Transcript of Inspiring the Next Generation for Manufacturing Careers with Mike Nager

David (00:00) Welcome, you’re listening to the IT/OT Insider Podcast. I’m your host, David. Subscribe to get the latest insights shaping the world of industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. Today I’m joined by Mike Nager. Mike is a passionate smart manufacturing advocate. He has been to hundreds of production locations and Mike, already looking forward to some interesting stories about those visits. He’s a business development executive at Festo Didactic. Festo Didactic is part of the global Festo group. They are an equipment and solution provider for technical education. That’s, I think, really, really important nowadays. Next to this role, he’s the vice president of marketing and sales at Industrial Insights. They’re a boutique publishing and consulting firm with a focus on smart manufacturing and industry 4.0. That’s a perfect fit for this podcast. And finally, Mike has published several very cool books, a children’s book titled All About Smart Manufacturing with some very nice and fun illustrations. And for the bigger ones amongst us, his Smart Students Guide. So lots of things to talk about. Mike, thank you for joining me. Mike (01:15) David, thank you very much for the invitation. I appreciate getting the word out about smart manufacturing. As you mentioned in your introduction, it’s something that I’ve been focused on for about 10 years now. And what I find is that there’s never a shortage of people that have an interest in it or people that should have an interest in it. So I take every opportunity to be able to talk to folks from around the world. because it definitely is a worldwide interest right now, for sure. David (01:46) Absolutely, absolutely. And growing day by day. Hey, can you, as a starter, you walk me through your interesting career? Mike (01:58) Yeah, so I am an electrical engineer by education and throughout my career, which is over 20 years now, I work for manufacturers of industrial controls. So I’ve spent my career at manufacturing entities, but the products that these companies that I work for made are components that go into every other manufacturing industry. David (02:25) Yep. Yep. Mike (02:26) So you can think of them as widgets or components or small items that make up the control system to control the processes of manufacturing operations. So it’s kind of a unique spot in the field because the positions that I held were customer facing, service, applications, marketing, sales, product, product marketing, and development. So it required a lot of interaction with the end user of these particular products. So after you do it for about 20 years and you start calculating your mind, it’s like, OK, I’ve been to a lot of different automotive plants and in addition chemical plants and pharmaceuticals, toy production, battery, some of the utilities, trains and electric utilities and water. utilities kind of fall into that mix too. They’re kind of closely related in applications. You start to realize, that’s kind of special. Not a lot of people in the general public, at least, have been in hundreds and hundreds of different plants seeing how things are manufactured in the scale and precision of which they’re being manufactured. So yeah, we’ll get into it. But that’s part of my mission is to David (03:44) Yeah. Hmm. Mike (03:55) provide a window into the world of manufacturing so that the general public and folks that don’t have direct experience in it understand it a little bit better. David (04:05) Yeah. Okay. Maybe dangerous question, but were there like certain industries you, you thought like, wow, this is something I like. I like those more, or, this is things I’ve, I’ve, I’ve beforehand, I would, I would, I would never expected this to happen or. Mike (04:19) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You you you think of the things that you you don’t like come to the top of the mind. So the first time you go to a pulp and paper plant, for example, you don’t realize kind of the odor and the smells that are present in processing wood pulp into paper. I also went to places that were making things like car tires, you know, some of the big manufacturers of tires. David (04:45) Yes. Mm-hmm. Mike (04:53) And you quickly learn that you don’t want to wear any clothing that you wish to preserve because they use carbon black. Think of the charcoal that you might use in a grill outside, but super, super, super fine. And a little drop of that gets, and when you try to clean it up, it just smears. So then if you got a little bit on your pants or even on the table, you try to wipe it up, it just smears, and then you get something else, and then you just can’t get it clean. David (05:02) Yeah. wow. Mike (05:21) I’m like, my gosh You know that’s you have to give hats off to the people that are working in these types of environments And then also the folks working in semiconductor and in the pharmaceutical industry that have to suit up in the big bunny suits the PPE the personal protective suits You know, it takes a half an hour to get into it. It’s kind of hot. It’s clumsy. You’re wearing the goggles. So you have limited vision David (05:30) Yeah. Yeah. Mike (05:52) So those are the kinds of things that really stick in your mind from a little bit of a negative standpoint, but then also it gives you a better appreciation for. David (06:01) yeah. absolutely. Absolutely. I also visited a fertilizer plant once in my plain clothes. And