The Connected Advantage: Solving Real Problems with Hexagon’s Digital Workforce, Ep #20

[0:00] Darren Metherell: Couldn’t wait for the digital age to come along. It’s great Now that we’re all on digital and paper’s consigned, so

[0:10] Nick Goellner: Darren may not have a patent, but correct me if I’m wrong, but you trademarked the bee kind, rewind phrase. Is that when you were working on the VCR Oh exhaust? I wish I just tossed that in.

You did, you

Darren Metherell: caught me on a

[0:20] Nick Goellner: curb there. I’m, I’m trying to make something remarkable.

[0:30] Mike Payne: All right. Shop owners, listen up here. I think all of us know we are in one of the most in capital intensive businesses. There is, and margins are tight and we’re, we’re always fighting issues. And then when we make money, what do we do with it?

[0:40] Stock market’s up and down all over the place. Well, I get asked a lot about where can I invest my money? I’m a firm believer as business owners, you’ve gotta invest in yourself first. You need to reinvest capital into yourself. So the number one thing that I’ve done in this industry investing was ProShop, ERP.

[1:00] We’ve been using ProShop since 2018, and my payback literally was within weeks with their per user based pricing. I knew when I made the decision I only needed to save my workers roughly one hour per month. We saw within the first week we were saving multiple hours per day. That type of ROI just doesn’t come along very often.

[1:20] Outside of that, the real value has been able to quickly implement best practices across my entire shop from the time we get an order to the time we ship it. Scaling my business with confidence, being able to go out and know that I can deliver on my promise to deliver quality parts to my customer, and then gaining insights into every job, employee machine, and every process in our business to really drive efficiency and look for opportunities for improvement.

[1:50] That’s where the real value in your business drives. So visit ProShop erp.com, book a demo, and start realizing ROI today. That’s ProShop erp.com.

[2:00] Narrator: Talent is scarce experience. Even more so. Driving a cost and sleepless nights. You may even think to yourself, can I do this? But this new era brings new technology and a different perspective on your operations.

[2:20] What you will hear will turn on a light bulb in your mind, so you can turn out the lights in your shop, get ready to. Sleep soundly while your shop never stops. Get ready for making chips. Lights out with your hosts. Nick Goner, Caleb Mertz and David Buick.

Nick Goellner: Mike,

[2:50] Mike Payne: what’s up buddy?

Nick Goellner: Hey, what’s up man? We’re on a field trip. We’re taking a break from Automation Academy on Lights out to go on a field trip with my buddy Mike. And where are we?

[3:00] Mike Payne: We were at Hex Live and you just didn’t wreck a race car.

Nick Goellner: I was only a half second behind. I know you were so

Mike Payne: close.

Nick Goellner: So yeah, I was in a simulator like NASCAR simulator.

It was

[3:10] Mike Payne: like a real one.

[3:20] Nick Goellner: It was so loud in there, like it feels like you’re in a real car, you’re looking at this screen, you’re in a real car, but like you’re looking at a screen and it feels like you’re driving. And if you do anything like jerk the wheel at all, like you’re in the wall. And poor Nicky, Nick Gonzalez.

Nicky went in the wall. Yep. That was not great. So anyway, but we didn’t hit her with fire extinguishers.

[3:30] Mike Payne: Probably should have.

Nick Goellner: That would’ve been funny. That should be the punishment. That would’ve

Mike Payne: been amazing

[3:40] Nick Goellner: actually. Yeah. But back up here for our second podcast of the day, these bonus episode, this one’s gonna be a lights out episode, which I’m excited about.

’cause anytime I can get ahead of the game, I know you’re like 10 episodes ahead on. Not

Mike Payne: right now. I was there for a while, but

Nick Goellner: yeah, you went on a trip to Europe.

[3:50] Mike Payne: And didn’t have to record

Nick Goellner: the inventory’s kind of backing down here. Yeah.

Mike Payne: Yeah.

[4:00] Nick Goellner: So we have an incredible guest today. It’s a gentleman by the name of Darren Meel, who is the head of sales for the Hexagon Connected Worker.

Welcome to the show, Darren. Cheers, guys. Thanks for having me. Did I get that right? You

Darren Metherell: certainly did. Yeah.

Nick Goellner: Oh, and he’s got a British accent, so I

[4:10] Darren Metherell: thought that was Texas. He could

Nick Goellner: at,

Darren Metherell: yeah. Middle Texas. Yeah.

Nick Goellner: You can say whatever you want and it’s gonna sound intelligent there. That’s the beauty of the, especially

Mike Payne: with us.

[4:20] Darren Metherell: I appreciate that guys. Yeah, I, uh, definitely feel sometimes a little bit in the short club with working a hexagon. There’s a lot of very smart people here.

[4:30] Nick Goellner: Yeah. You were telling us about some people have 19, 20, 21 patents, and how many do you have?

Darren Metherell: I’m still working on my first one. Yeah, so let’s just put it that

Mike Payne: way.

[4:40] The entire team here. That’s probably one of the things this week, I, the stuff you guys are doing across all of your different platforms is absolutely insane.

[4:50] Darren Metherell: It truly is. What I saw from the, uh, keynote today with the Aon robot was just amazing. And when they announced the robotics business a few months back, the fact that they’ve got a product available now, it’s just amazing and what it can do.

I mean, the dexterity in those hands is just amazing.

