On this week’s episode, David & Jake sit down with John Weiler, Sales Manager at Boston Dynamics. John discusses the human element of technology integration in workplaces, emphasizing the importance of an inclusive approach toward change management. By involving the workforce in the process, fostering a sense of ownership and inclusion can aid in smooth transitions towards tech-enhanced futures.
On this week’s episode, David & Jake sit down with John Weiler, Sales Manager at Boston Dynamics. John brings us a unique perspective to the show - he walks up and down factory floors daily solving maintenance problems - but he doesn’t actually work on the manufacturing side of the equation. That’s because he walks alongside Boston Dynamics’ robotic technology, specifically Spot, to enhance both safety and efficiency in maintenance and manufacturing processes.
You may have heard of Spot as the dancing robot in some music videos or Superbowl commercials. However, companies leverage Spot to perform inspections in areas that are unsafe or inaccessible to humans. As part of the conversation, Weiler clarifies the role of automation and AI in the job industry. Rather than seeing robots as a threat to the workforce, they're highlighted as useful tools that complement human tasks. The ability of these technologies to perform tasks in situations unsafe for humans underlines the pivotal role of technology in both maintaining global relevance and leading innovation.
John discusses the human element of technology integration in workplaces, emphasizing the importance of an inclusive approach toward change management. By involving the workforce in the process, fostering a sense of ownership and inclusion can aid in smooth transitions towards tech-enhanced futures. John's suggestions can equip listeners with practical insights into effectively introducing new technologies in their workplaces.
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Guest Bio
John Weiler, an Industrial Sales Manager at Boston Dynamics, is a distinguished leader in robotics and automation. His remarkable contributions have led to the deployment of robots and automation in a variety of industries around the world.
At Boston Dynamics, John engages directly with various global manufacturers, addressing key issues such as workforce challenges, demand requirements, throughput constraints, and the integration of legacy systems. Guided by his principle of always maintaining an open mindset in order to learn more effectively, John dynamically translates his learnings into addressing the systemic adoption of robotics within the manufacturing industry.
Furthermore, his personal life mirrors his passion for technology, including experiences with Spot that extend joy to people of all ages. John believes in the empowering role technology plays in the manufacturing sector, allowing it to grow and excel within the global manufacturing landscape.
Previously at Path Robotics, he played a pivotal role in increasing revenue to over $25 million as one of their founding sales hires. He attended Ohio State University studying Economics and raised an investment round his senior year to launch his first company.
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Guest Quote
“Every factory I talk to, when you move up the strategic ladder, one of the biggest things that they talk to us about is safety. ‘We need to improve the safety of all of our facilities.’ Anytime we have tasks that can remove people from unsafe situations, and they're repeatable and scalable, that's a home run formula for a robot.” – John Weiler
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Time Stamps
*(02:00) Opening Ice Breaker
*(02:52) John's Background
*(04:36) Why you should follow your passion
*(05:32) Segment 01: The Maintainer Mashup
*(06:58) What Boston Dynamics can offer factory floors
*(08:38) Spot's impact on the industry
*(12:10) Making sure data is not out of sight, out of mind
*(15:37) Increasing worker safety through automation
*(19:33) Segment 02: What's in Your Toolkit?
*(20:48) Why John enters each floor with a "Beginner's Mindset"
*(21:43) How people react to Spot
*(24:35) Inspiring the next generation of technicians
*(25:42) Segment 03: The Future of Factories
*(26:47) Automations are here to help workers
*(27:52) Change is hard but necessary
*(32:24) Segment 04: Fix It Funnies
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Links
[00:00:00] John Weiler: Maintenance? Maybe we should call it maintenance. I'll fix it. I'm gonna fix it. Concentrate it. Maintain it. Maintain
[00:00:10] Jake Hall: control.
[00:00:11] John Weiler: Maintenance
[00:00:11] David Lee: complete.
[00:00:15] David Lee: This is The Maintainers, a Bluecap Community Podcast. My name is David Lee, Director at Tractian, and your host for The Maintainers Show.
[00:00:23] Jake Hall: And I'm Jake Hall, the Manufacturing Millennial. We're joined with a super special guest today, uh, one that I can call my friend in the industry for several years now. We have John Wyler, who is the sales manager for Boston Dynamics.
[00:00:38] Jake Hall: Um, he's no stranger to robots. I met him at his previous job when he was at Path Robotics, uh, working with just really leading edge technology, and he joined the Boston Dynamics team. Uh, over with a lot of family that I know starting in May, he sure knows a lot about what is happening in automation technologies, working alongside the spot robot every single day that you've seen on pretty much every viral video that's out there on Super Bowl commercials, Katy Perry music videos.
[00:01:06] Jake Hall: And he's working with the Agile mobile robot, and I think once in a while, even touching Stretch. So, uh, John, welcome to the show. And before we do that, a quick word from our sponsors.
