries of the ISA 95 stack and get down to we can take in a $2 micro switch as an input through one of our edge devices. We have I wouldn't call them SCADA functionalities because there's no safety component, but the ability to govern work or data and move it across stations. So you have some of the the transmission values. We can talk directly to PLCs. Our theory is that you need to take what's supposed to happen. So think it is like, you know, work instructions in its rawest form and tie it to the things that are doing the work. So tools, people, machines, so that you can collect the data that matters, which drives insight and value on the other sides, right? There there's value along the way in training, error proofing, first pass yield improvements. But where the real value comes in in this kinda industry 4 point o, call it whatever BS term you want, is when you can generate, oh, crap. If these two things occur, this problem happens. We should probably fix those. How do we fix those? Oh, we're applying too much epoxy. Put a scale underneath it. Measure how much came out. Hey. Now we're in range, we're good to go. Problem goes away. You never see it again, whatever it might be. We shoot bolts, use a DC nut runner or just a clutch tool with a feedback loop. So it says how many you shot. Now you don't have to worry about one of them being not present. You know? It's the ability to say this is what was supposed to happen, and then make sure that it did. Yeah. I remember back in I think it was the very late nineties, early 2000s, Rockwell was getting us all trained up on SP 95, and that's when it was still it was still a proposed spec or, and, I I just remember the slides with all the different octagons on it, And MES was made up of all these different pieces. We had, data collection, historian, we had analytics, we had x, y, and z. I think there were 11 or 13 of these little boxes, and it's evolved over time quite a bit. And I think for a lot of the people who are on the plant floor, they have these I hate to say this old, this is gonna be like buzzword bingo. I hate to say islands of automation. Right? But in many cases Yeah. You know, and a lot of times they try to glue it together with their SCADA system or the historian, but that just doesn't get you to the layer of MES. Right? It doesn't what we end up having is we end up having all these silos of data. These blobs of data that never get looked at. Right? Well, you know, maybe somebody looks at a trend and if there was a problem, they may go back and manually look at it. Right? And they may even have a condition of monitoring package that can see a deviation and and give us an alarm. But, you know, what what you're talking about is really taking the orders in from the front office and saying, you know, make 10,000 of this and then orchestrating that down. I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but taking that down to the the the plant floor and saying, okay, this is what we need to do to make this happen. You make so many of those, you make so many of those. I mean, but also tying into the historians. So you know that, hey, this is the data for that run. If I want to pull up this this order, this this production run, it knows where the historical data is and it knows how to you know tie that in. All the am I even close? Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, there's hundreds of small functions that build all these systems. It's no different than any of the other layers. Right? And they all have to work together. So in our world, you know, in our definition or how we execute, we have things like process dependency checks, where when you when a part enters a station, you check to make sure that it has a valid complete flag from the station in front of it. Well, it could be a manually assembled station, like, did they actually bolt it down? And we're looking at at at a minimum, did the operator signal that they completed the the work? It could be, you know, looking at physical measurements from tools that were associated with the work. It could be a $2 micro switch that just said, yeah, the part was in the fixture, and now it's not. But something that says it did what it was supposed to do, and then we'll release it into the downstream. There's also a layer that says, you know, you have the I did it, and then you have the what what do I do next? So the the what do I do next part of it is you ordered 5 bicycle frames of this configuration. So this station needs to produce 5 of these subassemblies, and, you know, it was different than the order before, and it's different than the order that'll follow. But how do they know which variation of the process to run? So we'll govern that with a parent child relationship between the manufacturing order and the individual work ticket. And then you mentioned the historian. So that's a key piece, not only for the in process movements in the quasi SCADA world, but also just, you know, 6 months later when something goes wrong, you're trying to understand, did I build one of these bad? Did I build all of them bad? What changed? You know, sometimes you have all the information you need to make that decision. Sometimes it's in the supply base. But how do we integrate all of these things together against the idea of the product produced? It's an interesting challenge because classically, MESs were all custom, right? They would live within a framework, and then you had to customize everything around it. And I think a lot of the problems was the systems they came off of weren't the right fundamental level framework. If you think about how automation works, it's not directly set up. It drives a lot of IO, it has a logic system inside of it, but it's not thinking of the world as what's supposed to happen, where is it supposed to happen, and what did it do. You you can try to configure it that way, but it's not its core. And an ERP is thinking about transacting material. Right? I have raw I have raw goods, and I'm gonna convert them into finished goods, and there's a cost associated with it that the accounting side of it needs. Neither one of those is how the shop floor works. So how the shop floor works is I have things that I need to do over here, and it's a series of steps that get carried out in some form of sequence, similar in many ways to automation. But there's a physical world constraint, again, similar, where I can't I can't have the same same device in 2 places at the same time. Yeah. And I might have 5 stations that are all similar to each other that can carry out parallel work, but it's the physical world constraints, and you have to marry the 2 together and add an operator or an ID for the equipment that's carrying out the work. And now