[5:00] Nick Goellner: Yeah, so it’s a podcast, so it’s hard to describe what we saw, but basically this. Like humanoid robot, it’s got like little wheels for feet and it just rolls around. It’s got real looking hands. It looks like something out of a That Will Smith movie where they all come I robot.

Yeah, I know that’s right. Let’s see what it does. Your ass. So maybe

Mike Payne: that’s what they designed it after.

[5:20] Nick Goellner: It was cool to see and I’m at like four o’clock. There’s four o’clock. Yeah. There’s like use cases of how Yeah, we need to go

Mike Payne: watch that.

Nick Goellner: It’s not just a gimmick to look cool.

[5:30] Darren Metherell: No. We have a couple of beta customers already that are using the product, so it’s gonna be amazing.

Nick Goellner: This world is changing so freaking fast. It’s crazy.

Darren Metherell: Yeah, absolutely. And all power to it, right? Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it’s what we need.

[5:40] Nick Goellner: Yeah, exactly. So take us back, Darren, to how you got involved with this industry and these technological wave that we’re all experiencing. Go back though before all of that to your origin story, if you will.

[5:50] Darren Metherell: Okay, sure. Thanks. Yeah, Darren Mere been in the construction, stroke manufacturing industry for probably about 30 years. Always on the sales side. I’m sales guy at heart. I head up the construction, sorry, the connected worker business here in Hexagon. Our team is about empowering the shop floor worker with real time information that is actionable.

[6:20] How I came into that. Was really, as I say, always been in sales. Started my career back in the day in data, when data was kind like very embryonic and hosting days. And then as time moved through into the internet and the iot just continued with it, and now we live in a connected world. Everything that we do is connected.

[6:30] I laugh with my wife at home, we’ll be talking about. What are we gonna do for dinner? And suddenly, next time I look at my Facebook feed, there’s suggestions. It’s all these passive information that’s listening. My Amazon device, my phone, all listening all the time. When that

Nick Goellner: happens, I feel like I’m under surveillance.

It always creeps me out a little bit

[6:50] Mike Payne: unless it comes in handy. I have wondered about stuff in a conversation. Then all of a sudden, the answers in front of me. It’s kind of nice sometimes too,

Nick Goellner: as he’s describing kind of his start, it’s. Reminded me of you and what you were doing with some monitoring in the early days of Mike Payne.

[7:00] Mike Payne: Yeah, a little bit. I grew up in data also, so out of college was doing shop floor data collection, kind of machine monitoring, getting that data, integrating it with ERP systems and so forth.

[7:10] Darren Metherell: Right? Yeah. Mine was too. Mine was collecting data for, uh, company called JVC was for the Japan Victor Company. Don’t really know if they’re still around a big electronics company back in the day.

[7:20] VCRs camcorders the whole nine yard. And that was what I was collecting data on, was I worked in the service side. So as all these machines that came back in for warranty repairs, I was having to collect lots and lots of data. I had a huge pile of paper on my desk every day, and then at the end of day to file that before I went home.

I couldn’t wait for the digital age to come along. It’s great. Now that we’re all on digital and papers could signed,

[7:40] Nick Goellner: so Darren may not have a patent, but correct me if I’m wrong, but you trademarked the be kind, rewind phrase. When you were working on the VCR Oh exhaust. I wish I just tossed that in.

Speaker 3: You did, you caught me on a curve there.

I’m,

[7:50] Nick Goellner: I’m trying to make something remarkable. You don’t have any patents like all these engineers at Hexagon, so I’m trying to give you a trademark. Just take it.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ll take it. I’ll take anything. You can gimme, to be honest.

[8:00] Nick Goellner: So tell me about your team. Like how big is it? What are you guys focusing on?

How do you make your customers success?

[8:10] Darren Metherell: Yeah, so my team within the Hexagon business is fairly small. We’re a team of five, five professional sales individuals, and when we focus on two areas, we have a direct sales approach. So go and acquire our own customers through going to trade shows, et cetera, et cetera.

[8:20] And the other half of our business is really around empowering the. External, wider Hexagon sales organization and its Channel Hexagon has a very strong channel market, and that side of our business is really where we’re seeing most of the traction now, in that we have lots and lots of different softwares out there that are industry leading within their own segments of the market, and how we are trying to now enhance that reputation by providing connected workers.

[8:50] So taking the technology off of the machine or off of, yeah, off of the machine essentially, and bringing that. Out of the machine and into the worker’s hands. As I say, through disconnected and integrated play, that’s seeing a lot of traction and we’re seeing a lot of interest from various different parts of the Hexagon business in providing them enablement services.

[9:10] So an example that I’d like to maybe share with you is a paperless traveler solution that we just developed for. Some of our production software business on the cabinet side and the woodworking and stone business, but also on our sheet metal fabrication team, whereby we are providing a paperless traveler to reduce and replace paper within these machine shops.

[9:30] Because what we’ve seen and what we’ve experienced is when we’ve gone into these places for them to do their daily work, they’re having to produce 4, 5, 6 inches of paper just to manufacture a job run. And those things get. Out of order, they get misplaced and the whole nine yards start. Where’s Paul right now when you need it, right.

