Bruce Buscher of Jervis Webb shares his career history and Daifuku’s journey navigating the labor shortage with AGVs and AMRs.

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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Bruce Buscher. He is the vice president of sales of the Smart Handling Group of Jervis Webb. Bruce, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Bruce:

– Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be here.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited about this for multiple reasons. We met at the assembly show in Chicago; this was in October-ish. I’m blanking on my time.

Bruce:

– Yeah, the 26th through the 28th.

Danny:

– Oh, perfect, yes. And we had a great conversation, and we got to talking. I was like, man, Bruce, you need to come on the show. And it just so happened that it worked out for our filming that you were going to be here. And so I’m super excited to have you in person. I think you are the first person that we’ve had in person since the pandemic and all that, so it’s nice to have people back in the office. Now granted, we were doing a lot of this before too, and remote’s way easier. So we were accustomed to it beforehand. But nonetheless, always love it when somebody can come in, in person. Thank you for coming in. So first thing is, for those who aren’t familiar with Jervis Webb, if you can just tell us who you guys are, what you do. I know you’ve got Daifuku on your shirt. Maybe you could explain a little bit about just the company and the division specifically that you work in.

Bruce:

– Sure. Yeah, the company is Daifuku Corporation. They’re a Japanese-based company headquartered in Osaka, Japan. Jervis Webb is a division, airport technologies division of Daifuku Corporation. Here in North America the Jervis Webb group is made up of two pieces: airport material handling equipment as well as automatic guided vehicles. My responsibility for Daifuku is the automatic guided vehicles for North America, and we cross over in the markets. We cross over in the automotive market. We also sell AGV systems for parts of airport baggage handling systems and things. The acquisition between the two, there’s a lot of history between Daifuku Corporation and Jervis Webb going back actually to 1952.

Daifuku Corporation became a licensee of the Jervis Webb company for our chain conveyor products to sell in the Japanese market to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, and the other Japanese auto manufacturers. Then about 15 years ago the Webb family had decided that they wanted to exit the material handling business, family-owned, and at the time Susan Webb was the only family member of the Webb family that was active within the company, but there were 31 or 32 shareholders, Susan being one of them. She got outvoted by the rest of her cousins, nieces, and nephews, so the company was sold in December, 2007. And Daifuku Corporation actually purchased the company after a long-standing relationship going back to, like I said, 1952. It was a very good fit for Daifuku and a way for them to expand their business and footprint here in North America.

Danny:

– Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like you got quite the storied history there with the company. So before we jump in a little bit more about specifically what you guys do and some of the challenges you’re seeing, I want to get to know you. I want to get to know Bruce a little bit more. This is one of my favorite parts on the Executive Series. So how did you get into this space? Take me back.

Bruce:

– Out of college my first job was with Honeywell Corporation in Minneapolis. Was working as an engineer: industrial engineer, production engineer, manufacturing engineer. It was kind of turbulent times back in the early 80s because of where interest rates and things were. There was a lot of shuffling around, and certain markets were booming. Other markets were going in the tank, so I was jumping around within the engineering ranks. And then one day I got a phone call from somebody in the marketing group with Honeywell, a guy by the name of Jim Woolford. He asked me to prepare for giving a site tour to some executives coming in from Whirlpool, from Lennox, and Rheem. They wanted to take a look at the manufacturing facilities where we built a lot of the product that we sell to them. And so I did that, and a couple days had passed by after the tour. Jim had called me and said, “You really are more of a salesperson than an engineer than anybody I’ve ever met before. You really ought to think about changing your career strategy.”

I was at the time going back and getting my masters in business, and I was always interested in getting into and learning other parts of the business other than the technical side down on the plant floor. That was the door that opened up and said, okay, now is the time to make a change. I moved out of engineering within Honeywell and moved into their marketing group. Things just evolved after that, getting into sales and stuff. I found it was a good environment to use my technical background and technical knowledge but to use it in a fashion where I can work with customers and help solve their problems. That’s what got me into the sales end of it, and then on the automation side, that part with the technology and the way everything is changing. I’m a guy that I like to do things with my hands. This was a great way to use those skills in the sales side and, like I say, help customers solve their problems on the automation part of the equation.

