Andy Olrich  00:00

Where do we start? Where would you if you were to come in and say, right, you’ve got zero connectivity in your plan, or they think they have zero where can we go with that, like, where, what would be your first

John Broadbent  00:11

smart step do a spreadsheet audit and find out how many different spreadsheets your people touch per week, and how many hours they spend in that scriptures, if you have a check wire in your process, you can actually apply industry four to one. Industry four is not only an idea, it’s actually a journey through four stages of maturity.

Patrick Adams  00:42

You Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, and I’m joined by the one and only Andy Ulrich from Down Under Andy, how you doing?

Andy Olrich  00:57

Good day, mate. Going, great. How you going?

Patrick Adams  00:59

I’m going really well, it’s been, been a nice here in Michigan, we had, we had one nice day, really nice, actually beautiful day. But now we’re back to kind of rainy, cold weather. But that’s okay. We’re getting closer to summer, so the better the weather gets. The you know, the better it is for me getting outside and stretching my legs, things like that. You know, nice, fun.

Andy Olrich  01:22

No, no more snow. No

Patrick Adams  01:24

more snow. No, I don’t, I don’t think so. I think we’re pretty, pretty well past that. Now, still a little chilly, but not too bad. So what about you guys? What’s the what’s the weather like in Australia right now, where you’re at still

Andy Olrich  01:36

a bit warm, little bit of rain, where I am fair bit up north, up in Queensland, but yeah, we’re starting to head into our autumn soon, before we know it, and I’ll be complaining about the cold, so it’s Yeah, opposites, right? But yeah, it’s been, it’s been fine. Could be worse, good, good.

Patrick Adams  01:54

Well, today’s topic is, is a good one? We’re going to be we have a great guest that’s going to be joining us here in just a minute, and we’re talking about starting small, thinking smart industry 4.0 and really just, we’re going to define what that is and how it you know, how it relates to those of us that are listening in and just kind of talk through, you know, what we can do to, you Know, even start our journey toward industry 4.0 so Andy, do you mind just taking a minute and introducing our amazing guests that we have coming on today?

Andy Olrich  02:27

Absolutely, this has been a long time coming for me. I’ve I’ve been really excited about this one, so I had the pleasure of meeting John a few years ago. And John Broadbent, he’s had over 50 years experience in manufacturing. And the last 25 he’s been dedicating to helping manufacturers of all sizes utilize smart factory concepts. And he’s become somewhat more recently, and he’s said this himself, is an industry 4.0 evangelist. Thank you. And manufacturers, both locally and overseas, value his passion and experience, and he supports manufacturers in developing implementation roadmaps and strategies as an independent coach and mentor. Now, he’s no stranger to the public forums. He’s done over 80 keynotes and workshops to manufacturers, industry bodies, institutions, universities. We’re lucky to have him on here. He is in hot demand, and I truly, truly see that. And what I love about John is his passion for Australian manufacturing in particular, and his mantra for doing more with less. So John, I’m really excited to have you on here for our listeners out there. This is someone who’s certainly been around and certainly has helped myself and many others you know, find their way through technology and smarter systems. So John, welcome aboard.

John Broadbent  03:47

Hey fellas, good morning to you, Andy, and good evening to you,

Patrick Adams  03:50

Patrick, John, where are you at in in comparison to where Andy is, where? How far apart are you guys in Australia? Oh, okay, almost, yeah, nice. So you’re, you’re, you’re in the same weather pattern. Then, then that, Andy is, I’m assuming it’ll be, it’ll be starting to get cold there shortly.

John Broadbent  04:15

Yeah, we had 30 degrees centigrade yesterday here in Sydney. It was a beautiful day Sydney to I love the climate here, except, as Sandy says, for about three or four months of the year, I’ve just come back from Bali, so disappearing to Bali for four months a year and becoming a digital nomad is very attractive.

Patrick Adams  04:32

Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. I would love to join you on that journey might be a little bit more expensive for me then, then you, you’re a little closer, right? Yeah, it’s

John Broadbent  04:43

only a four to $500 airfare return. So it’s pretty, pretty accessible.