It really starts to go awry really quickly. Our third partner

[9:50] Nick Goellner: is A-A-E-R-P system founder, creator, and he’s all about get rid of the paper. ’cause what you just said,

[10:00] Darren Metherell: right? Absolutely. We’re replacing paper in those workshops. And the benefits, the cost differential alone from what we are providing for this service is really the cost of a Netflix subscription.

[10:10] Plus the cost of the paper they’re buying, plus the cost of the printer cartridge they’re buying. It pays for itself. And as well as then just the efficiencies that they’re seeing in having it all digitalized and it not all going all over the place and so on and so forth. That’s just one solution for the connected

Nick Goellner: one.

[10:20] Exactly. And that’s just, you were telling the start of their journey. You were telling me some before we were recording two or three others, but before we describe those, how do you get presented with the problem in the first place? You talked about kinda your direct sales approach and your strong channel, but.

I feel like you guys can do so many different things. How do you like start solving for that problem? Who brings that problem to you?

[10:40] Darren Metherell: Yeah. We typically call ourselves the problem solver team because everybody likes to talk about the big names, right? The big strategic accounts. But Hexagon as a business has a very long tail of companies that we service, and that middle market is really an area that in any industry, tends to get overlooked a little bit because no one wants to hear of.

[11:00] Mom and pop shop, X, Y, Z, and what they do. Everyone wants to hear the big brand name that globally is recognized. But for us it’s as important, in fact, more important to solve the business problems for those middle tier, middle market customers because that’s really where manufacturing is, the heart of manufacturing.

[11:20] Right? And if we can enable those guys to be more sufficient and more efficient, they’ll stay in business. They’ll invest in their business, and they won’t necessarily be open to having to. Sell out to that big corporation because times are tough, et cetera.

[11:30] Nick Goellner: What’s like an average employee account? An employee count for one of your main customers?

So for one of our regular customers, our employee account is about a hundred employees.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Mike Payne: Okay. Yeah. So

[11:40] Nick Goellner: similar, like how many do you have right now, Mike, altogether in your whole group?

[11:50] Mike Payne: Yeah, I mean, right now about half that with this upcoming merger, it’ll be. 80, I think. Yeah, right, right around that.

Nick Goellner: Okay. So give me an example of a, I’ll describe and Mike, describe your own shop for the guy. You know, what type of business you do and

[12:00] Mike Payne: Yeah, so we’re a job shop about half CNC, half welding and fabrication. Yeah, like I said, call it 40 something employees at any given day. Spread it across two locations.

Fairly close to each other, a couple miles, but still.

Nick Goellner: And what type of work? Mostly oil and gas. Mostly work. Energy, fluid transfer stuff.

[12:20] Mike Payne: Yeah, a lot of oil and gas work. We’re diversifying that, but that’s where the bulk of it is.

Darren Metherell: All right, sweet. And what’s the biggest problem that you see in your day-to-day with your workers?

That’s a loaded question. Alright, earmuffs, if you work at

[12:30] Mike Payne: communication, probably more than anything, whether it’s top down, bottom up, either way. Like think we don’t communicate enough, honestly, whether it’s how something was planned, how something actually went. Yeah, just in general, probably just better collection of all that data, right?

[12:50] I mean, the tribal knowledge part of the data. We’re pretty good at getting the hard data. Because we have a good ERP system, we have machine monitoring, we have a lot of those things, but the transfer of that knowledge back and forth is, doesn’t always happen.

[13:00] Darren Metherell: And in terms of attracting and retaining folk, is that challenging within your segment of the business?

It’s not

[13:10] Mike Payne: bad. We don’t have much trouble retaining at all. The attracting so much. But it’s a problem like it is for everybody. But we’ve also been pretty well right sized right now. We haven’t been needing to. Attract a lot lately.

[13:20] Darren Metherell: One of the things you mentioned about knowledge transfer I thought was quite interesting ’cause that tends to be a challenge that I’m seeing within the customers we service.

[13:30] Most of those, unfortunately, do have an attraction of new workers coming into the market, and one of the things that they are kind of almost being forced to do is. Become more digitalized because I call it the iPhone generation, right? These young individuals are coming into the workplace, they’re getting outta their cars and they’ve got, you know, their a thousand dollars smartphone on them and they’re walking into the manufacturing environment and suddenly they’re presented with pen and paper and you know, hey, I’ve got kids of that age as well, and.

[13:50] They don’t use pens and paper, they just, they’ll screen, yeah. Screen agents. Exactly. They’re all thumbs and fingers. And of course you bring them into a manufacturing environment and ask ’em to start writing stuff down on a clipboard or putting it up on a whiteboard, and it’s real alien to them. So the fact that.

[14:10] Companies are now bringing digital to them through a smart device helps attract those individuals and think that the company’s actually a modern organization is against a paper-based business. Yeah. You hear all the

[14:20] Nick Goellner: time, like no cell phones at work. These guys are just on their cell phones all the time.

[14:30] And there’s a lot of truth to that. Like it drives me crazy sometimes. I’ll walk through our shop and I’ll see our guy sitting there watching something on YouTube, but if you can use the devices that they’re familiar with and. Where it’s productive, the use of the device. It’s helpful. And Mike, you were just talking earlier about your machine monitoring solution that you’re using and you’re like, yeah, they’re just not using it enough.

[14:50] They have the data, but they’re not connecting with it enough. They’re not. Activating the data and using it to drive continuous improvement, where do they have to go to get the data? Is it available for all to see?