you can actually perform work, you can collect data, you can generate insights, you can create value. So it's a different framework. And I think by changing that framework, we can get out of a lot of the customization that has been in the past, and the customization is not bad. You you want the system to line up to your factory. But if if you're starting from a far away away and you have to do a lot of customization to get it there, it's really expensive, and that's the problem that people have seen. Right? Typical MES deployments are measured in months, if not years, to set up and in 100 of 1,000 or 1,000,000 of dollars. Yeah. If you can switch that out and do this kind of bottoms up approach instead of a top down routing and hierarchical approach, like the classic deploy, you can change the cost paradigm dramatically. You can build an element of work, copy it, you can tweak it, you can make variants of it, you can stack it into a workflow that creates products. I mean, the devil's in the details. It's fun to theorize about, but proof's in the pudding. You know, we're an order of magnitude cheaper with the same capability, if not more, of classic MES. I mean, we ripped and replaced a Rockwell deployment in 6 weeks in a semi truck factory. Nice. That was So that's a good point. Let's let's talk about that. So you can connect to let's just talk about this. So a lot of process a lot of these manufacturing cells are automated. Right? They may get loaded manually, but then they run and then a lot of times they're unloaded manually as well. Sometimes there's material handling between the cells. Sure. But if that if that automated system has a Rockwell or a Siemens PLC or somebody else's PLC, your system is capable of talking to those. Right? Hey, everyone. I just wanted to jump in here and pay some bills. Thank you, first of all, for listening to this episode. And while today's vendor wasn't able to sponsor this episode, I still wanted to invest the time to bring it to you because I think you're like me. You like to learn about new products and technologies. So with all that said, I'd like to ask you to consider becoming a member for just $10 a month, either on youtube or at the automation blog dot com to help me offset the cost of producing these episodes each week. In exchange for your membership, you will receive member only perks and ad free editions of every unsponsored episode of this show. With that said, thanks again for tuning in this week, and now we'll return you to this week's episode. Yeah. Through typically, either direct to depending on the PLC and the licensing they have, so a tag read write structure, or we have intermediaries. You can go through products like PTC's Cupware, where it kinda does a translation layer across all of these. Or you can go up to the scatter layer, so Ignition being one of the more popular ones lately, where you can do things like, you know, an OPC UA, back and forth structure. So, yeah, we the big thing that PECO does different is we can connect to you name the tool. There's 200 families of tools that we connect directly with either through our little $65 microcontroller based edge device. So I have a USB scan tool in my hand. How do I connect to that? Well, I can't can't plug that into an Ethernet port, so I need something to gateway it into the system. That's what those edge devices are for. Serial converters are another great example, RS 230. You know, 232 to, to be able to speak, you know, pick your flavor of choice, Modbus across an RS485, things like that. You gotta get it into the network if it doesn't have an Ethernet port sitting on it. So our ability to do that becomes really interesting. We can connect to torque tools. We can connect to scales. We can connect to laser engravers. I can connect to a PLC. I can connect to an ignition deployment for an automation system. It's trying to give people the opportunity to solve problems. Everything that we connect to was brought into the system to solve a problem, a data silo problem, a error proofing problem, whatever it might be, a speed up the system problem. But if you can connect to those different physical world entities, you can solve that. If all you have is a API structure on your edge and you force all that integration work onto the teams, now every single factory has to go repeat that integration. Well, that's not efficient. That's super annoying. You know how many people every day probably look at a DC torque tool spec and try to figure out how to talk open protocol to it? I mean, it's terrible. The it shouldn't have to be that way. Like, how do we eliminate that repeated work? And in the automation systems, it's really fun. There's a lot of things you can do. Well, that's why I was going to go to my next thing talking about manual stations. And I think, you know, a lot of times when you're talking to Rockwell and the other big automation vendors, even if it's a totally manual station, maybe there is a couple of buttons they have to press and some things they're going to scan. The answer is to put a PLC in there. It sounds like with your it's like, I really don't need a PLC for this. Yeah. So it sounds like your Edge device has some IO on it, and you could take in a scanner, you could take in other devices. You could probably take in some clickety clack contacts as well and maybe turn on some lights. Yep. Oh, yeah. We have output, input. We have I mean, the we we use the Raspberry Pi based microcontroller. Our secret sauce is the, the software that it took to make them 5 nines reliable, which was a trick, but, because no one cares why that factory goes down. Right? If it's the barcode scanner that didn't work, it's still down, and we have to fix that level of reliability. But it has that. We have the ability to add in other IO modules, right, that can communicate with either our server directly or through that. So you can go or you can go to a PLC. Like, the PLC is still really great in a lot of applications. But to your point, you know, if you wanna read a $18 Amazon special pressure transducer for just to know the airline is in range of the pneumatic tool, seems a little wasteful to put a PLC in place with an IO block to grab that when I can do it with a, you know, $50 piece of hardware. In the same regard, using the PIE as a safety critical motion system controller is probably not a really good idea for you. But we just wanna give the right tool for the job as an opportunity and then to solve the real problems. So you mentioned mixed automation and manual, which is the way of the world, frankly. There's always a human being somewhere. If you can find that lights out factory that isn't making, like, semiconductors, I'm interested in seeing it. But what you