[00:01:19] Voiceover: This podcast is brought to you by Tractian. Tractian offers streamlined hardware and software solutions designed to make maintenance more reliable and profitable.
[00:01:29] Voiceover: Their AI powered condition monitoring and asset management solution. Predicts machine failures and unplanned downtime, allowing clients to save an average of 10 million every trimester. It's artificial intelligence quarterbacking your
[00:01:43] Jake Hall: maintenance. Well, John, thanks for joining us. Uh, to kick things off, how are you doing today?
[00:01:50] John Weiler: I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. How are you doing? I, you know,
[00:01:54] Jake Hall: no complaints on my end. I'm doing pretty good. David?
[00:01:57] David Lee: Doing well as well.
[00:01:59] Jake Hall: Awesome. Now it is officially entering the fall season now. So a change in the activity is occurring along with the leaves. So John, what are you doing in the fall time that's just keeping you excited and keeping you busy?
[00:02:13] John Weiler: Well, fall in Ohio is one of the best seasons. Uh, you know, there's, there's plenty to do here, but. You know, a typical weekend for me is I've got two little ones and, uh, we will go to a pumpkin patch or we'll go and, uh, visit a park while the leaves are changing. Always good to catch an Ohio State game or a Cleveland Browns game.
[00:02:35] Jake Hall: Awesome. It's great to have a lot of excitement along with misery being an Ohio State fan. So besides that, you know, I guess go more in depth, you know, tell us more about your background. How did you get started in this industry?
[00:02:52] John Weiler: Yeah, I didn't always realize this when I first joined the industry. I have always been an early adopter of technology.
[00:02:59] John Weiler: I've always been fascinated with how technology can make an impact around the world. And the reason why I say it, I didn't always realize this because early on, I was kind of a little fearful of like math and science, which are fundamental in the world of manufacturing and engineering. But my, my grandfather was in NASA his whole life.
[00:03:16] John Weiler: So I guess seeing, seeing spaceships going to Cape Canaveral as a kid, it's now kind of paying off as, as I've been in this industry. But Um, the world of robotics and automation fascinate me. You know, I've been with industrial welding, I've got to see 6 axis traditional robot arms, I've got to walk, you know, 50 plus manufacturing floors around the world now, and I've got to see all different types of automation, and I'm consistently blown away with the level of complexity and, um, Level of improvement that I get to see day in and day out.
[00:03:46] John Weiler: Yeah, no, that's awesome.
[00:03:48] David Lee: So getting into robotics like this, I'm curious to hear, how would one go from not being a subject matter expert, for example, from the street, and let's say there was some kid listening to this and they want to play with robots for the rest of their life, uh, the way that you essentially do, what would you say would be the path to do that?
[00:04:06] David Lee: And what does that look like generally?
[00:04:08] John Weiler: Yeah, I would say I didn't take a traditional path, uh, studied economics in college, um, started a business actually right out of college and went into a few different areas in life. And when I was at a product development firm is really where I got to see small run manufacturing.
[00:04:24] John Weiler: Um, and I got to walk kind of small businesses through short run manufacturing. That was the first time I got to see that up close. And since then I've had the bug. Once you walk a few factory floors, I don't know if you'll ever leave that industry, but I would say to kids, you know, follow your passion and don't let fear, like for me in particular, right, getting, overcoming this fear of math or science and not being the best at it right away.
[00:04:48] John Weiler: Uh, probably would have gotten into this industry several years sooner, until I, I really overcame some of those fears in my 30s. So I would always encourage kids, get out of the classroom and get into the real world, and, and what I mean by that is if you know family or friends or anyone that can get you inside of manufacturing at a young age, I would ha highly encourage that.
[00:05:07] John Weiler: So you get to see the things that you don't often get to see. You get to see these complex systems. You get to see robots. You get to see it all come together. Awesome. Yeah.
[00:05:16] David Lee: Well, so now that we know a little bit about you, John, let's get into our first segment. It's called the maintainers mashup, and this is where we do a deep.
[00:05:25] David Lee: Dive into things like equipment, management teams, and ways to make maintenance specifically more reliable. Maintenance
[00:05:34] John Weiler: required. Listen, I maintain. I maintain the muscle. Maintain course.
[00:05:39] Jake Hall: Maintain speed.
[00:05:41] John Weiler: I gotta maintain
[00:05:42] David Lee: respect. So can we hear more about your role, Boston Dynamics, and when you're walking these floors day to day, what type of things are you looking for?
[00:05:52] David Lee: What type of ways are we adding value and progressing to the future, uh, when it comes to factories and
[00:05:58] John Weiler: technology? Yeah, absolutely. So I get to walk some of the largest manufacturers around the world. Um, and I get to see their operations firsthand and I get to meet with their teams. And these conversations will start all over the place from top floor to shop floor, we like to say.
