Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to INA Insights, where prominent leaders and influencers shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector discuss topics that are critical for executives, boards and investors. INA Insights is brought to you by Ina AI, a firm focused on working with industrial companies to make them unrivaled. Segment of one leaders to learn more about Ina Aihdev, please visit our website at www. Dot ina dot AI.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Good morning. Welcome to another episode of our Titanium economy podcast series hosted by Ina AI. Our guest today is Mister John Dyke who is the CEO of Sesame that stands for clean Energy smart Manufacturing innovation institute. The focus of this institute is research and development of technologies and solutions that can capture, share and process in real time the increasing amounts of information available at manufacturing facilities.
Funded by the us government, it is a non profit organization established as an advocate for smart manufacturing and a primary source for industry networking, education and workforce development.
John was appointed CEO of Sesame in June of 2018. He is a practical visionary with a passion for innovation in the manufacturing space and is known globally as a domain expert on both technology and business management in the nexus that often separates it and operations.
John was also recently awarded a number of patents for the application of industrial Internet of Things and analytics in manufacturing workflows and business processes. John, welcome to our podcast. We are very excited to have you and are looking forward to talk to you about smart manufacturing and your own journey so far.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Thank you. It's an honor to be here with you today.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Awesome. So, John, to kick it off, why don't you elaborate a bit on Sesame's focus areas and its overall goals and objectives.
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, so we are funded by the federal government to help us manufacturing become more competitive and through the, through the efforts and through the lens of smart manufacturing. And we'll talk a little bit about what that means, I'm sure. But, but essentially, we are here to convene this community. We're a consortia. We are here to convene all of the key stakeholder groups that are part of this value chain, from the manufacturers themselves, obviously, to the vendors, academia, the machine builders, so on and so forth. And our goal is to, and our vision is to accelerate the democratization of smart manufacturing. What that means is drive accessibility.
Many large manufacturers can afford to invest in smart manufacturing, but there's an increasing digital divide, we call it the digital divide between the fourth and 2000, roughly, and the rest of manufacturing that really struggles to understand how they can actually engage in these really, really important value creation strategies.
Our goal is to reduce the cost and complexity that has been historically too significant for a lot of these manufacturers to engage. And it's by reducing this cost and complexity, this democratization effort, that we believe we can bring these capabilities to all manufacturers. And we do this through three specific strategies we call pillars. One is kind of workforce development, education and knowledge. The second is around technology and the methodologies, the implementation capabilities that are really an important part of how we disrupt and how we transform this space. And last but not least, how do we create an environment where leaders and practitioners, and really this entire community can get together and solve problems, ecosystem level problems, in a much more collaborative way? Us manufacturers, like us citizens, are typically much more individualistic in their approach to working and living and solving problems, and that's okay. But when the rest of the manufacturing community globally is accelerating their adoption of these capabilities and collaborating in an effort to do that, it's become more and more important for us to recognize that the historic legacy, proprietary approaches to solving these problems is perhaps no longer sufficient that we do have to collaborate and work together to solve some really fundamental constraints in this process.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Awesome. The collaborative nature of it sounds great, John, and I would love to come back to that. But before that, this term, smart manufacturing, it gets used a lot these days and seems to be a focus area, especially within, let's say, the industrial sector and overall manufacturing. Could you explain a little bit from a practical point of view, what does it actually mean for manufacturers?
[00:05:47] Speaker C: Yeah, so there's an official definition that we have created together with our community, and I won't bore you with the details, but I'll show the top level version of that, that smart manufacturing is the information driven, event driven, efficient and collaborative orchestration of business, physical and digital processes within plants, factories and across the entire value chain. But to your question, what does it mean? Practically? It means that the data that's available to every manufacturing that already exists in your operations can be turned into significant new value if we can expose that data in practical and low cost, low complexity ways to empower frontline workers, to our production supervisors, quality, lean, continuous improvement staff and personnel, and empower plant managers, empower the enterprise and your entire value chain, your supply chain. We believe there is fundamentally, and this is the entire premise of the fourth industrial revolution as well, there is significant value in bringing the right intelligence information to the right individual in the right way and the right format at the right time. And so that's the sort of practical aspect of this, reduce the friction and the cost and complexity of how information is made available to people and the systems that can help make better decisions, data driven decisions in a much more effective way.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Got it. And can you give some examples of companies who are bringing this to life in their manufacturing operations? And what sort of value are they able to derive out of it?