know, battery manufacturing, I'll use that because, like, we bump into that a lot. It's a hot topic in some circles. You've got these automated cells, but you still need to record the epoxy lock code, for instance, that's going into the dispense system. So you change out a 55 gallon drum. You know, there's a human being that did that. You're gonna put in all the effort to have a fixed barcode reader on there and a rotating system to get the drum in the right location, and then an arbitrary pick your backup system when the drum got scratched and the barcode can't be read and it's found. So you got a camera for the human readable? Like, to automate that doesn't make any sense when you can have the person who dropped it off go beep with a $60 scan tool. So it's that blending things together that I think is a really interesting piece. The more automation you have, the less the MES is kinda needed. Frankly, we get cheaper and cheaper the more things automate. But it's about filling that gap. And then we talk about data next, which is the other side of the house. But, you know, the automation creates all that information. So And I've and I think we've already discussed this really, but I really want to circle back to this. So like you said, starting a company is a lot of work. And developing a platform from scratch is a lot of work. And you would never want to do that again, but you did this and I know we kind of already touched on this a little bit, but but I really want to circle back to it. We we, you know, to this is a massive undertaking. Right? And so what was if we could if we just go over this again. What was the main drivers for you taking on this massive thing to to create a new MES that's gonna, for once in it all, just do it right? Yeah. I mean, to me, the the there there were 2 key weak points when we started PECO that I wanted to attack. 1, the ability to airproof your processes in 5 minute changes. I'm not talking about having to write, you know, a new driver because you wanna bring in a random scale. Like, how do I how do I have this massive, you know, engineer's toolbox to allow me to have a problem bubble up in the morning, whatever happened. Ah, crap. We had a you know, there's a a chance for a human to cause a mistake or the automation system was allowing something to get through. I don't wanna deal with that ever again. I want a clean-cut in a repetitive environment. Like, how do I block that? So being able to do that has always been possible, but being able to do it quickly and efficiently is the challenge. Like, when I was a GM, you know how many days it takes to get another torque tool put online? Like, it's insane. We can input tools in literally in 5 minutes. You plug it in, it auto identifies if it has a system that communicates. You know, if it's a printer, you might have to create a template. DC torque tools are under an hour, and the majority of the time is to set up the rundown process. Like, it's taking out all of that wasted energy so that people on the plant floor can solve the problem quickly. That was the number one pet peeve. And then number 2 pet peeve for me is the access to the data. I call it the difference between thinking and knowing. Right? You think you you you have a good thought on how you build something, but if you don't have data to prove it, you don't know. I don't care who you are. Like, the and the ability to have that data trail drive continuous improvements, it's an addiction that once you've had it, you can never let go of. The ability to go, oh, let me pull up the serial number and see the here's exactly the produceconsume chain. It went through this subassembly into here into here. Here is every piece of information collected. There's not a go into another system to get the torque data and go into another system to figure out what the voltage read on the cells coming into the module were in a different system that tells me, oh, I gotta go into the dispense system now to figure out the lock code that's inside of it. Like, that stuff slows down progress. And when you're in a complex industry like aerospace or automotive, that matters. Right? If you if it takes you 2 days to solve an issue, 2 days would be great, first of all. But if you can solve it in 2 hours, you can solve so many more things when 80% of your day is meetings and firefighting. Right? Like and it was about having systems that allowed that to happen. Sure. And that kinda it brings me to, like, are you relying on other people to collect and store the data, Or do you grab, like, for let's take Ignition, for example. Are you using their data that they collect? Or are you actually taking, look, I need this data in my system separately? So how how does that work? Do you start anything in your own system? Or Yes. User's choice. So we we look at ourselves as an aggregation option. So, and our focus is on being able to make sure any factory can do this. A 20 person factory, it's a tier 4 supplier, you know, or or building that little widget that they sell commercially, or, you know, a 1500 person facility. Right? Everything in between. In the past, this type of technology was limited just to that bigger size facility that could afford the really expensive deployments. But inside of that world then, you give the user a choice. But before we get into that, I wanna thank the automation school.com for sponsoring this episode of the show. That's where you'll find all of my online courses on Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs and HMIs. So if you know anybody who needs to get up to speed on those products, please mention the automation school.com to them. And now let's jump back into the show. So if you built if you have automation in place and it's already connecting I'll go back to the battery example. It has voltage measurements and barcode reads on the cells, and then maybe it does a high pot test on them, the module, and there's, like, an image capture. We can grab that from the automation system and tie it to the downstream systems that are manually assembling the battery pack, for example. Right? Because it's hard to automate those those pieces of the puzzle, especially that I can fix. And that way, there's not a data silo problem in there. If they haven't built the automation yet, and for some reason, the automation company has a hard time figuring out how to connect to one of those devices, you can insert PICO. It'll connect to the device, and then it'll tell the SCADA as if it was a PLC when triggered what the value is on that or to kick off a routine. You know, we can run Python scripts for flashing firmware, for example, something that's possible to do in automation, but it's just really easy for us to do. So save yourself a