then afterwards I didn’t do the plain clothes any longer. one thing I still remember is, and this may be also a bit about training, is one of the things I always wanted to, well, I’ve never been an operator, but I wanted to understand what it took to… Mike (06:06) huh. Yep. David (06:30) operate in my case in a chemical environment. So at a certain point in time, I followed this training on how to access a closed environment with hazardous chemicals. So that means that you really have to do this very thick rubber suits on with air and those things. I followed that training on one of the hottest days of the year. Mike (06:57) Uh-huh. Uh-huh. David (07:00) gave me a very good understanding what it takes to enter a closed environment. Mike (07:03) Yes. Yeah, yeah. And that safety is so important. You know, when we look at any manufacturing operation or any sort of utility operation, you know, that reminds me, you know, many, many years ago, I was doing some work with New York Transit Company. So we had to go down into the subway. And before you do that, when you’re back behind the scenes in the subway, you have to take a safety training course. And part of it is there’s these little cutouts on the track so when the subway comes there’s a signal and then you have to like kind of fit yourself in this little indentation and let the train go by. So you know even something simple like that you know. David (07:41) wow. So that means that you always need to be aware of the nearest place to go to when you’re down there. Mike (07:59) Yeah, yeah, yeah, most definitely. You know, similar to the chemical and petrochemical plants, know, visitors typically have to go through the half an hour video and on safety. this alarm goes off and you’re outside, you look for the flag that shows the direction of the wind and, you know, run in that direction and, you know, not the other way and as fast as you can. David (08:04) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s I’m now three years out, but I still have the I still have a lot of those reflexes still remain. So and then and then at a certain point in time, so that’s a very interesting career. And then at a certain point in time, Mike, you decide I’m going to write a children’s book. Mike (08:30) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, so about 10 years ago, I made a little bit of a shift in my career. So up until that point, I was definitely involved in the industrial controls world, helping other manufacturers automate or make their production more efficient or more productive in some way. But 10 years ago, I shifted. did join Festo Didactic in the United States. And the Festo Didactic division. of the Festo Corporation is focused solely on technical education. So our customer base is typically not other manufacturers or people involved in production, but the educators that are teaching the skills that are needed to be inside that production environment. So a lot of my customers are technical schools. David (09:29) Yep. Mike (09:38) or in the United States we call them community colleges sometimes, typically a two year degree that when someone graduates they’re considered qualified to be a technician of some sort, an automotive technician, maintenance technician, you name it, but working in a factory environment, not a residential or a commercial environment typically. So I was able to take some of my knowledge from my previous work Bring it into this technical education field so Most of my day I’m talking either to a professor or a dean of a university or of a college and they have this idea That they need a new Hands-on laboratory that will kind of mimic the German style of learning by doing you that the German System is a mired throughout the world for its apprentice program where they’re getting young people you know, starting at 14 or 15 years of age into a tract program. And then, you know, there’s a lot of people with these skills that are required to run the German operations. Well, we don’t have that in the US to anywhere to that degree. There’s a few outlying companies that that might implement that model. But we’re relying on the public education system to create the folks, at least with the basic skills to do these jobs. David (10:39) Mm-hmm. Have you seen in one of the previous podcasts, when we talked, when I talked to, to, John Weiss, he said something very interesting. said, there, there has been a time where it was, I would say very cool and, and, and good, to have an, I would say a job in manufacturing, a blue color, job, so to say. And then the last, I don’t know how many years, but let’s take, I don’t know, decade to decades. There was this shift to, if you want, if you want to have a. job with well protected, good pay that you have to go for these, would say the white collar jobs, the office jobs, higher education, et cetera. Now, at least in Europe, I’ve seen that shifting again back to it’s really important to be technically trained as well. And not only important, you can also make a very, very decent living with that. Have you seen similar? trends in the US. Mike (12:06) Yes, David 100 % so, you know, I I’m of the generation where that message was very very strong, know, so, you know, I had gone to high school in the 1980s finished college by you know 1990 ish, know something of that nature and that message was super strong and and why was it strong? Well right around that time, you know the world economic model shifted to one of globalization, right so There was a lot of