[15:00] Mike Payne: It is, I think it goes back to what I was saying, like we collect a lot of data and then what do you do with it?

[15:10] And so how do you transfer that knowledge? What are you learning from the data you’re collecting? And then how are you transferring that throughout the entire organization? We talk about needing to capture tribal knowledge, and I think in a lot of ways we accurately refer to that as like getting that knowledge of how you’ve been doing something for 20 years.

[15:30] That’s, I guess, the definition of tribal knowledge, but like I’ve been trying to explain to my team internally, like we’re creating tribal knowledge every day. Every time we run a job, every time we do anything, we’re creating tribal knowledge. If we don’t capture it, store it and communicate it across the team.

[15:40] Yeah, and that’s again, I think that’s where we, when you ask what’s the biggest thing that I see from the highest level, I just see us collecting and creating. Data every day and not necessarily applying it.

[16:00] Darren Metherell: Yeah. It’s an area that we see a lot. That’s, it’s a very common theme as organizations accumulate this, how do you disseminate that information throughout your business?

[16:10] And one of the other connected worker solutions that we offer, as you mentioned previously, is dashboarding. Right? Is providing that information across the business through, so on the production line, you’ll have. Big screens up, which will show, you know, throughput, OE based data, our operational equipment efficiency data so that people can see what’s happening with the production line.

[16:30] Is that shift make, meeting its metrics and so on. Very important from an organizational standpoint, particularly if they’re offering some form of bonus for achieving goals, et cetera, et cetera. I love, and there you go,

Nick Goellner: right, because I think a lot of times it’s. Obviously the owner, the leaders, they’re like, yeah, this data’s important.

[16:40] But once you tie the improvement of those KPIs to the compensation, whether it be a bonus or just how they’re reviewed, and they know like, oh, if I move the needle for the business, I move the needle for the the bonus structure, Smith household or what, or whoever it is. Like that’s when I think you can really activate the data.

I’m glad you brought

[17:00] Darren Metherell: that up. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it’s about investing or. Bringing in those workers to feel part of that, right? Because if they guys are just coming in every day and they’re doing their eight hours doing banging out X, Y, and Z and so on, and that’s it, they go home and now they don’t actually see what potentially, other than their paycheck, they don’t see anything.

[17:20] But if you start to see that, you get that competit start to get that competitiveness going on, right? Oh my gosh. Shift number one. They knocked out 103% of the quota, man. Shift number two, us. We suck. We’re only at 60 or whatever, you know? So you could start and then shift managers can use that to get their teams moving a bit.

Yes. You get that competitive aspect. Well, I like that you said

[17:40] Nick Goellner: competitive, and I think what we’re talking about in a lot of ways is gamification. That’s like the buzzword for it. You talked about the connected generation and the screen ages, and there’s a lot of gaming. And you can harness that and you can say what are common attributes in games?

[17:50] There’s always like a way to keep score. If you have success, you get more coins or more gear or better weapons or whatever it is. If you can build some of these instead of like hating on it. Be like, oh, they’re on their phone too much, or They’re this way, or they just don’t make people like they used to, which is all true.

[18:10] Then adapt to how they’re making people right now and figure out how to harness that.

[18:20] Darren Metherell: You’re right. You have to adapt to New paradigm. Yeah, to the paradigm. You’re absolutely right. When we see now customers do that, we actually have customers that as part of their standup on their day shift standup, they’ll actually leverage the OE data from the dashboard to set new goals and set, you know, set new, you know, and they’ll actually be specific.

[18:30] They’ll say, Hey, Frank, on line two, you can knock out. 5% more this on this shift, there’s a team bonus. All right, so he’s feeling the pressure then, not just to deliver, but also to help the team get to their bonus. It’s clever. It’s the new way of operating these people. I like that. You keep using

Nick Goellner: OEE in lights out.

[18:50] We’re in the middle of this Automation Academy series, and the way I’m going through it is I’ve created this narrative and this made up story of these two different shops. The one guy walks through, the other guy’s shop, the golden boy of the town, and he sees all these dashboards like you described, and he sees all these metrics and he’s focused on spindle utilization.

[19:10] And there’s other metrics on that same dashboard like o eee and spindle utilization. Usually you wanna higher number. If you’re not making chips, you’re not making money. That’s what we say to end every making chips episode, but. If you automate the wrong part of the process, you’ll improve your utilization like crazy.

[19:30] But you might just be like clogging the biggest bottleneck you already had. You might be making your problem worse. You may have quality suffer, and so break down OEE, what that is, what that’s important or why that’s important for us.

[19:40] Darren Metherell: Yes. From my customer’s point of view, it’s all about making sure that they’re getting the maximum return on.

[19:50] A lot of my customers operate in a high volume capacity business making springs, for example. They’re in a competitive world where their competitors will offer. Tenths of a cent price differential. And unless you are able to be efficient within the way in which you operate, you’ll lose that contract.

[20:10] It’s that cutthroat. Yeah. So the more OEE information that they can provide both at the shop floor, but also into middle management and above, because middle management need that information to when they’re doing their pressing for a new bid for something. So the data is king in that respect. And the more that it can be mined through, we use power bi.

[20:30] Yeah, the Microsoft solution. Microsoft, yeah. We, yeah, we, as everyone knows, hexagon and Microsoft have a strong partnership together. So we leverage the Microsoft BI tool and really, really pull very key information that is meaningful to a customer. And the fact that it can be tailored to different parts of that business is also very important.