few $1,000, and it's just part of that deployment. So that's that's the more sophisticated route when people have been through it once or twice. They can start mixing and matching who's good at what, knowing that all the systems are integrated and they'll play nice together. But that's how I see it is the it it's giving options. If you speak ladder logic and that's the only logic you wanna know and you wanna go in and everything's a PLC and program to it, great. No problem. You know, We can fetch a CSV file you generate and parse it into variables on our side and run dashboards and SBC charts against it or create a report that's the full traceability required by the US Navy for the thing you made, whatever it might be. Like, why ask the automation system to do that kinda work if we can do it more efficiently? So and then in the same regards, we we don't do time sequence data worth of shit, frankly. Sorry for my language. Like, we're really good at events. We're really poor at time sequence versus the PLC where it can it can watch a variable over and alarm when it goes out of sequence and things like that. So married the 2. What a great marriage, right, that's doing this. The alarm goes off, we take that alarm trigger, we already have connections into Microsoft Teams or into Slack if you use that or email or text. And now the automation company didn't have to figure out how to do all of that stuff. So, anyway, that's the vision is you can just solve a problem without having to create code. Now I think let's let's talk about the and that makes a lot of sense to me. Let's talk about what your customers see. So they have a Pico MES system. Like, are there different views for different type of people? Who sees what? And I know every plants every deployment can be unique. Right? But, you know, explain some of like in one of the one of your, your more favorite, I guess, applications you guys worked on. Talk about the different views people have. Like, I'm sure you have somebody who's who's, like higher up on the food chain, maybe up at the front office who needs a view, and then you have people on the plant floor. They wanna know. Maybe they got OEE. They gotta get their act together or else the line's gonna be shipped overseas or or maybe there's a bonus tied to getting, you know, keeping some quality or, you know, cutting scraps. So talk about the different views because I know your system does a lot, you know, through code, but it also has to interface with people. Right? That's right. We have we have 4 key customers, if you wanna think of it that way, on the in the in the factory. So the first one is the operator doing the work. So we have a, it's a work construction visualization or worker guidance suite. So similar to an HMI, but it's moving step by step as they are moving. So you scan a barcode, it accepts it. If the pattern match works, it'll automatically advance forward. The operator doesn't do anything. And now out of the corner of their eye, they see a visual representation of the next step, image, video, CAD screenshot, whatever that might be. There's text, there's layered content, there's a strain a training kinda side of the house there where more information's available in certain situations. And then the the layer above the person doing work or, you know, on the machine side of the house, you would just use the HMI, so you wouldn't need that view. Okay. The the next layer up, though, is the supervisor. So they're going, okay. Now I wanna look across multiple stations and know who's on pace, who's not on pace, who's having trouble, who's what's working well, where are my issues. It's basically a reacting type role, right? I react to wherever the problem is. And so they get a view that's we call it a TV view, but basically it's the classic, you know, 5 colors of station status. If they're on pace and there's no alarms going, it's green. If they're falling behind pace, it might go yellow. If the they have a machine issue or a person is, having a trouble, it goes red. But that's their their item. They also can interact with, we we interact with teams and these kind of shared comms, so they could be following on their phone whether or not an alert occurred or quality defect, and it'll ping them, when when things are happening. Then you go level up to the engineer. So now their view is in the background, for a lot of it. How do I they're setting up the work instructions. They're setting up the device connections. They might be looking at the data to go down a Kaizen project, and do a they're looking at cycle time data and how can I rebalance it? So their views are in the what we call the manage pages sitting in the background. They have access to all the other views as well. Yep. But they might be focused on the the setup and the data side of the the the granular data. And then the final is the executive view. And now there's arts and charts, as we lovingly call them, for what did I make today, what did I pay what did I get for paying people effectively? So you have your output run rate charts by part number or product number. You've got OEE over on the station level side of the house or equivalents. You've got, maybe standard reports they wanna see. So, like, we send in this work order. When was it completed? Some of that comes out of the ERP. Some of it would come out of PECO depending on how they set it up. But it's much more of the strategy. And then typically, they're going a level it's like a Venn diagram. Everybody overlaps at least one level. So the executives might be looking at one level down data to understand, oh, do we what's our capacity? Do we need to buy more equipment, run over time, add a shift? Like, where are we relative to that? If I improve these perennial problems, could I save that equipment purchase? It's a really common question. You know? If I if I get an order for 15% 15% more, am I buying equipment, or can I find 15% in my processes? Well, at least we can tell you what your losses are. The engineers are looking at you know, the engineers know you get to do your job right up until the moment something goes wrong, and then you stop and you put on your firefighter hat, you walk out to the line, and now it's problem solving time. So you often they're watching the TV view like everybody else or the connected channels. So, but that's how we see the world is kinda in these areas. You notice the roles that PECO didn't directly interact with. I didn't mention the electricians or the technicians or the maintenance crews. Right? They have opportunity if they wanted to use us for, you know, maybe there were constructions associated with PM on a machine. But there's other systems out there that work really well for that. So if you wanna use