[00:06:14] John Weiler: And we'll walk through a facility and people will talk about the same kind of key themes around, A, we're facing these workforce challenges. There's a global demand requirement and throughput requirements that operations keeps coming to us about. And we need to be able to grow. How do we grow? Because we've got this aging workforce, or we've got less people entering in, or we've got people, young people, not necessarily wanting to get into factories.
[00:06:37] John Weiler: All these variables coming together. Combined with the fact of American manufacturing and some of these catalyst moments that took place over the last five years, and so we used to ship a lot off, uh, overseas, now we've realized that we need to be making more things here, so the tipping point of all this stuff coming together, when I, when I get on a site, these factories are in need of help.
[00:06:58] John Weiler: And so what we do at Boston Dynamics is we'll walk around and we'll say, you know, what are the things that you care about? Um, typically these are, uh, these are going to fall into certain buckets around their digital transformation strategy of, hey, you know, we, we don't have interconnected systems or we have legacy systems and we have, Equipment that might be anywhere from 70 to 30 to 10 years old.
[00:07:21] John Weiler: Um, we've got some fixed sensors here, but we don't have, we don't know where the data is going. And then we also have the time old, uh, thing of we're sending humans around with clipboards and they're collecting data on paper. And then that goes in a filing cabinet. And no one really knows where it goes from there.
[00:07:35] John Weiler: So you have all these different things going on. And so what we do is we walk around and we just kind of take a step back and we say, you know, if we can be impactful here, because at the end of the day, the technology, while it is fascinating, it's, it's this robotic dog. It is a tool, it's a tool in your tool belt, and that's really the best way to implement it into a, into a strategic initiative at a plant.
[00:07:57] Jake Hall: So the perception of spot by a lot of people is. It's this dancing robot, you know, it's the robot that's fun. It's interesting. It gets a lot of likes on Tik TOK and on Facebook and it gets shared all over the place. But at the same time, we know in the industry, you know, it's a lot more, uh, it's, it's applications where it's, Hey, it's being used at SpaceX to, you know, do safety and inspection after launches.
[00:08:20] Jake Hall: It's being used by companies to help you give better security of being able to look at a lot of area and a short amount of time and to do that autonomously. It's being used inside factories for, you know, a mobile IoT device, right? You know, it's, it's a platform with a bunch of sensors and technology that it can go anywhere.
[00:08:39] Jake Hall: What would you say is really making a difference? Spot a key player now in the industry. Why is spot becoming so much more relevant now than what it was like five
[00:08:50] John Weiler: years ago? Yeah. So it's a great question in your statements, right? In the sense that, you know, that the marketing team's done a phenomenal job creating this global brand.
[00:09:00] John Weiler: Um, and you have these viral videos. That, I like to say, they show the athleticism of the robot, right? So, a dancing robot, if you set the dancing aside, what really, what you can pull away and what I try and take, uh, industrial, uh, customers of mine back to is that you can navigate all these different types of terrains and anywhere that a human can go, this robot can go.
[00:09:20] John Weiler: And it can do it reliably, and it can do it at a robust enterprise level. Um, so once you're able to navigate a lot of areas where humans can, now you can start to check that box. And now you can say one step further of, okay, so I can get to these areas. What do I want to do in these areas? And why do I want to do it?
[00:09:36] John Weiler: The difference that we're seeing now is that when you walk into a factory with a walking robot, everyone pulls out their phone, there's this moment of like. Joy. And so once you get past that, though, the question comes up like, okay, what do we do with this? Why I think it's starting to pick up a lot of momentum now is for all the reasons of like what's going on in global manufacturing and US manufacturing in particular is you get back to some of those core problems that are impacting everyone, regardless of the industry that you're in.
[00:10:04] John Weiler: So you have that, the shortage of workers. You have throughput demands, you have financial constraints, you have efficiencies, you have, um, energy things that are going on. People want the world to be more energy efficient. So, how do we get all of these things together? How do we tie them together? The, the robot is starting to get to a point now where it's robust and reliable enough and people...
[00:10:25] John Weiler: Have gotten to the point where when we launched it, it was more of this platform. And we didn't really, as a company, as Boston Dynamics, we didn't set out and say, here's exactly what spot does. We instead let the market for about three years, come back to us with feedback. The most widely adopted thing that our customer base kept coming back to us with is this is a mobile inspection and data collection platform.
[00:10:48] John Weiler: And so that is now what we started to build feature sets around, and over the last year we've now got what we believe is a full feature set that can live up to the expectations of our industrial partners around the world. Can it do things like read gauges? Yes. Can it perform visual inspections? Yes. Um, can it do thermal inspections on a variety of assets?
[00:11:08] John Weiler: Yes. Can we do acoustic inspections to look for air leaks, gas leaks? Yes, we can. When we start to be able to put that all in a package and all of that data can connect to what other, whatever system of record you need and can do things like generate work orders and set priority, that's when you start to really connect dots in a way that is impactful and systemic.