[20:50] Nick Goellner: And that’s the connected is the word that I think differentiates between spindle utilization and oee spindle. Utilization’s good. But OEE, you’ve got your availability. Your performance and your quality, so your runtime. Over your planned production hours, your actual machine speed over the target machine speed, and then the number of good products over the total products, right?

[21:10] So if you don’t have a fully connected system, you can’t get OEE. If you have monitoring only at the asset level or the machine tool level, you can get your spindle utilization, but you don’t know. Increasing utilization is just clogging a bottleneck. Make more bad parts.

[21:20] Darren Metherell: Yeah. Or making or, yeah, you’re making, yeah.

Your failure rate. You’re tossing two out of every three bottles that you’re manufacturing or whatever, and that’s

[21:30] Nick Goellner: what I tried to do in that narrative is explain like if you hyperfocus on the wrong KPI, that isn’t a true measure of business performance. You might improve it and actually hurt your company.

Darren Metherell: Yeah. You has to be across the board. You’re absolutely correct in that respect.

[21:40] Mike Payne: Manufacturers, what is your biggest headache? Is it measuring, improving profitability, gaining efficiencies with AI and automation? Maybe tightening up your cybersecurity, maybe getting your business ready to sell. At CLA, their goal is to know you and help you with challenges like these and more every day.

[22:00] CLA helps manufacturers tap into millions in revenue and cost savings. One manufacturer that boosted capacity and revenues by 15 to 20%. Visit c connect.com to hear real success stories and learn how you can grow your top and bottom line.

[22:20] Nick Goellner: Gimme some other examples of real solutions, kind of case studies.

For us, you

Darren Metherell: kind of mentioned, as you were just mentioning there, yeah. Quality is another one. Right? So for we have a very strong quality.

[22:30] Nick Goellner: That’s what most people in our world consider Hexagon is like, oh, there’s CMMS and measurement and quality stuff.

Darren Metherell: Yeah. So again, we focus at, quality is a broad word in the manufacturing space, right?

[22:40] It’s a de definition of quality for the connected worker is ultimately the end product, right? Is that product when it’s manufactured fit for purpose to go out, either to distribution, to sale, or wherever it gets. So. Does that quality, is it a quality product that’s been manufactured? And final quality inspection is another workflow that we have.

We have inventory management where you, again, leveraging, see

[23:00] Nick Goellner: how he says that word? I I say sounds so much better. Say inventory. I sound like a D. He’s like, say it again. He. Inventory.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Darren Metherell: Okay. So you don’t want me to say schedule or schedule then?

[23:10] Nick Goellner: No, it’s just better. Like, everything you say just sounds so damn good.

Oh dear. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Darren Metherell: So

Nick Goellner: you’re making me feel, you’re making me feel

Speaker 3: clever

[23:20] Nick Goellner: now. Yeah. I appreciate that. I’m gonna, I’m gonna walk out here. Happy man. Maybe the software engineers at Hexagon don’t make you feel bright, but you hang out with me and Mike, you’ll feel like a genius. That’s right.

[23:30] I love it. I love it. Thanks guys. I, I’ll come back for some more. Not to derail you from what you were explaining, but your, the quality workflow.

[23:40] Darren Metherell: Yeah. So quality workflows is another area. Inventory management. Integration is a big play. So this is another area of connected worker, right? You can’t ultimately offer a connected worker solution without two key things, mobility.

[23:50] So you need a, a device to actually get, receive the information. Like a tablet or a phone or some, some sort of device. Yeah. Or even a PC screen, a touch screen, you see? Big touch screens now, they’re pretty cool things that we’re seeing. More and more companies deploy those on the shop floor. And then the other area is integration.

[24:00] Again, realtime information has to be realtime data coming from systems of record presented in a format that is relevant to the operator or the user of that information. So that information has to be integrated from an ERP system, from a PLM, from an MES, whatever their systems of record are that are relevant to that person’s function in terms of information.

So instead of siloed

[24:30] Nick Goellner: business systems that you have to connect yourself, you’re working on integrating all that so that at the user’s device or whatever, they’re getting the right information that’s pertinent to what they’re doing. Absolutely.

[24:40] Mike Payne: You’re taking the, you could come into my shop, take my entire tech stack from my ERP to my quality management, all those types of things, and then.

Do the integration to pull all those together to give us the information we need.

Darren Metherell: Yes,

Mike Payne: sir.

Darren Metherell: Absolutely. As long

[24:50] Mike Payne: as this, whether it’s a hexagon tech or something. Oh yeah, no, something else. We’re completely agnostic.

Nick Goellner: We’re complete agnostic. So it’s more of a, like you’re sell, you’re providing a service more than you’re selling a branded product or

Darren Metherell: essentially Yes.

[25:00] It’s a hexagon based product. We are Hexagon and we are a manufacturing intelligence business within that division. The solutions are. As your colleagues said, are integrated agnostically. As long as we can get access to an API, then we can pull in whatever information that we need to present the user with the information.

[25:20] Nick Goellner: And for those that don’t know, an API is what Application Programming Interface. It’s basically an open connection that allows you to translate one systems information into another. Basically connect the dots there. Yeah.