MaintainX or Limble or pick your flavor of ice cream for PM, CMMS, well, we integrate with them. So one of the manually done tools like a DC nut runner has a problem, the operator can trigger a ticket for maintenance into that, or we can do it based on number of rundowns for standard calibration cycles. But that way, yeah, we can interact with their world, but they can live in the world that works really well for the CNC machines that they're operating or the injection molding machines or whatever, you know, the automation equipment, let them stay in their world. Same thing with the ERP. We connect into the ERP so the accountants get the information they need. Right? They need to know how much labor they put into those parts so that they can write it off for taxes. Right? Yeah. How much scrap happened? Taxes. These things like that that need to go back and forth. So the key for us is making those integrations as easy as possible. Yeah. And scrap definitely, depending on where it happens, that the process could be cheap or very expensive. That's right. Add a bunch add a bunch of labor content or parts on the other end of it, and tear it back down again. Yeah. So yeah. But the goal when I think of this whole thing, it's just it's trying to just let people, you know, get out of their island. Mhmm. Every every one of those those views, whether it's the person the engineers creating the automation and the engineers setting up the processes, the operators, the execs, they have their island. But if they can't see the the world around them Hey, Hey, everyone. I just wanted to jump in here and pay some bills. Thank you, first of all, for listening to this episode. And while today's vendor wasn't able to sponsor this episode, I still wanted to invest the time to bring it to you because I think you're like me. You like to learn about new products and technologies. So with all that said, I'd like to ask you to consider becoming a member for just $10 a month, either on YouTube or at the automation blog.com to help me offset the cost of producing these episodes each week. In exchange for your membership, you will receive member only perks and ad free editions of every unsponsored episode of this show. With that said, thanks again for tuning in this week, and now we'll return you to this week's episode. Then the then the factory can't win. And I would argue, one of our things we're doing is by making this technology available to the supply base, to the smaller factories, you're actually able to go outside of the 4 walls now, and you could in theory change transfer data across suppliers and the whole supply chain for a complex assembly can now collaborate or improve, or, you know, there's circularity of scrap, there's matching a, b, and c bearings with a, b, and c rotor shafts, right, for tolerance stack ups and things like that. So but you need a digital backbone for that. You can't do that with Excel and paper, it's too delayed. So being able to build these these solutions for each one of those views, but in a way that it structures, that that was always the goal of that ISO 95 pyramid when we come back to the beginning. Right? It's like is everything's available or unified namespaces after the same target. But then you put that across multiple factories and things start to get really interesting. And that's what PECO is really unique about. Our data model's the same for every factory we deploy into. So we have tools that can cross factories. It's the next generation. Yeah. Very important too too. And I I know plants factories compete, especially there's a lot of companies that have multiple plants all over the US and they compete heavily. A lot of times it's shown as a failure if plant x cannot provide products and plant y gets to provide the product to plant x's typical customers. And so they compete internally very very, heavily because they don't want to be if there's a downturn, you know, the weakest has to be called and they always want to be at the top. They want to be not only getting the bonuses and giving the people, you know, that that, you know, assurance that their job's stable, but also is that internal plant versus plant versus plant. Everybody's a lot of companies, they're vying to beat each other and be the most efficient and more productive of facility and around. Even with things as simple as aluminum cans that we drink our beverages out of. I mean, it's very competitive. So, you know, what are the what are the some of the what are some of the things like a prospective customer comes to you, what are the kind of things that you wanna hear from them or you wanna ask them to know if they're a good fit for PECO MES? Yeah. So for us, the the first thing right out of the bat is the type of work being performed. Right? Are you building are you are you making things? Are you making things that contain things? Right? Or whatever the classic process versus discrete. So we're we we focus on the discrete side of the house and with the with an assembly flavor. There should be people involved. And if you're heavily automated, we we're still happy to to work with the team. Most of our factories are a mix of manual and automation. But that that's the first kinda scheme is does it fit does it fit what we do, which is guide people, tie into tools and equipment for error proofing data collection, and then use the data for for value. And then from there, it's it's really what is the pain of a mistake is a good way to think of it. Right? If you make one thing if you're a job shop that takes one order, makes one part, and may never see it again, to invest in infrastructure to ensure that one part make you should be investing in quoting software and, you know, workflow management software. There's better stuff out there than that. If you have a fleet of CNC machines and you're just wanting to monitor those to have the highest OEE, there's better like, we can do some of that, but there's way better software out there, that does that. So we tend to push people that way, and kinda help them find. But for us, sweet spot, you're assembling something ideally in north in in the US, and then you have that repetitive some amount of repetitive nature, either consistent processes to make lots of things or, make the same thing over and over again. So Yeah. We go ahead. I was gonna say automotive and aerospace and industrial equipment are our sweet spots today. Yeah. I think you did a good job explaining that. And, you know, I was kinda thinking that's 88. Right? So this is not a batching package. There's a lot of similarities. Equipment arbitration and but batching gets into respite handling and and I there is some of that here, but and there's a lot of similarities, but you know, process