[00:11:29] John Weiler: It's not just across one plant. Now it's like, okay, we can pilot it at one facility, but I know that if we check these boxes at this mill, We can go to 5, 10, 20 other mills around the world because they all have the same fundamental problems. Right, awesome. Yeah, so
[00:11:46] David Lee: our listeners are highly comprised of maintenance professionals, right?
[00:11:50] David Lee: So I want to come back to that point that you were making about the different types of inspections. And if I'm not mistaken, there are four specific inspections that you'll typically do specifically for maintenance professionals. Uh, let's talk a little bit more about that. Can you give us some examples of maybe some floors that you've walked, uh, and just.
[00:12:07] David Lee: Cool project that you've been a part of.
[00:12:09] John Weiler: Yeah, absolutely. So there, there's a lot of cool projects, you know, I'll reference one that I was at just, just the other week, uh, as a mill here in the U S one of the things that I find really fascinating is that within each vertical that you go, there's a story behind maybe why the equipment is a certain age or why they've maintained things the way that they've maintained them.
[00:12:29] John Weiler: So you start to pick up these little nuggets along the way, but. This is, this is in the paper industry and the way that you process paper, if for anyone out there who hasn't walked the paper mill, I would encourage you to because you have a big amount of respect the next time you go to write on a piece of paper.
[00:12:43] John Weiler: Um, but with these mills and this one in particular, you have equipment that is 50 plus years old that has gone through multiple generations of ownership, multiple generations of maintenance practices and standards. And so now you have all this legacy equipment from different vendors, all kind of working together to produce a product.
[00:13:02] John Weiler: Meanwhile, you have throughput goals that continue to grow each year. You have the staffing shortages that we've talked about. And so from a maintenance perspective and from what the robot can do from a hardware perspective, you put these sensors on top of spot, you walk spot around the facility. Um, and we literally follow these, uh, maintenance managers around their plants, they know the things that they're doing these PM rounds for.
[00:13:27] John Weiler: They know that they aren't collecting the data in a frequent enough fashion to be able to actually inform and be proactive in their decision making. So most often we'll get on site and people will say. You know, we're constantly putting out fires with the maintenance team and the staff that we have on site.
[00:13:43] John Weiler: We do our PM rounds and we catch things, but we're catching up on our backlog. And every factory we walk in, this one included, they've got air leaks all over. And as we're walking through, you know, they had things even tagged and we would stop them and say, well, this is tagged, why hasn't it been fixed?
[00:13:57] John Weiler: They just don't have the time. They don't have, they don't have the time as one element. They're, they're constantly putting out those fires and triaging. But another element is that, you know, they might know they have an air leak or they might know that they have a motor that's running hot. They don't have the accountability because they don't have this digital record of everything, and, and so they write this stuff down on paper.
[00:14:19] John Weiler: It goes in the filing cabinet. And then it's, it's back of mind. So it's like the old saying, out of sight, out of mind, the, the thing that the technology does is when it collects this data, it puts it in front of you and it creates a digital stamp, a timestamp. And it can connect that to your system of record and you can label this data with an asset ID and you can essentially now tell the story behind the equipment.
[00:14:41] John Weiler: You can click into a motor and you can see all the data that's collected on it. You can see when it was last, when a PM was last, uh, done on it. And so you can't really leave moving forward and being like, you know, I, Oh, I forgot about that. It creates this culture of accountability that I think, you know, when I talk to maintenance teams on site, they constantly are reminded of this industry 4.
[00:15:03] John Weiler: 0 that we've been hearing about now for like five plus years. And one of the biggest hurdles that they tell us is we just don't have the bandwidth to collect enough data to get to that state of, of making proactive informed data driven decisions. And so there's this constant bottleneck of collecting enough data to be able to actually get that strategy implemented.
[00:15:24] John Weiler: Awesome.
[00:15:25] David Lee: Awesome. So, specifically with, with, uh, with the way that you all are doing things and talking about maintenance specifically, maintenance professionals and their days in and day outs, is there a large focus on even the safety aspect of things? So, There's obviously going to be places that a maintenance worker is not going to want to go and put himself in harm's way.
[00:15:48] David Lee: Is there instances like that, that you find common, that that's another value set as well, making sure that we're getting home safely every, every evening and minimizing
[00:15:56] John Weiler: that risk? Absolutely. Yeah, it's absolutely. And then, and then, you know, in full transparency, it's one of the things that. It's sometimes, it's, it's sometimes trickier to navigate just from how do we quantify the business impact from safety.
[00:16:10] John Weiler: Every factory I talk to, when you move up... The strategic leader. So when you move into the people that are creating the vision for a strategic goals initiative for a company at a, at a global level, then one of the biggest things that they talk to us about is safety. We, we need to improve the safety of all of our facilities.