Danny:

– Well it sounds like definitely a great fit. Obviously in this space there’s a lot of technical challenges. It’s a very technical sales process, so having that experience was obviously super critical. You said engineering background, so I’m assuming you went to college, got an engineering degree. Is that…

Bruce:

– Yeah, so my actual degree is industrial technology studies from what was at that time Mankato State University. Now it’s called Minnesota State University at Mankato, but it’s part of the University of Minnesota. When I was there and actually working for Honeywell, I got involved with Mankato State to actually help them become an accredited engineering school. At the time when I was there and going to school in Minnesota, University of Minnesota was the only accredited engineering program in the entire state. So a lot of engineering people, once the University of Minnesota program was filled up, they were leaving the state, going to North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, wherever they could get in for an engineering program. For the state of Minnesota, they were losing a lot of revenue and things. And so we worked with the state, and because of my position within such a great company, Honeywell, and the fact that I was part of their engineering organization, I was invited to help Mankato State put together this program for the state of Minnesota and get them to be an accredited school.

We did that, and of course now you can get any engineering degree, anything from chemical to electrical, computer science at Mankato right now. So that played a big part, and then with that I continued and picked up some of the other classes and things that I needed from a mechanical perspective because that was really what I enjoyed the most part on the engineering was on the mechanical side. I picked up the extra classes, and then I continued in and moved into the MBA programs.

Danny:

– That’s really interesting that you were saying that the University of Minnesota or Mankato—did I get that right—that that was the only accredited university in the whole, entire state of Minnesota. That’s very interesting.

Bruce:

– Yeah, and this was in the 1980, 1981 timeframe, so it’s not like this was back in the 60s or 70s.

Danny:

– Right, yeah.

Bruce:

– Yeah, it was really surprising that there was really only one place in the entire state where you could get a full engineering degree, and now all the other state schools within the state of Minnesota there are a number of them that you can get the engineering degrees there now. It’s a field that really just took off in the 1980s, not only in Minnesota but probably in a whole bunch of the other states as well.

Danny:

– Absolutely. I’ve got several in-laws, family members that are in Minnesota. That’s where my wife is from. And lot of brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law that have gone into the engineering space and production operations management and all of that. That’s why I was kind of shocked to hear that. It’s like, wow, that’s interesting. Good, glad they made that change. It sounds like you were instrumental in that.

Bruce:

– I helped out a little bit.

Danny:

– So one of the things that I wanted to get into—I really love asking this question. You touched on it a little bit, and I’m not sure if this was part of the answer there. Throughout your journey, who is somebody that really had a measurable impact in your career and your life? I know most of the time everyone says, oh, there’s so many. You mentioned somebody. Was that who you were thinking, or is there somebody else?

Bruce:

– Well Jim, of course, got me started to look outside the box and get outside of engineering because he—

Danny:

– That’s definitely outside the box.

Bruce:

– He clearly felt, he was along in that interview or factory tour. He saw more of a salesperson giving the tour, and how he explained it to me was when he called me to offer me a job was that I explained everything in more simplistic form, and I didn’t get into the technical details because these were executives, and they didn’t really want to hear or go down into the dirt and learn all the details.

Danny:

– “I don’t want to know how this thing works. What does it do?”

Bruce:

– So he was clearly a big influence for me to get me started. But the person that I would say really gave me a big foundation when it comes to factory automation type stuff is a very good friend of mine and a guy that I went to work for back in 1986, a guy by the name of Dennis Wisnosky. Dennis is a former executive himself through the GCA Corp. They made large robots, gantries and things. He did a lot of work with the technical people in the Air Force and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He started up a company, Wizdom Systems, Incorporated, in 1986 time frame.

And it’s kind of a crazy story, but I got to know his wife because his wife was our real estate agent when we moved from Minneapolis to Chicago. She was the real estate person that Johnson Controls was using, and so she helped my wife and I get settled in Chicago. Shortly after that there was some announcements that were made within Johnson Controls, and my wife and I talked, and we really didn’t want to be a part of where the company was going which was going to require us to make another move to Milwaukee. We had just moved to Chicago and getting ourselves settled, so we decided, okay, we’re going to try to find a place, a way to settle down here. Rosemary, Dennis’s wife, actually introduced the two of us. She had mentioned that Dennis is starting this company. He really is looking for somebody with some sales and marketing background, things with background and knowledge of factory automation and so forth and controls. And that was a very good fit for where I was coming from and the background that I had. She got the two of us together, and we had what was supposed to be a short breakfast at Denny’s restaurant. Ended up turning into about a four or five hour meeting and developing a business plan.

