Driving Sustainability in Manufacturing – James Newman, Augury

This is Techstrong tv. Hi, I am Bonnie Schneider for Techstrong tv. Today we're taking a deep dive into the world of digital transformation in manufacturing.

Joining us now is James Newman, head of product and portfolio marketing. At re, James is an advocate for leveraging innovative technologies to drive impactful results. We'll explore how re's groundbreaking state of the product, state of production health survey sheds light on manufacturer's technology investments, and their efforts to quantify e s G initiatives.

So, uh, interesting topic, James. It's great to have you on Tech Trunk tv. Well, thank you for having us, uh, really appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit of what we we learned from this survey.

Wonderful. Um, can you tell us first, though, a little bit about yourself and your journey into the realm of digital transformation and how it led you to your role, role at aery? Sure.

So, I, I am the firm byproduct to be careful what you complain about. It might be your job to fix it. Uh, I stood for more than 20 years now.

I've been involved in engineering and manufacturing in different roles. Uh, somewhere around 15 years ago, we started deploying digital technologies in the companies I worked at, uh, to very bad success, to be honest. And so I began to work with my teams to say, why is this not working?

Why are we spending all this money, but nothing's really changing? And then before you knew it, uh, I made too much noise and I was in charge of digital transformation for our organization. So, uh, I lived for that The next seven years around our global world, I, I led the opportunity to figure out how digital technologies actually changed the way we work.

And then about 10 years ago, I got the opportunity to kinda shift my side of the fence and move to technology providers. And since then I've had the opportunity to work with several technology providers who actually helped to deliver and enable the transformation that seemed to be possible. I, I tend to hate the word digital transformation just a little bit because it's really about business transformation using digital.

And sometimes people get too hung up on technology, but it's really around how do people work differently. Uh, I had the opportunity about two years ago to come to re really awesome opportunity for me. Uh, for those of you who don't know, ay Aery is, uh, about a billion dollar, uh, organization focused on machine and process health or using AI solutions to, to transform the way that people use data to make decisions.

So that was a perfect fit for me. And here at re I get the chance to, to do cool things like talk to you and, uh, share kind of the message of, of what's happening in the world. That's great.

Uh, you know, speaking about the manufacturing industry, uh, they face unique challenges when it comes to quantifying E S G initiatives, which has certainly been in the news slightly. So how does Arie's Survey help with that Really kind of in three areas? First of all, it's a great tool for Liz taking the pulse of where things stand today in manufacturing, uh, on several different areas.

Actually, most important perhaps is how important is sustainability in the grand scheme of things. Uh, and to be honest, not important enough. Uh, when we looked at this survey and we asked people, what are your top objectives?

In reality, only 17% included meeting sustainability and E S G targets as top of mind for them, that's not really good enough. On the other hand, it helps us also to identify where people are working to deliver some value. Uh, it was kind of an interesting mix.

In this particular survey, we saw environmentally smarter technologies and reducing byproduct waste and producing more environmentally friendly products kinda rise to the top. So even though it's, it's not such a good news around how sustainable, how high it is on the priority list, people are taking actions. However, what we also see, which is interesting, uh, is that in fact people were having trouble quantifying the value of their activities.

Let's take an example of that. 37% of the people we saw we surveyed, said they're working on reducing byproduct waste, but only 29% of those folks can actually quantify the impact of initiatives. So it's not all great news to be honest, but what it also says is people are taking action, it's beginning to get more serious, but actually the opportunity in front of us is still very vast.

And, and this survey kind of outlined some of those things for us. That makes sense. Um, what did you learn about the way, um, manufacturers use ai and what, what insights did you gain from that, that you learn what you learned from the survey?

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting problem. Most, most people when they think about sustainability and media, think about alternative energy and sustainable packaging, a lot of those things that are in the news. But in reality there's a lot of, uh, opportunities to make the way we produce things today more sustainable.

And we see a lot of people investing in that area. For example, 70% of the manufacturers we talk to, they sort of claim their production potential is really good or even excellent. But at the same time, they all all admit they're struggling with things like unreliable equipment and unplanned downtime and other things like that that actually impacts sustainability significantly, indirectly.

At the same time, however, 71% of the people we talked to said that sustainability targets either hurt or have zero impact on their ability to make production. Uh, that's not awesome actually, uh, that they, that they still view this a little bit as a, as a competition between profitability and sustainability. And, and that's a real problem.

They're not symbiotic today. But what do we see customers who are deploying AI doing is beginning to overcome that, that that that gap between the two. And what we mean by that is that as people optimize their machines and their processes for efficiency, safety capacity, all the things that, that are production related, profitability related, they can also optimize them to be cleaner and have less waste and to be more reliable so that the downstream and upstream effects are, are matched.

And when we really talk about this a lot, because in the past we could solve for one problem at a time using AI solutions, we see people solving multiple objectives simultaneously. And that allows us then to begin to make a real impact. And to, we, we published a paper a year or so ago, said, it's no longer a zero sum game.

You don't have to pick between people and processes and the planning. You can now optimize for all of them simultaneously, but the only way we can do that is through good application of ai. Well, sustainability initiatives, uh, require buy-in from various stakeholders within a manufacturing organization.

So how does the technology like yours help bridge the gap between different departments to ensure a cohesive and environmentally responsible approach? So the reality is today, most goals from sustainability are still set at the corporate level. There are corporate objectives and, and that's where they should start.

The challenge we have today is they don't often get cascaded down far enough. People don't often get to have good visibility into what's happening in real time, which means that most of sustainability metrics are lagging indicators and they, they come up way too late to actually affect the outcome. Uh, they tell us how we did, but not how we're doing if you want to think about it like that.