[00:16:27] John Weiler: So things like how do we get our humans away from moving equipment? How do we get them out of areas where products on a conveyor and it's going at a high speed, but they need to check something on it? Um, how do we, how do we have a robot in a situation like that, or maybe the environment is very harsh, really high temperatures, um, is something that we often see.
[00:16:46] John Weiler: No one wants to check above a furnace or below a furnace for hotspots, but it is something that you need to do. Anytime we have tasks that can remove people from unsafe situations and they're repeatable and scalable, That's, that's like a home run formula for a robot. You're going to improve the longevity and increase the happiness of the employees when, when you create a safer environment for them to operate in.
[00:17:10] John Weiler: And then the nice thing about some of this equipment is it's often times that critical infrastructure that I've seen that's supporting a plant above ground might be at the basement level. The basements of some of these facilities are dark, they're, they're grimy, they're dirty and they're inherently dangerous because of those reasons.
[00:17:28] John Weiler: More often than not, people don't want to be going into a dark, dirty basement to check critical infrastructure that might be supporting lines above them. Same goes for high up areas. There'll be industrial grading. This is a reason why Spot's done really well is because it's a robot that can go up and down stairs just like we do.
[00:17:45] John Weiler: So I'll often hear people say, you know, 10, 20 flights of stairs to get to an area where they need to do checks. And because of that, because of those flights of stairs, in the heat of the summer, maybe the, maybe the tech gets up there and says, Hey, It's good for today. I'm, you know, I'm not going to do a thorough check.
[00:18:04] John Weiler: Um, and, and this is an example where that human level of variability over time has a compounding effect. Right. Wonderful
[00:18:13] David Lee: words there, John. So, after doing, you know, a whole lot of predictive maintenance projects and speaking with maintenance managers specifically, what, what I've been told and a lot of feedback that I get is the things that are hard to do are more dangerous.
[00:18:29] David Lee: Because what they find is... People have the full intent on doing it, but you know, our subconscious kicks in, right? And it's like, I really want to get out of this spot as fast as possible. I'm around all this hype, this high pressure on the line when it comes to the piping or whatever the case may be. And it effectively is just not a safe environment.
[00:18:45] David Lee: And what happens is we scale back the amount of work we do there and it's just natural, right? And so I see this as a way to address those types of things where it's a place that we just simply don't want to be. Um, so yeah, thank you for explaining
[00:18:59] John Weiler: that. That's awesome. Yeah, I've had plenty of days where if I'm out operating in a factory and it's 90 plus degrees and I'm walking by a furnace, I'm thinking to myself, even when I'm walking spot, I'm like, I can't believe that people are operating in this environment as frequently as they are.
[00:19:14] John Weiler: And I'm thinking to myself, I want to get out of here. No, I
[00:19:17] Jake Hall: like that. So, you know, I want to move to the next segment called what's in your toolkit. And we've learned about boss dynamics and how boss dynamics is operating with spot. But I want to talk more about, you know, John and how John has been excelling over the years and the knowledge that you've learned.
[00:19:36] David Lee: We're going to fix it. Get the tool.
[00:19:38] John Weiler: Pick the one right tool.
[00:19:41] Jake Hall: The right tool for the right job.
[00:19:45] Jake Hall: I'm sure it's been an incredible journey for you, right? You're at Path Robotics. And you're helping manufacturers solve the labor shortage when it comes to, uh, you know, the lack of welders in the manufacturing space. And you gain, you gain some great knowledge on that. And now you're at Boss Dynamics and you're more focused on the maintenance and the information side of manufacturing.
[00:20:06] Jake Hall: Now, what have some of your biggest takeaways been from, you know, moving into this new industry?
[00:20:14] John Weiler: Yeah, there's some commonalities just at a very high level that Whether it's a skilled trade or it's a factory worker in almost any capacity, I have yet to go on site regardless of where I am in the plant, if it's fabrication, assembly, production, maintenance, it doesn't matter, they all are telling me a similar story in the sense that They need more people and operations is, is coming to them saying, Hey, we need more product.
[00:20:39] John Weiler: And then finance is coming and saying we need it to be done more efficiently. And so you're at this tipping point, regardless of where you are, whether it's a skilled trade or not. When I go to a factory, it's, I'm trying to learn as much as I can. I'm in like a sponge mode of absorbing as much as I can.
[00:20:55] John Weiler: And I continue to give myself that beginner mindset. Um, so I, I try and continually frame it as I'm here to learn. I'm here to learn about what's going on in your world. And then over time, I think the more that I've done that, the more I've been able to connect some of these dots. And I'm very excited about the future.
[00:21:13] John Weiler: No, no matter what, uh, no matter where we are, you know, in our journey here, I leave these factories and I don't ever leave discouraged. I leave very motivated, uh, which is a, a very like, it's a rewarding thing to be in this industry. With all the obstacles that we have to overcome and all the things that we've, you know, talked about and, you know, other episodes that I've listened to about challenges, for all of those things set aside.