automation is is different on on many levels. And I can see why given the kind of information and the kind of customers you've talked about why you'd be talking more about manufacturing, like discrete manufacturing, making products. And I think that's what most, like, you know, my world of PLCs, HMIs, SCADA. That's what most facilities are doing. But, you know, you also have it in utilities. You have it in process. But, but, most of the people I meet and train, they're in manufacturing. They're making products whether it's an aluminum can or it's something very and there is even some extruded products that would, I think, fit very well. Because they they, they, they run it like it's in a what, it's not really a batch, you know, even though they run a, they're running a product, like let's say making a sheet of plastic. It, it, it, to me, it always seems to have more in common with, you know, discrete manufacturing. It's like making a very long bumper for a car. You know what I'm saying? Versus making, you know, 50,000 tank gallon tank of, you know, of of some kind of a paint or thinner or something. Very much different process because that's actually gonna be pumped somewhere at the end of the day and not actually cut up and sew those pieces. Right? So, I always I like to describe it as beer versus gaskets. I know it's kind of an interesting comment. Yeah. When you make and the other thing I mentioned to people is, like, you can make a system like ours work in those other environments. Just like you could probably take an OSI PI system or equivalent and get it to work in certain discrete applications or take ignition and try to make it into worker guidance. It's the pain involved in doing it. Yeah. That's what you're just that's that's all we're sorting for is to try to make the cost as low as possible and the speed at which you can deploy, which is another version of cost, you know, as rapid as possible. So, you know, could we make beer work? Sure. But, like, if you think about where our edge really lies, it's like a gasket. So gaskets are you know, you have a slurry process, and then it might come out onto a sheet conveyor, go through an oven, there's a slicer, and then there's the former. And at the end, it's now it's cranking out individual pieces. And especially companies that take that little piece and put it into a higher level assembly, now you're talking. But could can we run that line? Sure. Yeah. We know how to talk to scales and things like that. We can set alarms. It's just not as creative a fit as another system, that's designed specifically for that kinda time sequence flow of material through a pipe. And there's there's there's everything overlaps. Like, this is why I think it's hilarious that people get into the weeds of, like, oh, you you you're you're this niche. And I'm like, I wish I could just have that niche because it would make my sales life infinitely easier. But the reality of it is that everything kinda overlaps, and it's Yes. Yeah. Might it centers around there. But, yeah. Anyway, because you think about our connected supply chain comments. You know, if we wanna make the corner assembly that's going into the to the truck plant, right, so it's got upper lower control arm and a knuckle and a brake and a rotor and a caliper, all of that, right, classic assembly. Well, then you need to if you're gonna have the information of that whole corner be available to Ford, you need to be able to go into the system that was machining and assembling the bushings into the control arm. And then you gotta get into the casting house that made the thing in the 1st place. Right? Otherwise, you lose that data through the system, and now something goes wrong. You don't know if it's because the casting was wrong, the machine part was wrong. Like, pick your flavor of ice cream on where the problem might be. So there's flexibility that allows these to come together. And then more importantly, I I I call it the don't be an a hole thing, but it's like if somebody came to us and was like, hey. We want you to run our state of the art casting facility, I would say that's probably a bad idea. Like, don't be an asshole and help them find the right solution. But when it comes to that assembly of the control arm, yeah, we're really good at that. Can you give us some other examples that you've worked on with some of your customers? Those are good ones, but I was just thinking maybe throw some others out. Yeah. We have so the automotive examples won over, we make a lot of complex industrial equipment. So think, like, switch switch gears to go into data centers, like all the electrical cabinetry for power generation and backups. Those are really complicated. You can't measure you can't memorize that process. And then making an error is really expensive because you gotta tear down a lot be able to fix it. Vehicles clearly, come into our world, whether it's a tugger all the way or a fork truck into RVs. We have legs into, you know, pull on automotive plants, things like that. You can use this as a piece of the puzzle. You know, we sit alongside traditional MES systems, and we're just a worker guidance tool. We have other companies that actually don't use the worker guidance part and just use the tool connection part. So there's just a trigger and response system. Okay. And then you get access to our huge library of manually actuated tools. And then what are some other fun ones? We've got a lot of battery manufacturing, especially 2, 3 years ago when that was really spooling up. We had a lot of plants come online. Yeah, I mean, semiconductor equipment, that's another example of the people inspecting wafers or, doing part of the parts of the process with the photo. I forget the name of it, but we shine the photo and it makes the system. There's all those motion controls inside of there that are just extreme tolerances inside of really complicated assemblies. Yep. We have a good strong footprint in there. We spooled up a, oh, yeah. Boats are fun one. You know how a pontoon boat is made. That's really interesting. I'll give you I'll give you a hint. It's not automated. And then, yes, some other fun ones. We have, high mix, like sensors and valves for oil and gas. So you can imagine think about all the part numbers you can order for proximity sensors and different configurations and housings and all of that. Now put a layer of safety on top where they're rated for harsh environments like that. Now you can't have an air and you have this crazy high mix and you have to label it and have all of the certification paperwork, so we help manage that significantly. But I'd say over half our business is automotive and aerospace suppliers. And then the other half is these kind of