[00:07:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's no shortage of examples, really, across every industry, from the great automotive OEMs in this space, to the food and Bev consumer goods manufacturers across the spectrum, to the oil and gas and chemical providers. The sort of number one challenge for most of these organizations is always to understand where the constraints are and based on the nature of that constraint, because that constraint is a very sort of fluid thing. As soon as you address the constraint in one part of your operation, whether it's quality related or throughput or yield or. Or waste related, as soon as you address that constraint, that constraint pops up somewhere, the next constraint will pop up somewhere else. And so we have literally hundreds of use cases across this community that demonstrate how the use of information in a tiny manufacturer here in northeastern Ohio, with one simple data set from a waste scale, could empower this organization to reduce waste, to improve yield and throughput and drive their labor costs in a much more effective way. To a large organization like General Mills, who was very much focused on ensuring that when it says gluten free on the box, that it's truly gluten free in the box, and for their cereals and the entire sort of supply chain, monitoring and measuring and ensuring the quality of that sort of gluten free product from the farmer's field all the way to the package that ends up in the grocery store shelf. So those are two examples at two different ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between.
It's the use of data, real time data, as it makes its way into the value chain and manufacturing operation to help people avoid waste, improve quality, drive throughput, the first pass yield, improve your supply chain performance, and optimization. So it's really smart. Manufacturing is the prospect of improving every single aspect of your operation. And really, I'll close with this, at least for this question post. Covid, the frontline worker, through Covid, became sort of the. The center of attention for most manufacturers. How can we attract and retain and improve the time to value for that frontline worker as quickly and effectively as possible? And so, equipping that frontline worker with the best tools, the best information, the best intelligence from the operation to not just make them more effective, but also involve them in the value creation and in the innovation process for.
For their manufacturing operations, for their team, and for their company's profitability, we have to become more profitable and more productive as a manufacturing nation.
And this is one of the core ways that us manufacturers can invest to become more competitive and more productive here.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: As a nation and to achieve that objective. John, how are you seeing the collaboration play out across players within the same industry? And do you see collaboration opportunities or collaboration already happening across industries as well?
[00:11:15] Speaker C: Yes, the short answer is absolutely. And this is the exciting thing. From our perspective, we have a natural mandate. We have funds from the federal government through the Department of Energy, essentially to, to convene the leadership of this, of the manufacturing stakeholders in this space. And that's like I said before, the manufacturers, the vendors, the integrators, the consultants, the machine builders, the academia, we have to solve big problems in this space, and no one's organization and even no one stakeholder group can do that effectively because these are ecosystem wide challenges that we need to address. And so sesame represents at this point, over 200 member companies in this consortia that are here, obviously to leverage the outcomes and the capabilities that are a function of the work that we do here, for their workforce, for their smart manufacturing technology architectures and so on and so forth, but fundamentally to contribute to the identifying the right problems, but then working together to solve them. And so it's a powerful way. And we don't just get together and talk and write papers. We actually use these funds, the funds that we've been given. We've invested over $100 million so far to actually do the work, to take these ideas, find the right technologies, the right people, the right partners, bring them together and facilitate getting and getting that work done. And so that's a big, big part of why we exist. It's a relatively new thing for us companies to collaborate in this way. But I'm really proud to say that this is where that's happening. And we have great examples, literally dozens of great examples, of how we've been able to fund that innovation and bring that innovation back to the community. We solve these problems together.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: And as these hundred million of funds have been disseminated, what have been some of the highlight projects for you?
[00:13:28] Speaker C: Well, I mentioned too, in the previous conversation, from a small manufacturer in northeastern Ohio with less than 20 employees to general mills with plants all over the world and large, complex manufacturing operations.
But I could point to many from Lyndy, which used to be a praxair, partnering with Texas A and M, partnering with Emerson and Aspentech, the vendors and the key stakeholders there. I could point to Honeywell working on the aerospace and defense side, working with a large set of partners to solve some AI machine learning challenges for their operations. I could point to Raytheon and a small startup that is focused on reducing the cost and complexity for connecting legacy equipment machine tools to a manufacturing system that can collect that data in real time and make it available. And so these are what we represent, is sort of trying to bring this community together and to play essentially a broker role in the, as a community, identifying the right problem space and then looking into the community to say who are the most innovative players that can be part of solving that specific problems and then bringing them together through the mechanisms. The sort of membership agreement that we have, which includes rules about how we treat IP and how we can collectively protect the IP that these organizations bring to the, bring to the project, the bylaws for how we operate, the mutual non disclosure agreements, all of that's part of the framework that allows our members to work together to solve these problems. And yeah, there's data about over 50 projects that we've invested in on our website, and those project outcomes are there for other members to benefit from, to use as part of their journey and how they move forward.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: And John, you mentioned earlier that how making us manufacturing more productive is a national initiative now, and there is a lot of legislative focus, there is a lot of opportunity for innovation. The private sector is also catching up with their investments. What are your thoughts on where the sector is headed?
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Yeah, the really interesting dynamic here is that the IT community that serves manufacturing and that serves the broader enterprise IT marketplace is innovating at a pace that exceeds that of the traditional operations or manufacturing ecosystem. And so they've sort of been in many ways an aspiration, an inspiration rather, for the manufacturing community to partner, to engage, to innovate in a much more agile and effective way.