And so with solutions like ours, we now enable people to see them in real time what's happening, to make adjustments in real time to account for things like, oh, we have machines running poorly and they're consuming more energy and let's go fix them and bring them back down to consuming less electricity. You could never do that with lagging indicators. So what we see people with technology like ours doing is bringing that down to the shop floors and to the places where people can actually make immediate impact on the objectives without waiting for a quarter or six months to find out how poorly they did.

And that's sort of the transition we're making here. Do you have any, uh, specific examples of success stories? Sure.

Let me, let me start with kind of the big picture and then drop into a specific example if that's okay. You know, when, when re talks about sustainability, we talk about audacious goals. For example, uh, we had a study perform recently about an independent research company that said that every manufacturer in North America alone adopted aery, that we would cut emissions, uh, from manufacturing by 12% over the next 10 years.

It's a big number now, we haven't done that yet, but that's, that's the what we're, that's the target we're shooting for, right? That's not replacing equipment that's doing more better with what you have, and that's important. At the same time, waste is a huge issue downstream, upstream impacts of byproducts, of waste, raw materials or, or nearly finished goods.

And those also are things we impact. So what does that look like practically? So one of our machine health customers, um, had, had deployed machine health first.

Uh, most people start there with a, with a machine space. And in the first year of deployment, they saved over a million pounds of raw material from, from, from waste year over year million pounds. And all of that downstream impact about transportation of raw materials and, and the production and all the, the agricultural.

In this particular case, um, waste was prevented from saving a million pounds of raw materials. So that's a pretty cool impact. So then they said, okay, what's next?

So they deployed what we call process health into their, into one of their facilities. And in the first three months of that implementation, they actually reduced their waste by 45% year over year period over period, while at the same time increasing output by 2%. So both directions at the same time.

And they reduced their energy consumption by 4% on the same line. So what we allow them to do then is to begin to make tactical, very practical in the weeds and out on the shop floor, changes to how they run that actually in fact has a notable impact on their sustainability initiatives. And so, uh, that that's a pretty, and, and, and at the same time, they're increasing output, they're increasing their quality, reducing their cost.

So profitability is going up while sustainability is being achieved. That's a pretty cool outcome. That's great.

Well, being a liter leader in, um, digital transformation for manufacturing, how does, uh, your company stay ahead of emerging technologies? It seems like there's a lot changing in digital transformation all the time. So, um, how have you been able to stay abreast of all that?

You know, a lot of it's around, a lot of it's around communication, right? Um, a lot of it's around research. To be really honest.

There are so many new technologies that come out every day. It's almost impossible to keep up with all of 'em. So what's important to look for is which ones actually are, are tangible and, and applicable.

All every kind of prides itself on looking at solutions that are easy for users to adopt. Not that it requires huge research and and we wanna do the research for them, right? So when they take it, it's fast time to value ta fast to achieve outcomes that, that are tangible and drive confidence that this is something we can obtain, obtain.

So for us, it's all around the r and d. We have a lot of our teams who are out constantly exploring and talking to other customers and looking at what customers are doing and what other technologies are doing. And then looking at how we bring that together.

There's no easy, easy answer to this in some cases. Um, you know, monitoring a single machine is, is not necessarily practical. So how do you do that more holistically?

So there's lots of those technologies like that around energy monitoring and, and waste monitoring and steam monitoring and emissions monitoring that all play a role here. And trying to find the right ones is really the key here. Um, as sustainability practices evolve, uh, companies are now facing new challenges, especially global ones and understanding implementing complex E S G guidelines, um, lots of changes ahead, especially moving into 2024.

So how does Aery plan to support manufacturers in deciphering all these new regulations that are coming out and, and of course when they vary in different parts of the world? Yeah, so a lot of it's around the flexibility of your modeling. This is, uh, to a certain extent.

So what I mean by that is, particularly if you look at things like waste and quality and emissions, you can never, it'll be almost impossible to have a single piece of software that knows all of them. This is almost a non, non-practical, but what you can do is set the software up so it it allows you to build, to, to incorporate that into the models that it does and dynamically keep up with them. So it could have the same model applied in three different regions with three different criteria.

So our contribution to that is really by enabling our, our, our, the customers who work with us to have the flexibility to adapt in real time, to change in regulations. It, it is gonna be a little bit of a wild west scenario is kind of an American phrase, but, uh, wild west scenario for a bit is, is between regions, is things change. Being able to be able to capture my waste move by this much that meant this in the, in the regulation.

My regulatory compliance has to be very flexible. And that's sort of our contribution is to build the flexibility in for them. That makes sense.

And finally, for the last question, looking ahead, what role do you see Aery playing in the evolution of digital transformation and e S G initiatives in the manufacturing industry? So, you know, uh, there's so much to do in manufacturing that we, we could probably, we'll probably spend our lifetime solving this challenge 'cause there's so many much opportunity there. Uh, but it's super important that we do that.

You know, when you think about the manufacturing footprint on everything we do in society, uh, it's, it is pretty monumental. So by, our goal is really to help them understand how to produce better and to produce, to produce more sustainably. Our challenge is to help customers stop saying, be sustainable, but we're going to be more sustainable today by solving this problem we couldn't solve before.

So our role is really to provide solutions that enable them to answer questions they couldn't answer before. Uh, obviously leveraging AI in our case that allow them to take very complex problems and not be overwhelmed by them, but in fact bring them to measurable value. And so that's sort of our goal and that's sort of our objective is to allow people to, to not focus on can I solve the problem, but what does this problem enable me to do?

That's great. That's an optimistic outlook as well. Uh, thank you so much.

James Newman, head of product and portfolio marketing at Aery. Uh, it was a pleasure to speak with you and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about sustainability and manufacturing in the future. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. Great.

All right. Well stay with us on Techstrong tv. We'll have more interviews like this coming up.