I went to work with Dennis, and one of the visions that we had—and again, this is in the mid-80s, so 1986, 1987 time frame— Wizdom Systems was an engineering consulting firm, and Dennis wanted to get into the controls business. There was a company that he found called Engineering Tools. It was a group of three or four ex-Intel people that realized that computers are starting to become a big thing in the 1980s here. For that reason he wanted to leverage the technologies of a computer and everything that Intel was doing and put it into the controls world which was at that time pretty much a proprietary, black box-type, whether it was an Allen-Bradley or a Modicon or somebody’s PLC. Everything was black box-oriented, and nothing was being networked together and things at the time. All that technology was just coming out and just getting started. We took this software, and we put it into a PC platform, and we launched Wizdom Controls which was a PC-based controls environment programmed, looked like, and felt like a programmable logic controller from an Allen-Bradley world. But you were doing everything on an IBM keyboard and using the technology that IBM and Microsoft and Dell and everybody else was coming out with in the PC world.

That launched us, and that’s what really got me, more than anything, into the industrial automation side of it. I was with that company; we ended up—Emerson Electric purchased Wizdom Controls in 1996, October of 1996. I was with them for a while until the transitional period was over with, and then I migrated onto a couple other businesses that were also part of the industrial automation. I just actually celebrated my 15 years with the Webb company and Daifuku on December 6th.

Danny:

– Oh, congratulations.

Bruce:

– It’s been a lot of fun, a big journey.

Danny:

– Well it sounds like a lot of fun and a big journey, and I can only imagine really all of the change that you’ve seen in your career. You’re talking about it was ’86, controls, and using an IBM—I can only imagine now just that exponential curve of technology that continues to happen.

Bruce:

– Yeah, and in August of 1994, GM, Ford, and Chrysler had formed an organization which still exists today, but their charter has changed now, OMAC, Open Modular Architecture Control. There was a publication, a Connors publication called Control Engineering Magazine. That was like the Cadillac of all magazines in the 1970s and 1980s that all automation engineers would look at and read about. What’s the next generation of PLC? Who’s got what for sensors and things out there for your automation projects? The OMAC organization pretty much came out with—in fact they did come out in that article in Control Engineering magazine, and they said that they believe that PC-based technology will take over the proprietariness of programmable logic controllers and things in the future.

OMAC was the big three from Detroit. It was their way of joining a team to promote this environment. For the most part it did happen the way they anticipated, but it took some different curves. Today you can, whether it’s from Schneider Electric or Siemens or Allen-Bradley or Omron, Mitsubishi, you can still buy their boxes that look like a programmable controller, but for the most part it’s an industrial computer inside of their rack so it doesn’t look like the Dell computer sitting on your desk. But it’s an industrial computer. Some of them are running operating systems like Microsoft. Some of them are running Linux. Some of them are running something else. Everything is operating exactly the way we envisioned it from a technology perspective. It’s more open architecture. Now you’re using 802.11 ethernet versus proprietary Allen-Bradley data highway and things like that.

So that whole technology did evolve. Different details came into play throughout the process, but PC-based control is the basis of where everything is at. And today I don’t think there’s any type of sensor or control device that somehow doesn’t tie back into PC technology, making it much, much easier for customers that are building equipment and selling it to different companies or selling their services. It’s just a much more open environment than it was back then.

Danny:

– Oh, absolutely. And so many more capabilities, interoperability is huge. Let’s talk about—we talked a little bit about the past and this growth curve with technology. Where do you see things going? What does the future look like for you?