thought and a lot of power in the political realm that allowed this globalization to start occurring right around then. And what did you see? You saw that all these towns in the Midwest of the United States started to be called the Rust Belt. And the Rust Belt meant that these factories were just shutting down and production and jobs were being shifted overseas to someplace. You know, and that could be as close as Canada or Mexico, which are our only bordering countries. Or it could be in Southeast Asia or eventually China. You know, back then China was not what China is today. I always use an example of saying, well, yes, this is a case study and shows just how important manufacturing is. OK, because it’s. It’s one of the few force multipliers in our economy. You something that’s a prime driver of wealth creation is manufacturing. There’s not too many other industries that can claim that. The other industries take the wealth it’s already created and shift it mold it and do something else with it. But we got creating stuff. So that message trickling down to people of my generation and everyone since was yes, you you need a four-year degree. David (13:39) Yeah. Yeah. Mike (13:59) which is kind of a certification when you think about it. And you don’t want any of those jobs because first of all, they’re dark and they’re dangerous and they’re dirty. And second of all, they might not even be here because we’re going to ship them all over overseas. And the name of the game is, where is the lowest cost per unit production? you know, and that was that’s what drove the global economy for David (14:02) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mike (14:28) for 30 plus years now. It’s okay, we’re gonna make all these widgets and we wanna make the lowest cost widget possible. And if that happens to be just halfway around the world, well, that’s okay. We’ll build a whole, this is right around the time when logistics and supply chain management terminology started to come out and people are like, supply chain management, what’s that? well, we have to create these huge boats and cargo vessels to be able to. produce things from one end of the country and move it over to the place where it’s going to be utilized. So sometimes in my seminars, I joke, know, there are UFOs and aliens from other planets with a big telescope looking at Earth and seeing how we’re producing things. And they’re like, OK, this guy in New Jersey in the United States is using this little widget, but it came from 8,000 miles away. It seems crazy. David (15:24) Yes, yes. Mike (15:27) Why didn’t they just make it across the street? So sorry for the long winded answer, but yeah, we felt that pressure very, very much. But as of the last few years, five years, the tide has turned. The laws of supply and demand take place also in the labor market. So now as a country, we have so few people proportionately that know how to fix motors or program robots or troubleshoot a programmable logic controller that those job salaries and opportunities are actually rising. And I have many examples of programs where students can go for two years. Maybe they don’t even get the full two years and they get one year or even one semester of this hands-on experience. they now can quadruple their earning power from what they were before. So maybe they were at McDonald’s, which in some regions will pay $15 or $20 an hour. In the US, it’s not bad anymore by any stretch, but they could make $40 or $50 an hour in all the overtime and things of that nature. So the tide is turning. and it’s just in time because now this global model that we just talked about seems to be collapsing or at least shifting and changing as we speak it seems. what does that mean? Well, theoretically it should mean more production, more manufacturing in places like the United States and Western Europe where it wasn’t seen as a huge priority before. David (16:58) Mm-hmm. It’s a big challenge. Indeed, also now in Europe, we’ve seen a lot of companies, well, maybe not closing down, at least lots of jobs are getting lost. High pressure on a lot of companies who are producing a product here, which also gets produced in other countries with lower wages. maybe more supply for all the raw materials, less regulation. It’s quite a challenge. Mike (17:58) Yeah, yeah, and and that’s definitely you know another another example. I like to bring up is the fast fashion industry so You know H is you know like a retailer and then there’s a whole bunch of other ones that follow this fast fashion Paradigm where you know you buy clothing and it’s either for single use or for just a very small amount of time that you you’d actually wear one month two months David (18:05) Mmm. Mike (18:26) summer of 2025, I’m going to get this and then I toss it out. But when you look at the environmental costs of the industry, it’s a little bit staggering, you know, when you think about this t-shirt that, okay, maybe it costs five euros or six dollars or something of that nature, that people in a mall in New York are purchasing and you trace it back and, okay, the cotton came from India and it was assembled in Malaysia and the buttons came from China. and went on the ship. And then there’s examples where they actually ship the unused inventory, because this is the dirty little secret of mass production, is a lot of the stuff that gets produced doesn’t actually get used. It gets wasted. Actually gets sent back to Europe, of all places, and is incinerated and used to help with power production