[25:30] Darren Metherell: That’s our preferred methodology of connection. Now, some systems, again, manufacturing, we come across everything in manufacturing, there’s a lot of stuff out there.

[25:40] Predates that, but, so if we can get even a Excel spreadsheet, we can pull an Excel spreadsheet, we can take the data off an Excel spreadsheet. So you take a data

Mike Payne: dump every night at midnight or whatever and yes,

[25:50] Nick Goellner: I usually take my data dumps at eight in the morning right when I wake up. Nick, since we’re talking about it, Hey, you opened the door.

[26:00] I thought this was, you walked right on in, sat down, no pun intended. I’m, look, I’m looking at our editor right now and she’s making the cut, so like we’re cutting that out. John, you’re not supposed to, you gotta leave that in. Gotta gotta have some humor. Right. Okay. So after we’ve taken our data dump, that’s when we Go ahead, have breakfast.

[26:20] Right. Okay. I thought for a second that you’re just kind of more providing a service and you’re going into all these agnostic different. Products or systems or whatever, and then dashboarding it and helping it become more relevant and more accessible and all that. But then you said, we have a product.

We’re selling a product. So what’s the name of the product?

[26:30] Darren Metherell: So the products fall into different categories. There’s the quality category, there’s the inspections, there’s audits. There are four main areas of our business, and then there’s a whole set subset of workflows that are applicable because again, we’re not trying to.

[26:50] Provide a one size fits all here. Manufacturing organizations, manufacturing shops, all have different needs and we prefer to look at it that we’re, we’re pain solving, we’re problem solving. I’d rather come in, have a five minute conversation with, Hey, what’s the things that are keeping you Mr. The plant manager awake at night as it relates to your shop floor workers?

I can’t address, you know, whatever. But in this area here, what’s the kind of things that you would need to see an improvement on and what’s keeping your weight?

[27:10] Nick Goellner: And I can tell you’re in sales ’cause you’re very good at the asking questions and probing and you’re getting some stuff outta Mike here. And that’s what I always tell my team.

[27:20] Sales is just asking questions and listening. It’s not as much about talking. And so when you heard Mike talking about some of the challenges that they have at Hill and whether it be. Really using the data from machine monitoring or just general communication issues that he was describing, or tribal knowledge, you are like, okay, it could be this product or it could be that product.

Is that how your mind

[27:40] Darren Metherell: is working in your role? It’s less about product and more about solutioning. Sure. Right. You know, and sometimes we now live in this world where overused words have become synonymous with everything. Solutioning could be anything to anybody, but in our world, I wanna address a problem or address a pain point and, and it’s all about trying to provide a return on any form of investment a company is making outside of their own business.

[28:00] They have to see a return on that investment, and they have to see value if you don’t, and again, overuse word value, right? But again, if I’m providing a solution that provides value, and I can prove and get that, and more importantly. Is about time to value, right? Time to value is important in manufacturing because we live in a world where I say people will swap contracts for 10% on something.

[28:20] So if I can provide time to value to you, and some of my solutions are what we class as called out of the box. So they are standardized solutions that you can be up and running within 10 working days. And the cost of that is like the cost of a Netflix subscription. Yeah, so you know your monthly Netflix post, so at cost on Netflix subscription, I could improve your efficiency in this area that you’ve mentioned, the pain point, and I can have it up and running in 10 days and it’s gonna cost you like 250 bucks.

[28:50] Oh, buy it’s, yeah. It’s not really a lot, a big commitment in the scheme of things. That’s two fills of my truck and gas

[29:00] Nick Goellner: in the example Mike gave where. There’s tribal knowledge that needs to get unlocked from the veteran team members’ heads and into everybody else’s head. Are you solutioning? Is anything jumping into your mind like things that you could do to help a shop like that?

[29:10] Darren Metherell: Yes, there most definitely is in that respect, and we probably need to dive into a little bit more detail, but assuming it’s around how you operate this particular machine and it’s the tribal knowledge around how to operate that to get the most efficiency out of it, we would take that. Tribal dump of how do you operate this machine?

[29:30] How do you make it that is efficient? We document that down into a digital solution and then provide that as a checklist to an operator. So an operator can come in assuming that he’s certified to use it. And there’s another workflow we have where again, you log on and you can only be assigned to work on machines that you are certified for.

[29:40] Very important in the construction industry where crane operators and so on, certifications on certain things, it’s

[29:50] Nick Goellner: almost like a learning management system. Then knowledge management systems and back and yeah. And then back to gamification too. I’m gonna get paid more this year ’cause I’m certified on eight different machines and I was able to get certified because the tribal knowledge was there and I was able to consume it and then apply it.

[30:00] And now I’m certified so I’m more valuable to the company. ’cause I used to only be able to run three different types of

[30:10] Darren Metherell: machines or something like that. Absolutely. And it’s all been case of. I just followed a checklist that was digitalized. I was able to learn from it and boom. Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome.

[30:20] Nick Goellner: Do you have any other, like kinda more tangible solutions that you wanna share before we wrap up here? Examples or case studies? Where we shop, we have about. A thousand employees, but it’s broken across a few different businesses. Sheet metal fabrication and machining. Just like Mike, both just general metalworking.

[30:40] We can make a lot of different things. We have machine monitoring as well. I think programming like a. Staying ahead of the machines and always making sure that we have the program, the work, holding the material all ready to go so that the machines can run lights out. Like I don’t think we get enough lights out hours at my company.