Bruce:

– We saw this back in 2008, 2009 when the economy took a serious dive because of the financial crisis. We saw a lot of manufacturing companies pick themselves up and made decisions right away; hey, we’re going to get lean. We’re going to go through our processes in our factories, and we’re going to find where we’re not efficient. We’re going to find where we’ve got waste, non-value added labor and things. We’re going to automate our way into the future and position ourselves so that we don’t have to go through the financial problems we went through when the markets crashed. Well when the pandemic came along, essentially the same thing happened, only now it’s not so much about the financial part of it. It’s about the workforce part of it. A lot of companies, they still don’t have their full workforces back yet. A lot of people have dropped out of the workforce. There’s supply chain issues and things going on right now, and so a lot of our clients today are looking at, okay, we’re going to spend this automation because of what Covid and the pandemic has exposed to us that we had this weak link in the workforce. And that gap is not closing fast enough.

The number of our customers that normally were three-shift operations are still two shifts, and some of them are only one shift because their volume isn’t back yet, and in a lot of cases, they can’t get enough of their workforce to come back to work for them on a regular basis. Then of course the supply chain issues with not having enough parts, that’s not helping things either. You have two shifts of operation, and you’ve got enough parts to last for one and a half shifts. So everybody is looking for ways that they can automate to, again, try and avoid these issues in the future. Two to three years ago safety and ergonomics were probably the two biggest return on investment calculations for implementing robotic applications, implementing automatic guided vehicles, AMRs. Today probably the single most important value that everyone is looking at is, what does it do for my workforce? Because I have all these issues where I can’t get the people to come to work. Fine, let’s put in some automation to solve that problem for us.

Danny:

– Labor has always been an issue with manufacturing, attracting new people into the space, and there’s varying levels of it. I think this was a problem before the pandemic, but certainly afterwards for a whole host of reasons. You mentioned supply chain. Depending on what industry, too, you are in you had drops in demand. You had acceleration in demand. From a forecasting standpoint, who the heck knows what’s coming down the pike? We were talking earlier about some companies that we worked with that, they were seeing orders go through the roof just because of the way that the economics have shifted. But how much of this, in your perspective, how much of this did you see from February of 2020 to April of 2020? What did that shift look like in the need for what you guys have?

Bruce:

– For my group with the automatic guided vehicles, the increase that we saw clearly was due to the labor shortages. There’s no question about it. Our clients were even telling us right up front, “This project wasn’t planned for maybe another, until 2023 or 2024, but we can’t wait that long anymore because we can’t get enough of our employees back to fill the jobs.” And a lot of the positions that were open for some of the companies that are trying to expand their business because their markets are expanding—before the session started we were talking about the off-road vehicle industry.

That industry has taken off to the point where they are planning the next generation of vehicles for 2023, 2024, much like whether a GM or a Ford plans for their next generation of cars and trucks because people want these toys. They want to play with them. And the manufacturers are saying, okay, if we’re going to expand the business, but it’s very difficult to find even new employees to come in because there’s—the manufacturing jobs have got a stigma about them. Well, I’m in a manufacturing plant. It might not be the greatest work environment, a lot of stereotypical type comments that I think a lot of people hang onto. So maybe for those reasons they’re not afraid of it. Maybe they just don’t feel that they’re around the technology that they like to be around that they get with their mobile phones and that type of thing.

I’m not sure exactly what the reason is, but what I do know is that the manufacturing companies here in the US, they are planning that we are going to continue expanding our operations in North America. We’re going to continue expanding and bringing out new products. But we are going to do it based on automation, automated assembly lines, whether it’s through AMRs, AGVs, or some other level of automation. And we’re going to find again anything that is non-value added done by a person, we are going to try and figure out a way to automate that so that we can take that person that likes to work for us and redeploy them in another part of the operation where they get satisfaction and the value both for the company and for the employee.

Danny:

– Absolutely. Obviously when the pandemic happened, too, there was a lot of conversations around when we were off-shoring and moving a lot of manufacturing for the last several years—for the last decades—moving things to the Asian markets and Mexico, all kinds of other areas because of cheaper labor. Now that the labor bubble, if you will, has been popped and we say wait a minute; we’re really struggling with this, are you seeing some of your customers, are you seeing the industry bringing that back and saying, you know what? If we deploy technology and some automation, we could actually have some more domestic production here. And we’re seeing where the economics actually make sense.