Patrick Adams  04:47

Oh, wow, yeah,

Andy Olrich  04:48

that’s, that’s great digital nomad piece that you talk about, John, just before we get into it too. I just wanted to you know a bit more about you, John. Do. You obviously do some other things, right? So did you want to just quickly touch on so not only you’re helping to save and and support Australian manufacturing, but you also recently released a book, yeah,

John Broadbent  05:12

I did about cradle to grave journey for men, why we are as we are, and what we can do about it, not only for ourselves, families and community at large. And my objective in that is to reduce the male suicide rate, which has taken a 40% uptick in the last decade. And my hardly was actually running a retreat for a bunch of bunch of fellas for a week. It’s about the eighth time I’ve run it. And I just read a message this morning from one bloke who very moving message, who has completely rethought how to deal with his estranged son.

Andy Olrich  05:48

I just wanted to drop that in there, because, you know, we talk a lot here around culture and people at the heart and things like that. So not only is John, you know, really helping, you know, from the the operational excellence space, but this is a person that truly cares about people, so you’re in for a real treat. This is really coming from the heart with John’s approach, so I just thought I’d drop that in there. Thanks for sharing, John. Yeah, love that.

Patrick Adams  06:11

That’s amazing. We’d love to talk with you, you know, maybe offline at some point, John about that. That’s that’s pretty amazing that you use. You’re spending time doing that. So hats off. Sure. Well, let’s dive in here. Let’s, let’s. I know that there’s a lot of guests that are listening in that are very interested in industry 4.0 I mean, I’ll be honest we, you know, you hear that term almost like this buzzword that people throw around, and it’ll be, it’ll be good to maybe get into the details around this a little bit more. But, you know, one of the things that I hear a lot of times is like, well, I don’t know if we’re ready for that. It’s, it’s too big, it’s too expensive, it’s, it’s too much for us. Not, you know, not, not interested in learning more about that, but, but what is, what is industry 4.0 really mean for the average manufacturer? Is it expensive? Is it big? Is it you know, something that they should be scared of or or not? What do you think? John, no,

John Broadbent  07:09

no, no is the short answer to those three questions.