[00:21:40] John Weiler: They, they never outweigh the optimism I have for global manufacturing as a whole.
[00:21:45] David Lee: Awesome. And so, you know, we have these challenges like, uh, manpower specifically, but to lighten the mood a little bit, I want to ask a question. It sounds like you have a spot yourself in the house. So what is Spot doing for you?
[00:22:00] David Lee: Imagination immediately goes to the Jetsons, and you know, I think about the robots vacuuming and things like that. And so, a spot there, maybe babysitting the children? Is it a spot playing with the real dog that you have, keeping them company? What does that look like for
you?
[00:22:17] John Weiler: Yeah, yeah, it's a fun question.
[00:22:21] John Weiler: The first time I'll just share a story with, so I live on a suburban neighborhood, the first time I walked spot, so when you, when you go to Boston Dynamics, this is one of the things that's like built, built into the, uh, the ethos at, at the company is don't be afraid to break it. Don't be afraid of it. Um, and so they give the new hires an opportunity to learn hands on with the robot.
[00:22:44] John Weiler: So, uh, on the, uh, sales team here, we'll talk to one of the colleagues. They'll ship me one of their robots. And this is when I first started. And the point here is to get comfortable with the UI, get comfortable driving it around, get comfortable with the environment and don't be scared of it. Because if you're scared of it, when you go on site and someone asks me, Hey, could, do you think it can make it in this environment?
[00:23:02] John Weiler: I have to have the confidence and the wherewithal to say, let's go try it. Um, and I, and I can't be nervous to do that because if it, if it needs to do the job that they need it to do, we've got to figure that out together. So. You know, come back to home life here. I'm walking it down the street. My wife, my two kids, and our dog were walking and I'm like, Hey, I'm going to take Spot for a walk too.
[00:23:21] John Weiler: I did not know that there was a four year old's birthday party down the street. And I see them start to line up inside the house. The grandparents, the parents, and the kids all come outside. And one of the most rewarding things with being in this current job and just working with robots in general, I know Jake can relate to this, You get to bring joy to people.
[00:23:41] John Weiler: It does not have to be in a factory setting. And so with this, I got to see grandparents come out, maybe a little timid. I got to see moms and dads come out. Dads were like, hand me the controller, I want to play with it. And then the 4 year olds and the kids coming out, and they wanted to touch it. And so you have a slightly different message for each one of those groups, but the thing that tied them all together was the smiles on their faces.
[00:24:01] John Weiler: And it was a, it was a really cool moment for me. If we tie this back to the factory setting, the, one of the factories I was at, this is something about change management and culture with bringing in automation to a factory floors and something that I find amazing. When we bring Spot on site and we go to deploy it at a factory, something we suggest is, Hey, have a naming competition, make the robot your teammate.
[00:24:23] John Weiler: And it's, it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference because now they feel like this is our mascot. This is our dog. Um, we're going to name it. And they, they allow all these people to get together and name, name the robot. Another thing I've seen factories do that I think is, is fascinating is take your kid to work day.
[00:24:40] John Weiler: We talk about ushering in the next generation and getting them into manufacturing as a whole. What better way than to bring them into a factory and let them see some of the latest technology and, and what it's doing. I had a factory worker pull me aside, uh, less than a month ago and said that their kids have not stopped talking to them.
[00:24:56] John Weiler: I can relate to this because my son who's one and a half, one of his words is bot. Dude's obsessed with spot. But this, this parent said, this parent said to me, um, I, he was thanking us. He was thanking me and the sales engineer and saying like, you know, this. This is really cool because my kids, my daughter and my son are like, they think my job is amazing again.
[00:25:17] John Weiler: Cause I've been telling them spots coming to my workplace. And it just was like, that was one of those moments for me. I was like, it's awesome to see the business value, but to, to be able to be in an experience where you've aligned business value with just pure joy and hearing stories like that.
[00:25:32] John Weiler: Couldn't ask for a better situation. Awesome.
[00:25:36] Jake Hall: Well, I think it's time to go into our next segment, which we call, uh, the future of factories.
[00:25:43] David Lee: Meet the future! To our
[00:25:45] John Weiler: futures. What future?
[00:25:47] Jake Hall: The factory. My factory.
[00:25:49] David Lee: Everybody's factory. I
[00:25:50] John Weiler: love your factory. My factory.
[00:25:53] Jake Hall: My walls. So, you know, we're going out there and we're looking at.
[00:25:58] Jake Hall: All the new technology and the shift in mindset and how we're doing business and, and how we're going to see this collaboration between robotics and, and workers, you know, what are you seeing in a way that it's just to make sure that we're not stepping on the toes of the traditions and manufacturing, but we're helping create an embracing change that comes from all the different
[00:26:24] John Weiler: generations in it.