Bruce:

– Absolutely. A lot of our biggest clients have brought product and projects that were targeted for maybe China or India or some other places in low labor rate areas. They have brought them back to the US and implemented them in the US factories with automation. One of probably the biggest things that we’ve seen with several of our large clients is to help in the cost-reduction efforts. They’re not so much setting up new plants outside of the US to take away business and jobs from the US. They’re setting up plants in other parts of the world to sell to those parts of the world. So yeah, you’re not exporting it from the US, but they become much more cost-effective by having a factory in Poland or having a factory in India or China or wherever it might be in Southeast Asia to serve that part of the market. We even do that ourselves.

Daifuku China is a license from the Jervis Webb company to build some of our automatic guided vehicles. Those automatic guided vehicles are built for the Chinese market. We had to do it because the customers really were demanding it from us when we did this. We liked the idea of exporting them from the US, but we were going to start losing the business because the amount of time that it took to export it over to China, get it through customs, it could be anywhere from one to three months. Our customers, especially in the automotive space, they couldn’t afford to take those kind of hits on their big programs. And so they asked us, “Is there a way that we can get these vehicles, the exact design, but get them manufactured in China?” And so Daifuku said, “Yeah. We’ll get our Chinese factories to build the same, exact product that we’re building for you in Michigan. We’ll build it for you in China, but it has to stay in China. What’s built in China for automatic guided vehicles stays there. It cannot be exported to any other part of the world. Everything else still has to come through our Michigan plants.”

And we’ve seen a lot of our customers doing the same thing: buying factories in other parts of the world to duplicate what they’re doing here in the US for that part of the market because by the time you export, especially with all the tax issues and import/export duties and tariffs and things that have taken place over the last few years, it really makes it difficult for a lot of companies to try to send product into other parts of the world where the dollar is much stronger than their local currency, so it destroys the market and the whole benefit of that.

Danny:

– Absolutely, it makes a lot of sense. And to be honest with you, I get excited about more US-based operations coming back here and growing here in the US just from an independence standpoint. And I think if anything that we’ve learned when you look at the supply chain and the resiliency, one of the big things is flexibility and being able to respond. And so when you have massive lead times because of transportation or logistical challenges, when you’re able to localize that production, that, like you mentioned, takes a lot of that off the table so you can really help to serve your customers better and faster and respond in a much more flexible manner. I think that’s a really interesting result, if you will, and I think that’s something that we’ve seen with the pandemic. You always hear, too, with technology, specifically with robotics, AGVs, and AMRs oh, my gosh, they’re taking away people’s jobs and all this stuff. You’re like, okay well the reality of it is, especially now, we got tons of jobs. Where are all these people? They don’t want it, and yet everybody still wants their really cheap items on Amazon. Something’s got to give.

Bruce:

 – It’s a Catch 22 situation. There’s no questioning. I’ve been asked that question multiple times by customers, by friends just having casual conversations, even family members around the dinner table. What about all the people that are getting laid off? A lot of companies aren’t necessarily laying people off. They’re trying to redeploy their workforce and getting them to do value-added jobs. If you build cars, and your job in that plant is moving boxes around or moving parts around in totes, how is that helping build that car and making that car better and safer and less expensive so that the consumer can afford to buy them? And that’s the way you have to look at it.

It’s not necessarily about all the people that you’re going to put out of work. I can also say without hesitation that the way our business has grown since 2008, 2009 time frame, in our factory alone, we’ve added a lot of people to our factory to help build these AGVs that we’re selling to customers. For a lot of our clients, again, their main focus isn’t, well, we want to get rid of bodies. What they want to do is they want to get rid of the jobs that nobody really likes to do. There’s not a lot of self-satisfaction in those jobs. And they add no value to whatever product it is that’s coming out of that factory. What the companies want to do is they want to take their employees and they want to give them a purpose. And by redeploying them in the factory with a job that actually has a purpose, that is actually building a car or building a motorcycle or refrigerator or whatever it is, they’re going to feel better about getting up every morning and going to work knowing that, “Hey, I’m going to be building refrigerators today,” instead of, “Hey, I’m going to be moving boxes around.” There’s just not a lot of self-satisfaction in that type of a job.

Danny:

– Right, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. As we’re winding down on our conversation—this has been fascinating. I’ve really enjoyed it. Right now what does your organization do, what does Daifuku do or the Jervis Webb division—sorry, I had to write it down—the Smart Handling Group of Jervis Webb, what are you guys doing right now to stay ahead of your peers? The hard-hitting question.