But the reality is, as I mentioned before, that if every vendor, if every one of these stakeholders is innovating in a vacuum, is innovating to create more stovepipe architectures and to each sort of reinvent the wheel, and the way that information kind of at an infrastructure level is made available and is contextualized and then made available for an AI machine learning model, made available for some sort of value creation solution, we are sub optimizing our investments and our ability to innovate every, in every single one of these implementations. And so that, again, comes back to creating a center of gravity here in the US, not an isolation of what other manufacturing regions are doing in Germany and Japan and Korea and so on and so forth, but ensuring that we're working in a harmonized way with those other manufacturing regions, drive towards the interoperability, drive towards the portability of manufacturing investments so that we're not building everything from scratch every single time and with no way to translate and copy and paste what we use here into the next site. Into the next site. Into the next site. And so that's what I was referring to as the sort of ecosystem challenge.
How can we move from the proprietary, everybody does it their own way, from scratch every single time, into a way where we can really commoditize much of the non value added aspects of how we use information and bring that information to life to solve major problems from the machine all the way up to the supply chain.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: So, John, switching gears here a little bit now to focus on your journey to date, tell us a bit more about your background and career before sesame.
[00:18:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I've had the opportunity to work for some great manufacturing automation and software companies over my career, working for Rockwell Automation straight out of college, going from there to help a friend raise some venture capital and build an important startup in this, in this space.
After that was acquired, I went to GE, where I led their manufacturing software business globally, and then back to Rockwell to help Rockwell on their journey to becoming a more of a software player as a traditional, very successful automation player in this space. And so that has shaped my perspective to understand across these multiple different chapters of my journey, to understand how complex and how challenging this space really is, that the vendors in this space really face common challenges, and that there's massive technical debt that exists in the installed base in the marketplace that we have to address as we look forward. So I've had the privilege across these different organizations to understand very deeply what the commonalities are across this space and across the vendor and the implementation community, and how we can perhaps address those. And obviously with the privilege and the funding and the mandate that we represent here at Sesame to work on some of those things in a very systematic way and hopefully a very thoughtful way to address some of those headwinds.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: And what attracted you towards this opportunity of becoming a CEO and at Sesame?
[00:20:24] Speaker C: Well, I think it was exactly that. Having, having had this experience with the three companies I've worked for and on the board of directors of an association called Mesa that was also focused on convening the players in this space, the stakeholders in this space, I did see across this community how complex and how difficult this was, and began thinking a decade ago about what the real headwinds were. What are the very sort of nuanced challenges that have made it so costly and so complex. And so when I saw the opportunity here at SEsME to lead an organization focused on exactly that and try to influence this marketplace to move forward in a much more collaborative way to solve some of these problems with the federal mandates and with the support of the Department of Energy here and with the support of UCLA, which is the organization that we live in, I had what I felt was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with some of the great thinkers and some of the great thought leaders in this space to bring this community together and solve these problems. So it's been a real privilege and an honor for me to do that.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Sounds great. So John, for closing thoughts, the industrial technology sector or the overall manufacturing sector is what we refer to as the titanium economy and it's very exciting to see its rise to prominence, especially in the last four or five years with all of the legislative focus on how it's becoming a center of all of the policy making.
What do you see as Sesame's role in helping to revive the sector going forward?
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a great way to sort of cap this conversation. I think as the manufacturing ecosystem learns to collaborate and learns what partnering to solve important problems looks like, we are creating a center of gravity here at sesme for that sort of voice of manufacturing and for the ability to influence not just the manufacturing community in a more effective way but to your point also influence policymakers. We've had the opportunity even in the last twelve months to bring Sesame members and the bring this community to play to provide a high level and strategic input into for example, the congressionally convened or mandated effort last year to build a national plan for smart manufacturing.
We influenced the actual creation through Congress of that request for a plan and then we were able to influence how that, how the, how how the manufacturing community provides their input, their point of view back to this group that has been chartered to put this national plan together. And so the fact that our policymakers from the administration all the way through the House and the Senate are actually writing bills and requesting that we as a nation become more focused on smart manufacturing, that we use smart manufacturing as a way to become more competitive, that's a very nascent thing. That wasn't here even five years ago. But we're thrilled to see the, the focus on these important topics from the very sort of administration on down and to provide what we aspire to be, which is that voice of manufacturing representing all of these stakeholders that can provide balanced, nuanced, thoughtful input into the dialogue and into the various discussions that are taking place where we need to shine the spotlight on these important and highly strategic areas for a nation's well being, but also for our nation's security as a vital manufacturing nation.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense. John, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure to have you and talk to you about Sesame's role in the manufacturing sector and how it will shape the future of the manufacturing sector within the US.
[00:25:01] Speaker C: Thank you. It was an honor to have this conversation with you. Take care.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to INA Insights. Please visit Ina AI for more podcasts, publications, and events on developments shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector.