John Broadbent  07:17

Industry four is nothing more than a recognition that emerging technologies have converged to provide us an opportunity that we’ve never had before. For example, I watched a guy do a presentation a few years ago about the smartphone, and he said because the cost of memory had, you know, reduced Moore’s law had, you know, double CPU power, all that sort of stuff. And there’s another law to do with the development of pixels on a screen. I can’t remember who it is about. You know how small you can go. And he said, when you when you increase memory and reduce the price, you increase CPU capacity, you reduce the price, and you increase resolution of a screen, and you reduce the price, touch technology, all that sort of stuff. He said the smartphone was actually inevitable. It was just a question of who was going to invent it. To invent it first. And obviously Apple sort of got there, although I did have a, I think it was a HTC phone before that that ran on Windows, that was a dog, but for its day, it was pretty good. So industry four is nothing more than the coalescing, if you like, of three different technologies. And to give it context, everybody knows pretty well about what we call the Industrial Revolution, which is really the first industrial revolution, which was 1784, I was born in Yorkshire. My father was actually a carpet weaver, and he was really the center of the woolen industry in the UK. And so mechanization, the weaving loom, James Watt, the steam engine, all came out round about that time. So in summary, that was really the advent of mechanization. And then in 1870 Edison and Tesla had an arm wrestle. Spoiler alert, Edison won, sorry Tesla one. Yeah, the ACDC debate, and that was about 1870 so we can look at that as really from mechanization then to the step of electrification, and then in 1969 I remember sitting in primary school watching the alarm strong walk on the moon. That was then the advent of computer chips, transistors, all that sort of stuff. I think was about a decade later, the PLCs and other automation system started to emerge. And so that was really the advent of computerization as a sort of an epoch change in the way that we did things. And then in 2011 Germany said, Well, now we have access to all these various technologies, which I’ll talk about in a second. So one is cyber, physical systems, fancy word, I’ll get to that in a second. One is the opportunity to access cloud computing, and the other is the industrial internet of things. So really, what we’ve got the opportunity now with industry 4.0 is, is to move from mechanization through electrification to computerization to now integration. And it’s the integration piece, the. Ability to share information across what we call the tech stack within a business, all the way from ERP to factory floor and back again. In the old days, if you had a system like SAP, you produce a production order, it’d be handed to the factory and then it would disappear, until sometime in the future, someone said it an SAP terminal and keyed in some finished goods. But between the issue of that order and the first receipt of some goods, which might be a week later, as far as the ERP system was concerned, it disappeared into nothingness. And so we’d have to move data up and down the stack within the organization, from, you know, the enterprise level to the to the to the manufacturing level, down to the control level make stuff, and the latency in that was always days, if not weeks. And so with the advent of industry 4.0 a cyber, physical system, when people hear that term, they go, what does it really mean? And all you have to do is look at your car dashboard, your engine management computer in your car is doing lots of calculations. It’s adjusting valve timings and injection for fuel and all those sorts of things. But all you get on your dashboard is, how fast am I going? Where’s my fuel level? And maybe if you’ve got a taco and temperature of your car, that’s pretty well it. And you don’t know if you’ve got an issue in your car until the engine management light comes on. So the underlying system takes care of all that for you, and you just get a subset of the important things that you need to see. That’s a cyber physical system. So in manufacturing, if your listeners are from a manufacturing background, you’ve seen human machine interfaces, or HMI on a machine, or a Scouter system, that’s that’s a cyber physical system. So it gives us the ability to look at information in a process and bring it up to our computer screen or phone or tablet, so that we can see what’s actually going on, so we have access to that data. The other is the ubiquitous spread of cloud computing. When we use a banking app on our phone, we don’t care where that server is, whether is it on the premises of the bankers in the cloud somewhere. When we push our pictures off our phone up to Google Drive or Dropbox or OneDrive again, we don’t care where that is. We just hope that the person that we pay to take care of that for us does all the backups, and it’s secure and the so we’ve got access now to be able to move data around at will, and as a result of that, we’ve got access to software as a service, type products which we never had before, so subscription models and all that sort of stuff has also come to the fore. And the third leg is the industrial internet of things. For those of listeners that want to know what a thing is, a thing is nothing more than an object out in a factory or a home or anywhere else where you can get information from. It could be a smart fridge, washing machine, a smart car, smart phone, a computer at home. And the industrial internet of things is simply a subset of all that. So things that you would typically find in a factory, like a PLC, a SCADA system, a robot, a check wire, whatever is there sitting and sitting within the factory. And so when you combine the ability to see what’s going on in a process with the access to cloud storage, cloud computing and networking and the industrial internet of things, being able to get information from other parts of the process, it really does form a synergy where you’re going to one plus one plus one probably equals 10, and we’ve never been able to do that before. And in 2011 just as industry four was being coined, I obviously didn’t know. I was presented with an opportunity by Coca Cola here in Sydney to be a industrial Solution Architect for a project where they made injection molded preforms. And a preform is a P, E, T, plastic, thick wall test tube, so the thread where the cap goes on is in place, the flange that the cap sits again is in place, but the rest of the bottle is like a thick wall test tube, and a lot of people don’t know that they’re injection molded first and then left for about three weeks to anneal so the stresses can relax, and then they’re put into another machine where they’re then heated and blown into a bottle and filled in one operation, which means Coca Cola Were no longer transporting air around the country. Australia is a big country, so you can imagine trying to transport three liter coke bottles. They’re a bug, everything to stack, and they’re an even worse thing to try and de palatise to put into a process. Then you got to wash them, all those sorts of issues. And we found that the we have a 600 mil water brand here called Mount Franklin slows like a mineral water or fresh water, and one cubic meter collapsible bin that gets recirculated through their process from pre fall making to filling, can now hold 14,400 mount Franklin bottles and it. A big meter.

Patrick Adams  15:01

What would it have been if it if they were in the past?

John Broadbent  15:07

Oh, well, one semi can now carry what eight semis used to carry? Oh, wow,

Patrick Adams  15:11

that’s amazing. So you can imagine,

John Broadbent  15:13

the first 12 months, I heard on the grapevine that their transportation savings were around $2 billion for a $60 million investment