Is there anything that

Mike Payne: will you ever,

[31:00] Nick Goellner: until we’re running almost entirely lights out, right? Like we always have something to chase, but what about that? What about shops that wanna run with more? Unattended lights out, automated processes. Do you have a solution in mind that your team can help with?

Darren Metherell: Yes, we do.

[31:10] Yeah. Again, leveraging sensor technology that both inside Hexagon but also external, again, we’re agnostic from that. Bringing sensors in, bringing in AI to help. With automation of processes. Absolutely. We do that all day, every day. So sensors can kinda like what? Bring your maintenance to more predictive instead of reactable people.

[31:30] Predictive, yeah. But also help with ensuring that the flow within the production plant is more automated without the need for someone to be physically there checking what’s going on. Camera technology, we use cameras now for quality inspections. Camera over as a piece of one area of our business, we really focus is on specialty vehicles.

[31:50] An RV comes out of the production line. Or a trailer comes off of the production line. It’s captured, it’s scanned by a camera over the top, everything is reported as fine, and then it’s inventory tagged, RFID tagged, and now it goes into the yard That RFID information is loaded into the system so that the stock is recorded into the system so that they can immediately sell it or ship it out to a dealer as whatever it is.

That’s cool.

[32:10] Nick Goellner: Yeah, so it, it’s almost like. You have a bit of a cheat code with working for Hexagon because there’s so many different solutions and some are out of the box, some are a bit more custom, but how often are you like, yeah, there’s really nothing I can do to help you. We don’t have that product available, or we don’t have that solution available, does it?

Do

[32:30] Darren Metherell: you run into into that? It happens? Oh yeah. Most definitely. We. In software, in the software world, it’s time and money, right? You can always do something, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. In our world, in manufacturing, which is where we play, we live in the here and now, right? We have roadmaps and et cetera, but our customers, our mid-tier customers are typically operating production lines that are 25 to.

[32:50] 30 plus years of age, right? They’re not about to throw that out and go and buy the ladies production line that cost X. You know, it’s just not what they do. So for us, it’s about making sure that we provide more life into their investments that they have today, and that’s by adding sensors to a line. That line may not have any.

[33:10] So to get to the point whereby you can be more lights out, you need more automation on this, we can add that information into a legacy plant that doesn’t necessarily have that.

[33:20] Mike Payne: The whole conversation is, it’s really intriguing to me. ’cause if I go back to the like mid late nineties when I was doing manufacturing software shop for data collection, it was the same thing.

[33:30] We’re walking around a shop, identifying pieces of paper, identifying data that they’re trying to collect and figuring out how to automate that. The difference. What, 30 years later now is how much of it’s like integration for you of standard products and then there’s obviously there’s gonna be custom interfaces and all that.

[33:50] We were doing it, Nick, you’ve heard me talk about this, like in machine monitoring. I could get you the same data 30 years ago out of that CNC machine that you can get today, I charged you a half a million dollars to do it. The companies today are, you know, it’s $75 a month per machine or something. Yeah.

I mean, like it’s, yeah. That’s the

[34:10] Darren Metherell: subscription level stuff. Yeah, because, because it’s been standardized and that’s the piece you mentioned earlier. You know, most of my business is I want you to buy an out of the box solution because, and the reason why I want you to do that is ’cause I want you to get time to value.

[34:30] Yeah, I want you up and running. I want you for very little investment, start to see value and then we’ll come back in 90 days and we’ll say, all right guys, hey, great. Has it been running? You know, what would you in an ideal world like to see tweaked? To make it more specific to, yeah, fill some gaps here and there, and then we’ll start filling in gaps.

[34:40] And then once you’ve seen the value, you’ve seen the value. So then we go, that piece would be customized. It would be specific to you. You’ve got a budget for this or thoughts in mind, and then we can start to work on it together. Or more importantly, you could start to go, okay, well yeah, there’s my roadmap.

[35:00] I’d like to and put into the budget for next year or the year after, or whatever the timeframe. But you’ve got a roadmap. And that’s the thing with the connected worker business is that. I will get you up and running with cost effective digitalized solutions today. And then over time we can customize them and adapt them to be more specific to you and your business to take advantages of what you need to be more

Mike Payne: competitive.

[35:20] And that’s what’s so cool for me to hear. ’cause when I was in that space. It was just the largest of companies in the world that could afford to do all of this. And now you can bring that.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. I mean, he started by saying, a hundred people shops your size,

[35:30] Mike Payne: right? Yeah. Now you can bring that down to a shop and I can experience those same efficiencies in a shop my size.

[35:40] Darren Metherell: Yeah. And in our cabinet vision customer base, that’s in the wooden stone space, making kitchen cabinets, et cetera, they’re typically sub 25 employee shops. Yeah, they are. You know, or even some instances, sub 10, 10 employee shops, they need digitalization because they need to be competitive within their market space.

[35:50] So if I’m gonna go in there and try to sell ’em something for a hundred grand, they’re gonna laugh at me all day long. I’m wasting mine and their time at that point. But if I’m going in there and saying, Hey, I can provide you a solution for 200 bucks a month.

[36:10] Nick Goellner: Right, and maybe over time as they go from. 20 people to a hundred people or whatever, you’re just like alongside figuring out what that next need is and they can build over time with you.