[00:26:26] John Weiler: Yeah, it's a very delicate balance. I'll say that as, as an opening overarching statement, part of why I go in with such open ears and eyes is to try and understand what's going on in the environment. Why are they interested in solutions? What are they looking for? What have they tried in the past? What worked and what didn't work and why didn't it work?
[00:26:44] John Weiler: But with, with robots, They're helping. If, when you talk to people in the factory floor and even the people that are in the headquarters or the global level that maybe might not be in those environments every day, people in the industry, on that, I have yet to hear them say, I don't need help. They might have pushback for feature sets or specific requirements around a robot, or maybe they want it to operate in more harsh conditions or hotter temperatures, or hey, can it swim, it can't swim, can it climb a ladder, it can't, um, you know, things like that I'll get, but I very rarely get pushback on needing help, and all I mean by that is like, take Spot for example, You need a tech to go around and with a FLIR, IR, or any kind of RIR device, take thermal on 1, 500 motors at a plant or 3, 000 motors at a plant, you don't have the bandwidth to do that every single day, and then you add in, okay, visual inspection, I needed to read all my gauges, that's, that's more time, so I try and talk to people about, hey, We're just providing you a tool here so you can, uh, grow into that future state so you can start collecting enough data and you can empower your people.
[00:27:52] John Weiler: And I also will talk to people about, you know, it takes courage to admit to yourself that you need to make a change. And it takes courage from people on the floor to be willing to ask for help. And I think, uh, manufacturing, like many industries, It's easy to say, let's keep things the way they are. We know, you know, we know it works this way.
[00:28:13] John Weiler: Change is difficult, regardless of the industry it's in. And regardless of, of anything, just at a personal level, it can be difficult. It's easier for me to keep ordering on DoorDash than it is for me to make a meal. But I know one is better for me. So, you know, with, with robots in the factory of the future, it's not removing people from the equation.
[00:28:31] John Weiler: It's empowering them. And so we have to, as a industry, we have to embrace some of these changes. And I often say we have to adopt robots because people around the world are adopting robots, and if we want to stay globally relevant, so that's like foundational, let's just stay globally relevant, well I don't want to just stay globally relevant, I want to be leading, I want to be, I want to be ahead, so when I see countries like China adopting robots faster than us, it makes me like, I want to go even to more factories than I can go to and, and tell the story again and again and again, because I think it's critical to the future.
[00:29:06] John Weiler: If we're going to have these factories of the future in the U S in particular, which I want, then we need to be leading in it in areas like innovation.
[00:29:14] Jake Hall: I love that you touched that, John. Cause like for me, I always say that robots aren't taking jobs. They're saving and creating jobs right now that we live in a truly global economy with global competition.
[00:29:28] Jake Hall: It's not so much that the robot's going to be replacing that task or that task or that task. It's the fact that in order for a lot of these small to medium sized manufacturing businesses and businesses that are domestic in order to compete in an international economy, they need to leverage technology that's going to give them the front hand.
[00:29:46] Jake Hall: So where, you know, going back to, you know, your previous job, for example, right, you know, in order for, for, for companies to stay In business, when you can't find the skilled welders anymore, you have to leverage automation and, and AI and, and what you were doing with industrial robots at PATH, because if you don't, then those jobs are just, then the business you can't compete with is just going to go overseas.
[00:30:10] Jake Hall: So then everyone, the, the remaining 65 employees that were at that company no longer have a job because you couldn't compete. And in the same economics. And I think that's the same thing that we're going to see when we're, when we're adapting new technology, like AI and robots, it's not that robots are going to be completely, and AI is going to be completely taking the jobs.
[00:30:30] Jake Hall: It's just, we're seeing a shift in how businesses is done. And in order for manufacturing and automation and end using companies to continue to be relevant, they have to adopt
[00:30:41] John Weiler: change. Yeah, it's enhancing. And I think, you know, to build off of that, there, there's a, a study, a Um, the more robots that were adopted at a plant level, there was actually higher levels of employment, more human workers at those, at those same plants.
[00:30:58] John Weiler: So to me, and what the study really showed is, is it, it provided some data to what I've always had an inclination around of the more that we adopt this type of technology, the more we grow. And that's like Spot is a tool that allows maintenance teams and predictive maintenance teams. To do their jobs better so that they can grow more and expand more and get more product out into the world.
[00:31:23] John Weiler: And, you know, the, the thing I'll touch on with the maintenance teams in particular is they are the crew of people that keeps the lights on literally all of the uptime, all of the stuff that, that produces products, all of the, sometimes they might be more sexy or more exciting areas of the plant, the assembly process or whatnot.
[00:31:40] John Weiler: But whenever something happens, they're calling that team. So they are like the lifeblood of the plant. Um, and so it's different from the world of like the skilled trade where it was like a master welder, a master artist. Um, but it's, it's the same in the sense that it's a mission critical function of every plant.
