Don’t Automate Chaos: Running Lights Out with Sarah Wierman of Fastems, Ep #45

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Most shops picture automation the same way. A robot arm bolted to a machine, a green button, and a quiet promise that you can finally walk out the door at night. This episode takes that picture apart, and what replaces it is a lot more useful.

The trio is back together, and to kick off a new run of episodes we brought in Sarah Wierman of Fastems, someone Nick worked alongside for five years in workholding before both of them drifted into automation. Her big reframe is the one worth sitting with. Fastems isn’t really a pallet company. It’s a production orchestration company. The pallets moving in and out of the machine are the part you can see, but the real product is the software, MMS, that plans your jobs, runs them, and monitors the whole thing like the brain of the operation.

We get into why so many shops are feeling the pull toward automation right now, and it isn’t a desire to replace people. It’s labor shortages, a wave of retirements taking hard-won tribal knowledge out the door, and the need to stay flexible when demand swings the way it did during COVID. Sarah’s point is that automation done right keeps your best people and frees them from babysitting a spindle.

From there it gets practical. Why you can get into automation too soon. Why repeatable fixturing is the foundation everything else sits on. Why tribal knowledge is the villain of the automation story, and why you should never automate chaos. Sarah walks through how the software can look 96 hours ahead to warn you a tool is about to run out, and how her cousin Caleb’s rule, observe but don’t intervene, separates a shop that trusts its process from one that keeps helicopter parenting the machine.

By the end she leaves listeners with three tactics you can start this week, none of them flashy, all of them the kind of one percent improvement that compounds. If you’ve ever told yourself you’re too high mix to automate, start here.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (0:00) The trio is back, and why a real disconnect refills the tank
• (2:42) Introducing Sarah Wierman of Fastems, back on the mic
• (3:47) Parallel careers: the workholding road that leads to automation
• (8:22) DN Solutions: high-end machining with SMX and DVF, built for automation
• (9:34) The necessity question: don’t just bolt on a robot and pray
• (11:20) Labor shortages and retirements outpacing new talent
• (13:10) Educating customers toward the right solution—not a sale
• (14:40) Knee-jerk automation vs building a reliable process first
• (16:06) Fastems as a production orchestration company, not a pallet pool
• (19:07) Meet MMS: the manufacturing management system that runs the shop
• (23:48) SMW Autoblok: RASRAM and the seven habits of effective workholding
• (24:31) The discovery process: what Sarah asks before recommending anything
• (27:42) Standard product mix versus becoming a productivity partner
• (29:38) High mix, low volume, and why Fastems thrives there
• (32:35) 96 hours ahead: the fires before the fires are lit
• (34:15) GTS and CTS: storing up to 1,500 and 5,000 tools beyond the magazine
• (36:14) How workholding fits into an automation strategy
• (38:18) Repeatable fixturing as the foundation of any automated cell
• (39:53) Don’t automate chaos: automate the good process, not the bad one
• (42:48) Observe but don’t intervene, and document it when you do
• (44:45) IMTS Job Shops Workshop, September 15 (sponsor)
• (45:37) Relationships over the hard close, and why the longer cycle fits
• (53:10) Three tactics to start your automation journey
• (55:18) Track your downtime, because most shops underestimate it
• (56:37) A Westie for Christmas, and where to find Fastems

Resources Mentioned

• Fastems
• DN Solutions
• SMW Autoblok
• IMTS Job Shops Workshop
• Raptor Workholding
• Atomic Habits by James Clear

Connect with Sarah Wierman

• Fastems
• Connect on LinkedIn