Bruce:

– The hard-hitting question. We have ourselves, we’re really a very conservative company. We’re probably not going to be the company that’s going to be the first on the market with new technology. We acknowledge that the technology is changing, and it’s changing very rapidly right now. Automatic guided vehicles, AMRs, if you just look at in the last five years, I’ll go back to probably four to five years ago. There were maybe 20 to 23 companies total in North America selling mainly automatic guided vehicles, but there were a few selling AMR products and things at the time. Today when you look at the number of companies—and the companies are still coming in from China and other parts of the world because they want to get a piece of this growing AGV market, AMR market. It’s now targeted to be close to $18 billion by the end of 2025, 2026. There’s almost 60 companies and growing here in North America.

And so the big thing was that AMRs brought to the table is the LiDAR technology, not having to put in an infrastructure that automatic guided vehicles use and so forth. There is really a lot of misinformation out there between the two different products, an automatic guided vehicle and an AMR. What makes what what? Everybody’s got their own opinion. In my opinion—again, this is my own personal perspective. I try to run my group this way, and we educate our customers this way. An AMR and an AGV basically do the same thing. We pick something up from point A, and we take it to point B. The application itself drives how often you need to do it, how many jobs per hour, whatever the customer is looking for. That all comes out in the end. But the technology literally is a complete crossover.

Just like AMRs, we support the LiDAR technology. We call it natural feature navigation where the vehicle will look, and it will find building columns, walls, pieces of equipment, and it will guide off of those things instead of using laser targets or inertial plugs or magnetic tape on the floor. But we still support all those other technologies. And so where we’re going as a company, our philosophy is we want to one, learn from the customer. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Two, with that, we’re going to try and find and identify one of our standard AGV products that would best fit your application, Mr. Customer. Then on top of that, and the last part of it is with all the different technologies that we have available to us that are our own technologies that we’ve developed, we are going to recommend—being the experts, because we’ve been doing this since 1962—we’re going to recommend. I know you say you want this technology on your vehicles, but we can provide that, but we really believe that this is the better technology, and for these reasons we believe it’s the better technology. Sometimes the customers listen to us, and sometimes they don’t. But that’s where we’re at, and we’re staying on top of where LiDAR is going and the next generation.

It was less than 10 years ago. The fastest that you could get automatic guided vehicles to move in a plant was 200, 250 feet a minute. Now the average for most of us is running around 360 feet a minute. When the next generation of sensors start to react and respond faster, you’ll probably start seeing automatic guided vehicles, AMRs that might be running at 500 feet a minute and so forth. We’ve got to wait for the safety devices to get caught up with where the actual speed of these devices can operate because again being a very conservative company, we’re never going to put anything in front of safety. It stops right there. I don’t care how cool the technology is, whether the customer wants it or not. If we don’t believe that it’s safe, there’s no way that we’re going to deploy it on our vehicles and start to advertise it for that. We see a lot of growth in the marketplace, several billion dollars going from I think it was in 2022 the markets were supposed to be about four billion worldwide, and now they’re projected 18 billion worldwide between AMRS and AGVs.

Danny:

– Wow.

Bruce:

– The battery technology is going gangbusters right now. Lithium ion batteries, the cost per dollar amp hour is really getting almost equal to that of what lead acid batteries are. Just updating, and the technology that we already have is probably the position we’re going to be taking, at least for the next couple of years until some of these safety devices and things get caught up to where we can start running the vehicles faster. And then the integration with the rest of the systems, whether it’s MES system or MRP system, WMS systems that are in the factories, more integration at that level is going to be a big part of where this technology is going.

Danny:

– Absolutely, it makes a lot of sense, and I know, especially with the stat you mentioned. The market has just grown from 4 billion to 18, obviously it’s introducing a lot of new players in the space. One interesting little tidbit that one of our previous guests that we recorded just before this, we were talking about what I thought was interesting, is that from a startup perspective, they gave a stat saying that 25% of GDP is from manufacturing. Yet from a startup perspective, 0.7% are actually from startups in the manufacturing space. A big part of it, I think, is from not understanding. It’s a very complex; manufacturing is very complex. There is a lot of things going on there. I think what we’re seeing, which is interesting, and we were talking about this a little bit before, is that there’s a lot of new players on the space. There’s a lot of money pouring in from Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of VC and PE money being dumped in because we’ve got, there’s robotics in there, but implementing that into processes, there’s a lot of technical know-how. There’s a lot of things going on. So it’s going to be interesting to see how things shake out as we continue to go because obviously this is a space that is just blowing up.