[00:31:58] John Weiler: You can't grow if your equipment's down. You can't, and you know, and no one wants the unplanned downtime events, so.
[00:32:05] David Lee: Awesome, John. I'm very happy that we were able to address All the different elephants in the room here, essentially, or in this case, different dogs in the room. Toot, toot, tshhh. Alright, so, moving on, moving on to our next segment.
[00:32:19] David Lee: Before we say goodbye to John, our next segment is actually called Fix It Funnies. Fix it. It's making a really funny noise. Alright, fix it. Make it funny would be great, if you could make it funny. Your fate is fixed. So make it
[00:32:32] John Weiler: funny. Make sure it's
[00:32:35] David Lee: funny. Previously, we asked about your favorite activity during the fall, but winter is right around the corner.
[00:32:42] David Lee: So when it comes to winter, what would be a activity that you would like to do or what is your favorite thing to do with respects to like the
[00:32:49] John Weiler: winter just in general? Yeah, so I absolutely love, um, hiking if I, if we can get out to a cabin and like, you know, I've been to uh, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole and it was the most beautiful place I think I've ever seen in the winter.
[00:33:05] John Weiler: And so skiing, snowboarding, those are always fun activities. Um, but honestly, you know, I've got a two month old and one of the most rewarding things. So the one and a half year old, I think is going to be running around in the snow. When you see your kid see snow and react to snow for the first time, uh, it's a pretty amazing thing to see.
[00:33:23] John Weiler: So for me, that's something that I'm thinking about this, this winter. Awesome.
[00:33:28] Jake Hall: Well, what you need to do, John, is, uh, get spot, put reindeer antlers on it. And then pull your kid in the sled. Yeah. And I better see a video of that posted on LinkedIn.
[00:33:43] John Weiler: I will, I will do that. Yeah. I mean, spots, spots, pretty interesting in the snow.
[00:33:47] John Weiler: So we've, you know, we've had to, with the customer base that we have and some of the environments that we've been in, you run into things like beer foam, for instance, and the outcome of it is that, you know, there's some areas where we walk through plants as humans with our feet. And we're like, The surface area of our foot doesn't make it that slippery, but because the surface area of Spot, the dog, is smaller, you get into some of these environments where you think it's slippery.
[00:34:12] John Weiler: So the outcome of this has been, now there's some videos that I've seen where Spot's able to terrain on ice because we've had to build software updates to accommodate for slippery floors. So the outcome is some of these engineers with Spot... Walking around on, on ice by their home and taking video of it.
[00:34:28] John Weiler: It's, it's quite amazing to see. That's awesome.
[00:34:31] Jake Hall: So if you were in this industry, John, if, if, if you decided to go something other than manufacturing, what would you, what would you be choosing?
[00:34:39] John Weiler: I would say, you know, this is going to sound cliche, but I feel like I'm living out my dream here, working in the industry that I'm in.
[00:34:46] John Weiler: Uh, I get to take a piece of brilliant technology, a tool around the world and get to go into new environments and help. You know, people do their jobs better. That's what they share back with me. That's one of the most rewarding experiences I think I've ever had the opportunity to do. So, I can't, you know, I can't really say that I'd be doing something different.
[00:35:07] John Weiler: But I absolutely love traveling. I absolutely love seeing new cultures, new parts of the world. I still think I would somehow be involved with robots. I mean, I, they're fascinating. I, I, you know, I played soccer my whole life. So my dream growing up at one point was to be a professional soccer player. It, Jake, you've seen me in person.
[00:35:28] John Weiler: I'm not the tallest, tallest guy. Right. So, you know, there, there's, there's some physical limitations there, but if I, if I wasn't in the world of automation and robotics, maybe professional sports. There you
[00:35:39] Jake Hall: go. Well, we know that O'Hara doesn't have any, so, uh, we're good with that.
[00:35:47] John Weiler: I've got no comment. I've got, yeah, I've got, yeah, I've got no comment. We'll, we'll see. We'll see. We will, uh, we'll see what happens here at the end of this, the end of this year.
[00:35:57] Jake Hall: We'll podcast comes out when, uh, when, uh, what the results are. Yes, yep.
[00:36:04] David Lee: Awesome. Well, listen, John, it has been absolutely wonderful to have you.
[00:36:09] David Lee: This has been The Maintainers, a Bluecap Community Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you consume your content, as we are on most major platforms, so you Can be in the know immediately when the next episode drops.
[00:36:25] Voiceover: This podcast is brought to you by Tractian. Tractian offers streamlined hardware and software solutions designed to make maintenance more reliable and profitable.
[00:36:34] Voiceover: Their AI powered condition monitoring and asset management solution. Predicts machine failures and unplanned downtime, allowing clients to save an average of 10 million every trimester. It's artificial intelligence quarterbacking your maintenance.