random industrial things. We do have one process factory. He's a former user who went to a process factory and is like, oh, I can use you here. I can make a work. It's perfect. Yeah. He's got a scattered network for everything else, and he just uses us for the sampling systems. Okay. So which makes total sense. Right? You get our whole IoT network. And so we connect into the scattered networks for the data silo problem and nothing else. We're just fetching files and bringing it into the historian, and then you can tie all the inspection systems together. So the scales that measure the you know, okay. What was the dispensed component amount? Our camera systems that we can deploy for, like, was the slurry applied properly? Yeah. Environmental sensors, all that fun stuff. So And that is a place a lot of times where the automation guys struggle because it's very expensive to try to automate that with a PLC. I mean, you can deploy PECO for trivial amounts of money. You can even deploy it now. We we released a free what they call a freemium model. So there's a free version of work instructions for up to 10 stations. You can add a paid user license to unlock all the digital tools for $100 a month. Like and then you can go to a connected station. So in theory, if you just had one user and one connected station to do that inspection, you're only gonna $200 a month. You could reach out to us if you needed a one time buy so you didn't have to deal with recurring charges. So, like, why on earth would you go through it? For the less than the cost of the PLC, here's 5 years of PICO. Right? And you didn't have to wait. What's the current lead time on Allen Bradley's? Right? Are they finally down from 9 months or whatever they were at a year ago? I don't know. I haven't had them on the show. No comment. No. I don't I literally don't know. I mean, I used to. I don't anymore, though. Well, I think and that's true. Would you say go ahead. Go ahead. It's just an easy way to supplement a bigger system. That's what we mean by modularity. Like we No. Use it different. If I if I we have some listeners who are struggling with that, kinda like those manual systems where they have, you know, people have to do some manual assembly or manual setup and they're struggling. They're like, this doesn't fit what a PLC does. I mean, is is that a good customer for you to contact you and say, Look, we do a lot of stuff, but we're really good at this. This is one place we're really good at, and we can tie into your existing PLCs and HMIs. But we can we can take over those stations, those operating stations where they're doing some assembly. You're not capturing that data right now. Is or or am I off on that? No. It's it's a great application. And and what I like about it is we get really lightweight and really low cost at that point. So, like, we can be we don't because we're not trying to drive the entire thing, we can be just a little piece in the puzzle. Just think of us as, like, instead of buying a key on sensor, you bought a Pico manual station control system Yeah. For that. And then we can what I'd like about this is, it doesn't matter to me where the data historian is as long as there's a single source of truth, and it's all in one spot. So if you want me to feed whatever happened in the manual world at Build Complete into the automation system, then we just set up the communications to do that. You can use the same comm structure in all your different locations, or we feed a common database that that effects effectively becomes a unified name space if you insert lots of details. But the it's a neat tool that now those teams can build bring to bear. What we typically find is actually the opposite, where the automation company is like, I just wanna do my little sweet spot, or the automation engineer. I'm really good at this. I can do the motion and the pick and the place and the testing and the Yeah. The value add. And I don't wanna figure out what the hell you're doing over here in manual world. And in which case, then they go, here's how this works. You should buy a system like PICO or one of the others that Yep. I mean, pick your flavor of 1 you'll hate more. Then we just tie you into us, and the user has that that kind of flexibility. They have to learn it's a very minor, software set inside of Pico to learn. It's not like this is months of training. It's hours of training because they're not trying to get into the craziness. So at that point now, they can see the automation data, they can see the manual data, and they're happy. Well, I see that use case. I can definitely see that use case. I think another use case, tell me if I'm wrong, but you have these small to medium size, manufacturers that they always knew they needed an MES system. They need some KPIs, they need some OEE, they have some manual stations they want to track, and they they just there's no way there's no way in God's green earth they're going to get a $10,000,000 you know, capital project approved for MES. Right? And so they've always just said, you know, is that a type of customer that would be a good target as well? Because I know so many people never do the projects because the price just goes, you know, through the roof. It's 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars. Yeah. Our that's our sweet spot. That's what we built the company for. It's for small and midsize factories. We know we can go up to the bigger factories and do from time to time because it pushes the technology. But 90% of our customer base is small and midsize by definition, 500 people or less. The the real sweet spot's between a 102100, people inside of the factory. Right? No one's gonna touch that typically in, in the MES space. And what we do is we give them that's part of the reason why you have that whole lower pyramid is an MES by itself is effectively useless, frankly, if you can't tie it into data structures that are feeding it good information. So the it's giving them that whole system as a place to start. And with us, you can start for the $100 a month is like a trial. Yes. In theory, you can start there. But it is we have a significant customer base that's at $12,000 a year, 12 k total, and they just run the digital tools. They care about traceability and worker guidance. So think the value props are training reduction, always the right process on the screen at the right time, and the ability to say this is when the part went through. So it's not error proofed, but it has all the traceability. So if your process or your product is error proofed, great application, low cost. Aerospace suppliers love this because they can run local, which means then you get ITAR certification. Right? So we we can run-in the cloud or