Bruce:

– That’s probably one of our biggest challenges today when we’re talking with a customer that reaches out to us and wants to automate part of their operation. They read all of this stuff in, whether it’s on YouTube or different publications. They’re reading about all this technology. They’re reading about all these companies that have come out with this new product, new AGV or new AMR. One of the things that we have been talking to customers about a lot the last couple years is, look guys. You really need to better investigate this technology or this company to make sure that they are on solid ground for what you’re looking for. The fact that there’s so many new startup companies in the AGV business, some of them don’t even own their own technology. Some of them are buying and licensing bits and pieces from other companies, putting something together, and here. Here’s my AMR, or here’s my AGV. There’s nothing wrong with that provided that they have the financial means and background to be stable 10 years from now when you still need spare parts. When it comes to the installation and implementation of this automation in the factory, what kind of experience do they have?

Within our group, it’s kind of ironic, but again being one of the oldest AGV companies in North America and being in this business since 1962, we’ve got engineers in our software and our electrical group that have literally been with the company 30, 35, 38 years, some of them going on 40 years. And they’ve been doing automatic guided vehicles that entire time. They’ve been there, done that, and there are so many things that some of these new startup companies, they don’t know how to design a system especially in a manufacturing environment, and even in warehouse and distribution. They haven’t seen enough experience themselves to where they don’t even know what questions to ask all the time.

When you were talking about integration with some of the other equipment, some of the other software that the customer has, what safety issues you should be concerned about, and the safety standards themselves. It used to be ANSI B56.5 safety standard. Well now there’s some new safety standards that are coming out because the AMR community and the AGV community came together to develop a next generation of standards because there really were no safety standards guiding the AMR products. Although that was good because we really didn’t have to comply to anything if I’m an AMR company, the safety advisors and safety supervisors of the clients, that’s not what they want to hear. They want to know, how are you going to protect my employees from being hurt in their own work environment? How are you going to protect our equipment so that you’re not running into our building and some of our machines and all of that type of stuff.

There’s a lot of that that’s being addressed now, slow and behind schedule from where it really needs to be. They admit they’re just now catching up with the technology and with the players in the business. But there’s a lot of things where I think we’re at the point in the industry and the market where we’ve got to slow down just a little bit, let everything else get caught up, the safety standards as well as the technology from where the companies are at before we start exploring in the new areas. The big thing is making sure you’ve got the right people designing a system that will work safely in your environment and yet accomplish what you’re looking for it to do from an automation perspective.

Danny:

– Absolutely, makes a lot of sense. Bruce, thank you so much for your time today on the Executive Series. From the first moment that we met and we had a great conversation at the assembly show—I wish we could’ve recorded that, and we got into some of it here, but it was great. It was very natural, very organic, and I really enjoyed talking about it and how you view things and hearing your insights. Thanks for coming in.

Bruce:

– You’re very welcome.

Danny:

– It was awesome. So for those who’d like to learn more about you guys, our audience can go to daifuku.com and come and check you guys out there.

Bruce:

– Right.

Danny:

– Alright, well so thanks so much. I really appreciate it, and I’ll wrap us out here. Alright, okay, well there you go. Thank you so much for watching or listening if you’re listening on any of the podcasting stations that we’re on. Fascinating episode. I really enjoyed it. Super excited that Bruce is able to come into the studio here.

But thanks for watching. Hey listen, if you are not subscribed, you need to go make sure you get on that list because you’re missing out on great content like this great episode where you’re hearing from leaders and experts in the industry about what they’re doing and how the industry’s changing for them. Sometimes you guys are in the same space; some you are in tangential. There is a lot to learn, so get on the subscription list. It’s really easy; go to IndustrialSage.com and you can subscribe. You’ll get this; we send this out every week. So that’s it. That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

 

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