in northern Europe. So again, another kind of crazy example when you look at it. David (19:29) Absolutely. Mike (19:30) from the thing. So there’s a lot of opportunities to make things better on a global scale. just depend. It just takes our collective mindset to start shifting away from the per unit cost of something and look at the total cost of ownership and then the total cost in society and for the environment of this stuff. David (19:44) Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so when I was going through your children’s book, saw you talk about robots and you talk about apps and all these, would say, yeah, think words a child should know about. what I found most interesting was it’s mainly about people. It always comes down to people. Mike (20:18) Yes. Yes, yes. So, you know, with my experience in automation, you know, that I’ve had, you know, ever since I started working, I’ve heard about the lights out factory, right? So, you know, we’re heading towards the lights out factory. And what does that mean? Okay, it there’s not going to be any people, right? We just press the button. We don’t need any lights because the machine don’t need lights. And every day we can just come and we can reap the harvest of the machines. And I’ve literally been hearing that for like 30 years. And it always seems like it’s five to 10 years out. Lights Out Factory is 10 years away and always will be, in my opinion. So it’s like my dad used to say, he was a big guy. We used to have a series of magazines here in the US called Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. And what it would do is it would take kind of complex things in the mechanical world and provide it to the general public so that you could read about the latest and smart cars or smart highways. And in the 1950s, there was always this concept of the cars that would be able to be turned into an airplane and you’d just be able to fly. he would get the magazine in 1960 and read it. in 1990, he’d get the same magazine and would still be talking about the smart roads and driverless. So it kind of reminds me of that. So people are so, so important, and they’re always going to be. David (21:33) Yes. Mike (21:51) Super important is at least for the next coming decades. I’m I’m sure but but you know the the manufacturing Environment is such that the skills are changing very very rapidly. So so even an operator in the plant Whose whose job it previously was was just to make sure the machine is running and Maybe the feed the machine with raw products and take finished products out Even that position is changing where you have to, those folks have to develop more of a production mindset. Like my job’s not tending the machine, it’s making sure 100 components are produced in my shift. And being able to understand like, if this continues, I’m not gonna produce 100 units during my shift. I should take some sort of action. David (22:35) Yeah. Yeah, there is also this interesting paradox I witnessed is that the more you increase automation, the more stable your processes start running, behaving, the more difficult it becomes for operators to get, I would say, trained on the job because you see… there are less interventions or there is less manual work or the computers take over most of the, I would say, most of the optimization algorithms, maybe even startup sequences or shut down sequences or whatever is needed. And then at a certain point in time, something happens. And then you see you get operators who might already be five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years in that plant, but it’s the first time they witness it. And that’s something interesting to, would say I’ve seen it and obviously you have simulators, et cetera, et cetera. From your experience with… Mike (23:39) Yes. David (23:56) with your educational role and your educational solutions. Have you witnessed similar challenges? Mike (24:05) Yeah, it definitely is so In a lot of the processes, you know, they can kind of like shrink down to a machine level a process You know think think of your office copier, you know, for example and all the functions that it it can do There’s not many people in a typical office that if something went wrong With that office copier could actually fix it Okay So you see a lot of that in various industries where the vendor human support is super critical. So it might be the vendor, the supplier of those machines actually has service personnel located at the end user, right? Because there’s no expectation that the end user has the ability or the inclination to have someone on staff. Provide that type of of service so that business model is changing so, okay You might show up at that chemical plan or that semiconductor plant every day But you’re not working for the end user. You’re not working for Motorola or Intel you’re working for the supplier of you know, one of these pieces of equipment so You know, it’s a different it’s a different model than what most people kind of think of but I can only think that that David (25:03) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mike (25:30) type of situations going to increase over time as the single type of machine takes over this specific part of a process. David (25:33) Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. then, and there is also still, at least what I see is there is also still an enormous spread in the level of automation and between, between manufacturers. And you still have, you still have the ones who really have to still take, I say the first steps where they might already have some PLCs, but that’s about it. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have this fully integrated, fully automated plants are Do you have any examples to share companies you visited which were on either end of that spectrum? Mike (26:23) Yeah, so David, as you mentioned, I’ve seen every iteration possible of that scenario. a lot, most manufacturers are not large international companies that people know. They’re companies that have anywhere from 25 to 200 people working in them, making a very… Specific type of product that’s the min. That’s the majority of employment is in companies like those not the huge Bell wings and GE’s and Siemens and companies like that so You know, it’s not uncommon to see you know machines that are 30 or 40 years old being used in those environments with no automation at all and You know, maybe it fits the model of their business, you know One thing that techie people are kind of guilty of is sometimes they like to throw solutions at problems that don’t exist. So in a lot of cases, it’s okay to have a manual process. It doesn’t have to be automated. But what’s kind of interesting, and I think this is the area that you’re highly involved in, David, is this IT/OT convergence. Because two things are happening. One is the cost of all this stuff has plummeted in David (27:32) Absolutely. Mike (27:49) real value, dollar value. So, you you think of all the sensors that 30 years ago were only used by military operations and cost thousands and thousands of dollars are literally pennies or dollars now and are being incorporated into devices not only that manufacturers could use but people can use in their house. So you think of the explosion of web cameras and Alexa. David (27:51) Mm-hmm. Mike (28:19) voice assistants and things like that in your home. Well, the cost of all that stuff is such that it’s opening up doors that no one even thought were possible 15 years ago. At the same time, people are kind of following that Steve Jobs Apple model. if people are going to use it, we got to make it simple. It’s got to be plug and play, right? And the reduction of complexity in installing and using David (28:29) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Mike (28:49) a device which is plug and play and the low cost of is providing great opportunities for all those places that didn’t think automation was for them. And this is even going down into the robotic area. all the established robot players plus 10 times more startup companies are looking at collaborative robots as a new entry into the field and what are they doing? David (29:01) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mike (29:17) They’re making smaller, more lightweight, more user-friendly, easier to program types of robots to go into operation. now maybe you don’t need $100,000 budget to do something with a robot. Maybe $15,000 would get a job done. So the lower complexity, the lower cost is kind of democratizing automation in a way that we’ve never seen before. David (29:36) Mm-hmm. That’s interesting insight. In your students’ guides, there was one thing which also triggered me and it’s obviously closely related to what we’ve been discussing, is that you identified two important reasons to keep manufacturing local. the one being national defense, the other one being wealth creation and distribution. And that actually triggered me because I personally, I didn’t consider the national defense point of view. Could you just elaborate a bit more on these, I would say these two, yeah, these two reasons or these two dynamics? Mike (30:41) Yeah, certainly. you know, following the globalization model that the world adopted, you know, in force in 1990, let’s just pick a date, 1990, you know, it was kind of when it hit full gear. The idea was we don’t care where the manufacturing happens. We’ll just buy the finished product, right? So. David (31:02) Mm-hmm. Mike (31:08) It was definitely seen like the future is going to be a service based economy and a knowledge based economy and the little widgets that go around weren’t that important But it probably wasn’t too long after that when the US Department of Defense started to look at the supply chain Well, maybe maybe maybe a decade or two happened I looked at the supply chain and then found out that in order to make David (31:30) Mm-hmm. Mike (31:36) the equipment that’s needed for the US Defense Department, is a little kind of big. There was no domestic supply and it just wasn’t of the component that was needed, it was all of the precursors. So, you I know you’ve worked in the chemical field for a long time and when you make a specific plastic or some sort of compound, there’s all these precursor chemicals that you need. Well, the same in any other manufacturing. David (32:00) Mm-hmm. Mike (32:05) There’s there’s all these subcomponents and if you start looking one level two levels six seven eight levels down of the precursors There was no no domestic supply for any of that and that actually put that actually created a national security risk in the terms so the Department of Defense actually started creating what we call manufacturing institutes kind of modeled after the David (32:24) Yeah. Mike (32:33) I’m going to butcher the name. I think it’s the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah Try to edit that out if it’s wrong So so these are a public private Lab where you you you you try to develop things so so Long story short, there’s now 17 