[36:20] Darren Metherell: Absolutely. And that’s the piece, again, time to value and we can evolve together. And sometimes you may just wanna stay where you’re at, which is fine, but just again, just like our friends on Netflix, right? Yeah. Hey, then they want to add you to get this subscription, that subscription. Before you know it, you’re up at a thousand dollars a month, right?

Nick Goellner: So. What are you most excited about with the future of your team, the Connected Worker program that you’ve got going on? Like, what’s the Man, I just can’t wait to see

[36:40] Darren Metherell: this happen. So for us, there’s two tracks. One is when you see the announcement today with the robotics and Aon Eon Aon, I must pronounce it correctly, eon oid with the little wheel, the humanoid robot.

[37:00] I mean that connecting that into the workplace, right? In terms of being able to, because again, now, you know, at the end of the day that’ll have a an API interface. We’ll be able to. Pull, you know, we had to send information to it to go do a job, but pull the information out as well. So we’ll be able to track the efficiencies of these things and enhance that.

[37:20] So that side is one thing, but for me it’s about what more can I do to help manufacturers that have got systems that are, that they’ve invested in, that they own, that we can just get more out of hexagon’s. A good example of that, we have a number of portfolio production software solutions that really need.

[37:40] Modern day interfaces into, they’re fit for purpose. They’re used widely in the automotive industry. We have one particular product that’s used by just about every single automotive manufacturer, and when I see these quality recalls that we all get played with on our vehicles. I know that my platform could solve, not necessarily the, but certainly you wouldn’t have be recalling a hundred thousand vehicles.

[38:00] You might have only had to recall a hundred, you know, 10,000 or something like that, which is meaningful in their world. So it’s more about what my technology, as we evolve that and we’re constantly evolving the connected worker portfolio, what can I do to help the investments that companies have made today?

[38:20] I don’t want you to have to throw out ERP salespeople. I always come in and trying to get you to replace your ERP with a new ERP. That’s a really. Difficult sell. Why not enhance what the investment they made, let’s say, say to me, money RP sucks. In which case then there’s an opportunity to replace the ERP, but which we don’t do.

[38:30] But if you’ve made an investment in ERP, let me get more data, let me pull more data out of it to make it more efficient for your business.

[38:40] Nick Goellner: And I’ve heard that, yeah, from a like hard assets. And they even know the ERP too, like you’re trying to. More value from what they already have by amplifying what they’ve got going on.

Yeah. Extract more value from the investments you’ve made.

[38:50] Mike Payne: Yeah. I think that’s such an important takeaway from this whole conversation. ’cause everybody’s heard me talk a hundred times about like, I like to buy shops instead of build them. So when I acquire a shop, I end up with equipment that might be two years old, might be 20 years old.

[39:00] I get tooling workholding, like everything I get. Can be, you know, it could be really old. It’s just the way they’ve been doing it for 30 years. But in every case, like I can’t afford to go in and replace all my machines, but I can afford to buy some tombstones from Nick and some tooling and the types of things that make those machines run better.

[39:20] Maybe put a robot on putting high speed cooling on one whatever, or high pressure coolings. And it’s the same thing with the software, like you’re talking about. Like let’s use what we’ve got. May not be perfect, but we can build it there, generate cash flow, which then now we can reinvest in those next phases.

[39:40] Darren Metherell: Exactly. A roadmap gives mid-tier businesses a roadmap to make them more competitive, to win more business, which is ultimately what we’re trying to achieve here. Yeah.

[39:50] Nick Goellner: I think a connected worker is a more competitive worker. They’re a more empowered worker. If you do a lot of the things we’re talking about and you provide that, you connect the worker to this information, you’re really making an investment in leadership.

[40:00] If it’s just a cog in a wheel and just do the same thing over and over again, you’re not really investing in creating future leaders the way you could be by connecting the worker, and you’ve just given so many different ways that you do that. So thank you for joining. Lights Out. You can’t run a shop.

[40:20] Lights out without. Connecting systems and making systems work together and ultimately work without somebody sitting there babysitting it. So I think you have a big role to play in the mission of what we’re trying to accomplish with this podcast. Yeah. Cheers guys. I appreciate your time today. Thank you.

[40:30] Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your British accent. And with that, we will turn the lights out on this episode.

[40:40] Speaker 7: Hey guys, it’s Nick and I’m so excited about Machine Shop Mastery being part of making chips. So my good friend Paul Van Mader, he’s been a partner. He’s been a sponsor, he is been a friend and he’s been involved with making chips for a long time.

[40:50] And now his podcast that I love is part of our group. Here’s why you should listen to it, Paul. Just run a software ERP company for machine shop leaders. Paul was a machine shop leader. He loves machine shop leaders. He’s the one leading the charge to thank all the machinists out there for all the incredible work they do and the.

[41:10] Best thing about ’em is he actually knows how to make their incredible work turn into an incredible business. So when you listen to Machine Shop Mastery, you’re gonna hear Paul and his guests talk about exactly what they’ve done to overcome their challenges and make their business successful. You’re gonna get those kind of like heart wrenching stories that tell you what people have been through, things that you can empathize with because you’re a manufacturing leader too.

[41:40] So check out Machine Shop Mastery and learn how to master your machine shop. Hosted by my good friend Paul Van Mader, under the Making Chips Network. Thanks.