Patrick Adams  15:21

in this factory. Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, so the

John Broadbent  15:24

return on investment is extraordinary. And because the timeline for this project was reduced from 12 months to six months, because they had to get it finished by Christmas, because our summer, you know, water supply mount Franklin, very popular drink over over the Christmas period, and they had told the supplier of those bottles that they were going to take the molds off them for the injection molding failure wasn’t an option. We had to start on the day that we started, the 20th of November. Remember it well, on 2011 and because we had to hit the ground running when the equipment arrived, the best project I’ve ever worked on. But what we did was my job was to speak to all the vendors. So we had Husky from Canada, we had a vision inspection system from Germany, we had resident management from Italy, we had automated guided vehicles from the United States. We had local manufacturers providing gear as well. And so my job was with my team was to build a data model underneath all of that that could connect with all those machines, extract the information, put in the data model, and so the data model became a hub, if you like, in the middle of an ecosystem of spokes going out to these systems, one of which was SAP. So we got power on the plant two weeks before startup. The next day we got it, and the next day, we were communicating with the machines as the vendors were bringing their machines online, and because we pre configured all the data model, and we told the vendor, here’s your IP address, here’s your gateway, here’s your submit mask, they tested all that back in, you know, Germany or Canada, wherever it was, and we had then set within the data model What we wanted from them. You know, machine health, production, information, all that sort of stuff. Three days after we got power on the plant, we were collecting data and testing the efficacy and rigidity of our data model to move data around the plant. And so not only did we have what I call vertical integration, which was moving data from SAP to factory floor and back again up the stack in real time, but we had horizontal integration, where we’re able to share information between machines in the internal supply chain that, out of the box, didn’t talk to each other. Oh, that’s powerful, all right. And that was the first we’d ever done that. And when we saw the value of that, it was like the Holy Grail for us. And then we use that, then we use that data model and structure of the hub and spoke in every job we did after that with 100% success rate, because there was nothing that could go wrong and interesting. The underlying engine of all of that was Microsoft SQL. So it’s open source, stored procedures, easy for people to read, properly commented with an SAP middleware product over the top of that that unfortunately they’ve now announced end of life. They acquired it in 2001 from the States, a company called light hammer in Exton, Pennsylvania. We became their distributors here before SAP bought the company, and when SAP us bought light hammer in 2005 we had pipeline and no product. And SAP Australia had product and no pipeline. So I got an introduction, kicked their door in and said, you need us, and we need you. So I’ve been there. I became their free pre sales person, yeah, just want to

Andy Olrich  18:32

jump in there now. So if there’s that’s that, that case study you’ve given there around Coca Cola, like that was a that was a big deal, right? And that says, you said that was the first, first in the world to do that. And I’m sure that there’s some really sharp, technical people out there that are really getting, you know, a lot out of that. Now, if I’m switching my hat to I don’t have any robots, okay, don’t have any automation in my plant, but I can’t be there all the time, or I don’t want that person standing at that machine then having to come and write on paper what’s going on, etc. If we’re to flip from a Coca Cola to a not that. And I’m thinking, I don’t have billions of dollars and I don’t have a John, where do we start? Like, I’m trying to now just we’ve given a really strong example of, you know, best practice for those out there who are listening going, Oh, that’s completely not what I do here. Where would you if you were to come in and say, right, you’ve got zero connectivity in your plant? Or they think they have zero where can we go with that? Like, where what would be your first smart step

John Broadbent  19:44

do a spreadsheet audit and find out how many different spreadsheets your people touch per week, and how many hours they spend in their spreadsheets. And when I’ve challenged some companies to do that, you watch their heart going to. Were fibrillation for a while, they might have assist some system somewhere in 100 100 spreadsheets that the poorly managed you can’t really trust the data on them, who last edited it, type stuff. But for the food and beverage industry, particularly Andy, anybody who doesn’t know what a check weigher is, for example, it’s a piece of kit that just weighs product at the end of production. Anything pretty well, everything you buy from a supermarket goes over a check wire before it comes out to make sure it’s the right way. And if you have a check wire in your process, you can actually apply industry four to one piece of kit. And industry four is not only an idea. It’s actually a journey through four stages of maturity. And the first stage of industry, four is being able to take information from a piece of kit and show it somewhere else, not on the kit. So for example, if you have a check wire and it’s computerized, which they are and it can go on a network, which most of them can, if you could take the pack weight in real time out of that and stick it on a spreadsheet or a screen somewhere in a little SCADA system. That’s the first step of industry four, which is being able to see the information remotely from the machine, so you don’t have to walk down there and stand at the machine and watch it. So let’s assume that your car dashboard is an example again. And all you all you know is that you’re doing 60 kilometers an hour. So all you know is your pack weights are on target. But if you’re doing 60 kilometers an hour, you need to have context. If you’re doing that in a 40 kilometer in our school zone, you’re in trouble, and if you’re doing it in 120 motorway, you’re also in trouble, but for different reasons. So we then need to get context. And context comes from outside. So when you’re driving your car, your Speedo says, I’m doing 60. But context comes from the advisory sign, the set point of what you should be doing. So when you then take data out of your check, where it says it’s 510 grams, 495 grams, it’s well, okay, well, what should it be? Well, it should be 500 grams. And that might come from a higher level system. So you’ve now got stage two of industry four, which is giving the data that you’re collecting context