of these manufacturing institutes across the United States David (32:39) Possibly, I don’t know. No, no, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. Mike (33:03) that are responsible for niche areas of technology, but to bring the complete supply chain back either to the US or back to the US plus politically aligned countries. So, you know, the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute is looking at how can we reduce the energy need for manufacturing. David (33:19) interesting. Mike (33:32) so that these small manufacturers can produce things more economically. There’s one on thin films, there’s one on bioengineering, there’s one, there’s 17 of them. So that was started and is kind of a growing field. And then that’s all for Department of Defense National Security concerns. And the final point of that is, President Biden announced the CHIPS Act in the US, which is meant to bring the production of semiconductor chips back to the US in a greater number. And that’s billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars earmarked to help companies locate the production facilities, not just the R &D facilities, the production facilities on US oil. yeah, so that was the… the first point in that book. And then the second one is, you know, manufacturing does create wealth from scratch. You’re taking things and you’re creating value where it did not exist before. And it’s unique also in that the number of people in this process that have to contribute to that is a much larger percentage than another field. So when you’re creating something at scale, you have to hire a lot of technicians, lot of engineers, lot of finance and procurement people. And that wealth creation trickles into the communities. And you can go to any of these towns across the United States and you can see maybe there was one big steel mill in the town and then all the supporting companies were around it. David (35:13) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mike (35:27) And I think, you know, if you point to China and how fast they were able to increase their economy over the last 30 years, almost all of that was due to manufacturing. They did some parlays into real estate and had their issues like we did and military spending, of course. But the vast majority of I think everyone agrees is manufacturing really lifted the country from kind of a desperate situation to a worldwide contender now. So the proof is kind of in that. So yeah, the manufacturing and the location and the manufacturing is super important for those two reasons. David (36:01) Absolutely, absolutely. Wow, this has been very, very interesting. do you have any plans for educational plans for the future, for the years to come? Things you still wanna do, you wanna talk about, you wanna see changed? Mike (36:31) Yeah, I mean in my position because I’m working with educators every day I’m in a pretty nice position to hear about where they’re they’re thinking so at the university level I’ve worked with several people. They’re definitely pushing the technology the IT OT convergence that you know, you’re familiar with In the manufacturing realm, so I’m it’s pretty exciting to see how they’re looking at big data and now analysis. We’ve done some significant work with augmented reality and how that applies into producing better manufacturing environments. So I’m pretty happy where I am. You get to hear all these things that probably in a few years will become more mainstream and it gives me a good seat to see it. And with the books I’m just trying to expose people. A lot of manufacturing is not visible, literally not visible to the general public. It’s not on Main Street. It’s tucked into an industrial park. Maybe when you’re on the highway, the Autobahn or something, you look over and you see this building with no windows. Maybe you think, I wonder what’s going on in there, but you probably don’t. And then if you talk to someone, they’re like, we produce 300 million AA batteries every year out of this David (37:45) Yeah. Mike (37:58) This building that doesn’t look very important. So with my books, I’m trying to create a virtual window into these manufacturing operations. And the first one was for high school students, but then I realized I’m preaching to the choir. Anyone that picked up this book at the high school level had already self-selected themselves into this field. So that’s where the idea for the children’s book came. It’s like, OK, how can we hit eight-year-olds? David (38:24) Yeah. Mike (38:27) and get them starting to think that maybe this is something that I should consider for early on and trying to fill that pipeline and fix the awareness gap. The awareness gap is people not being aware of manufacturing or aware of careers inside of manufacturing because of everything that we just talked about. David (38:47) is really cool. my daughter is eight. So that’s like your target audience. My son is six. you know what, I actually tried already a couple of times I tried to explain what it is that daddy does for a living. But now that I have your book, I’m going to use it. I do need to do some inline translation, unfortunately, to Dutch. Mike (38:55) Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. David (39:17) But yeah, know, definitely, definitely gonna use that. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. To our audience, thank you for tuning in. Make sure to subscribe. You can find Mike, his books in the show notes of this podcast. And yes, until we meet again, bye bye.