local, which is kinda nice. And then the you the I'd say our our most common customer is the one that blends in the error proofing. So this is where the ACV or, annual contract values get into the 40 to 50 k range, and we're governing probably 20 to $30,000,000 worth of product creation, maybe more, depending on whether they're selling a widget or they're selling a finished good with a higher markup. So round off error in the value prop. I mean, we'll move you 30% in output. Same amount of equipment. You're either gonna get data you never had or you're gonna be taking busy work off of a lot of people's shoulders. Because without a system like this, there's a lot of people trying to do busy work or people just don't want to do it, so it doesn't get done. So you don't get that traceability. You don't get that information. And so That's 3. Yeah. Gosh. 3 3 value props you just point to just every time. So just measuring something that wasn't measured before and giving the operator feedback, just giving them basic feedback on how they did, you're gonna get anywhere from 5 to 15% output increase. And there's a little gamification that occurs. Not everyone will move, but the mean will move up that much. You go put in error proofing in the the continuous data flow. So just being able to the traceability data says how long it took me to build it and where my errors are, you'll go find 1% improvements 20 times. You'd be shocked. It's not it's very rare you go into a factory and there's a 20% hand grenade sitting there. Oh, man. If I could know not to do that, I could increase my output 20%. Right? People aren't stupid, but they can't see 1% failures that are occurring randomly throughout the factory. Well, with our world, you can, and more importantly, you can stop them. That's where the tool connections become very important. So you gain another 20% there. Right? The range officially that we state is anywhere from 15 to 50% increase in the number of parts produced for unit labor. Right? Now I don't know your factory. If it's running and having a hard time, you're gonna be up towards the 50%. If you have a really strong factory, you're gonna be down in that lower section. If it's heavily automated, it's probably less than that. But what we can guarantee you is you will find the gains that you didn't know existed, and the pricing aligns to the value. Right? You don't spend a lot of money if you weren't gaining a lot of things. Right? The way the whole structure of selling by the station. So to me, it's just that's the one thing I hope people realize is in the past, expensive, difficult to roll out. You're gonna be held back by it. It's gonna cause lack of flexibility in your factory. Arguably, what happened with automation too. Right? What's modern world look like now? Flexible, easy to readapt around the change in your business system. It generates data that drives insight that has increased value over time because you're able to continuously improve and find things over there. And it's modular. You can now get a click PLC for $300. Right? You cannot spend an You can get you can get Rockwell and Stevens PLCs for $300 too. I mean, almost every vendor yeah. You can. And that's the problem because if you go with a big house, they're gonna wanna use the the $50,000 PLC. I just mean there's options. There's just choices. There's lots of options. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a real issue in itself. But Yeah. You go back, like, if I wanna buy, and I'll just say brand x MES, they're going to probably want me to have the Cadillac of every other product they have and that doubles the price. It's like, I really don't need that. I really don't need the Cadillac. You know, you you actually make, you know, you make compact cars too. Those work well. You know, if you if you're if you're if you're not, you know, for the use case. But, well, I I guess the last question go ahead. Go ahead. It's just giving him a choice. That's all. And then walking him through the path. Being don't don't be the a hole philosophy. Right? Like, help them through their choice, whether it's to you or to somebody else. Yeah. Absolutely. So I guess my last question is if we've if any of the audience out there, we have the best audience in industrial automation, if any of them say, you know, we should look at this, like, who would they contact to maybe do like a Teams or a Webex or, you know, a Zoom call to learn more about what you guys do? Yep. We're a put up or shut up kind of a house. So if you go to, our website, there's a there's a request demo form that'll allow you to to ping, and we'll reach out from our teams or our side of the house to set up that that call. So we'll ask you a couple questions so we don't waste your time and show you something you're not interested in. But then we can set up a live demo and literally walk through the MES. But the other side of the house is you could sign up for the product and play with the work instruction side of the house and the digital tools for free. And then that way, you're not just listening to me about what it's like. You can actually experience it for yourself. There's also a boatload of YouTube videos and things like that too. So and I I just wanna jump in here and say for those people walking their dog or, you know, driving home during their busy commute, could you give them your website URL? Yes. Yes. Picomes.com. So picomes.com. Yeah. Super easy. You can't get better than that. Well, Ryan, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I really enjoyed talking to MES. I haven't talked to MES in a while and, talking, ISA 95 and all this stuff. And I do think there's a lot of smaller factories out there that can use a product like yours. So I really wanna thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Sean. And sorry for the rabbit holes of going into, but it was really fun. I enjoy the the kind of back and forth like this. So, and for anyone listening, you know, if you wanna get into the weeds on the technical conversation, I'm I'm available on LinkedIn. You can find me there or just reach out to Pico and they know how to get a hold of me, but I love having these kind of conversations too. I hope you guys enjoy that episode, and I wanna thank Ryan for coming on the show. And I wanna thank our members who made the video edition of this episode possible. You will find the video edition in the members only areas on both YouTube and on the automation blog.com. So thank you to our members for supporting the work we do here at Insights and Automation. And with that, I, again, wanna wish you all an awesome Thanksgiving weekend. Hopefully, you get all 4 days off, and I just wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.