Adam Honig: Because I feel like the lasting impression that people have of manufacturing is from the really old I Love Lucy episode where they’re making chocolate. That’s how people think about manufacturing. It’s really not like that at all..

Mike Nager: Laverne and Shirley putting the tops on the beer bottles, right? 

Adam Honig: Exactly. Hello, and welcome to Make it. Move it. Sell it. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products, and having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig:, CEO of Spiro.AI. We make amazing software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today, we’re talking to Mike Nager:, the Manager of Solutions at Festo Didactic. Probably more interesting to people here on the podcast, a published author and an expert on Industry 4.0. Welcome to the podcast, Mike.

Mike Nager: Thank you, Adam. I appreciate the invitation, and I’m very happy to be here.

Adam Honig: Oh, awesome. Maybe, Mike, before we kind of get into Industry 4.0 and some of the new and interesting things that you’re seeing, maybe just tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to be such a knowledgeable person about these topics.

Mike Nager: Yes, I went to school for an engineering degree. As a result, I’m an electrical engineer by degree. My first job right out of college was working for a manufacturer of components we call industrial controls. Industrial controls are used by every other manufacturer and machine builder to control the movement of their apparatus or machines. I’ve stayed in that field ever since I graduated from college. I was typically in a customer-facing position, such as applications engineering, sales, or product marketing. As such, I had the opportunity to visit hundreds of manufacturing locations throughout my career. When you do it, you don’t think it’s that special until you start reflecting upon it and talking to people at cocktail parties who are in accounting or different fields. You start to realize, ‘Oh, yeah, I was in a tire factory, an automotive factory, or a pharmaceutical factory.’ This is not something that everyone has done in their career. I started thinking about how I could take this knowledge, or at least this experience, and share it with more people than just those I can talk to at a small gathering. That’s how I kind of started out.

Adam Honig: It’s super interesting because I visit a lot of factories as well, just as a part of my work. I was talking with a manufacturing executive at Hershey’s, and he was expressing his excitement about getting to visit someone else’s factory. I thought, ‘Wait, you don’t get to see other people’s factories, but I do?’ That didn’t make any sense to me. But yes, it’s sort of a common thing, right?

Mike Nager: Yes, especially for the suppliers. I’ve worked for companies that made connectors, cables, and things of that nature. In sales, you’re visiting all these customers every day, and you might think that there’s a community of people at Hershey, Nestlé, and all the other food manufacturers. However, they can’t go out as much. So, it’s an interesting situation when you’ve seen seven different plants of how potato chips are made.

Adam Honig: Yes, potato chips is a good one. I haven’t seen one of those, but I did see some other very interesting things. But tell me, when you got to work with all these different types of companies, was there any sort of interesting or unusual type of project that you got to see?

Mike Nager: Throughout my career, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work on a lot of really cool projects. I worked on several USPS projects, the Postal Service with high-speed sortation and delivering of packages, mail, and letters, and things of that nature. I learned how that structure is set up between the post office and all the subcontractors that supply that, and all the machine builders that supply to the subcontractors. It’s a very sophisticated system. What you find is every industry has a very sophisticated system of supply chain and of how things are made. It’s not a simple process. It’s not just a single plant that’s making it. It’s all these interconnected pieces that have to come together. That was pretty cool. I worked on a New York subway project where they were trying to place some more instrumentation inside the subway tunnels and I got to go down behind the tunnels to where you normally would stand and see the control rooms.

Adam Honig: But no radioactive spiders while you were down there, right?

Mike Nager: Yes, we were fortunate in that case that we avoided all that. Wind turbine companies have their production facilities, and it’s really amazing stuff when you see it. Or even a battery factory. I was at an AA battery factory in a very nondescript, windowless building in South Carolina 20 years ago. When you go in there, you find that they’re making 250 million AA batteries a year. Their production line is so fast you can’t even see the individual batteries whizzing down it. 

That was 20 years ago, so I can’t even imagine what they’re pumping out of that one facility today. All over the country, we have these nondescript, windowless buildings producing things at this scale that the general public has no idea about. It’s all happening behind those corrugated steel walls. Part of what I’m trying to do, and part of why I think you invited me on, is to try to place a window into those walls so that people can see inside, be amazed by it, and maybe even encourage a young person to consider it for a career.

Adam Honig: Yes, let’s actually jump into that because I’ve been speaking with a lot of people on the podcast who are trying to hire. It’s challenging for people to hire, and there’s this sentiment that younger people are not really that interested in manufacturing. It doesn’t sound as appealing as being a baseball player or even working in high tech. Are you seeing that same sort of challenge?

Mike Nager: Yes, very much so. And not without some good cause. We have to rewind the clock to 1990. That’s where I kind of think of the modern era as starting. What happened then? Well, in the general public, what they see is declining manufacturing employment. Typically, when you have declining employment in a sector, that’s not something that you would encourage someone you care about to go into. It seems counterproductive. 

But yes, manufacturing still has the reputation of being dull, dangerous, and dirty, and it’s not something that a lot of people, unless they have someone close to them who knows differently, would consider out of the blue. The manufacturing community, especially now that we as a country are rethinking this idea of offshoring to faraway places in the world and coming up with the concept of reshoring and bringing things closer to home, or near shoring, bringing things to Mexico or Canada instead of Taiwan or China, is facing a huge issue. Now it’s like, ‘Well, how are we going to supply all these workers?’ It’s a huge issue for manufacturers and the education system. Some of your previous guests have mentioned it, and I agree 100%, there’s a big job ahead of us.

Adam Honig: Yes, I mean, I’ve been nurturing this idea that I think we need a good movie about manufacturing. Something like ‘The Social Network,’ but for manufacturing, or maybe even in a Marvel movie or something like that. I feel like the lasting impression that people have of manufacturing is from the really old ‘I Love Lucy’ episode where they’re making chocolate. That’s what people think of when they think of manufacturing. It’s really not like that at all.

Mike Nager: Laverne and Shirley putting the tops on the beer bottles, right?

Adam Honig: Exactly. 

Mike Nager: No, that’s a wonderful idea. We should pitch it to someone in Hollywood. I could see a ‘Jack Bauer 24’ episode, you know, where they have to save the world with the manufacturing of some things. Actually, during Covid, we came pretty close to a real-life example of that. A lot of companies, including the one I work for, jumped into the fray and asked, ‘How can we do things very quickly to try to alleviate the worst of what we feared might come with the Covid crisis?’

Adam Honig: So, in that movie, would it be Pfizer manufacturing, or the suppliers? How do you envision that going forward?

Mike Nager: Yes, there could be a whole bunch of different angles. Like what we said before, there are so many players that have to come together to make the whole thing work, including the supply chain folks. There could be a lot of heroes to that story, for sure.

Adam Honig: Yes, interesting. Now, I know part of your work is also focused on not just awareness, but training and education of younger people to get them into manufacturing. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Mike Nager: Yes, I work with Festo Didactic. Festo Didactic is a branch of the Festo Corporation, which is a privately held German company that primarily produces industrial controls. We manufacture pneumatic and electronic controls that go into machines, utilities, and all sorts of apparatus. The division that I work for is a relatively small division of that company, and we are focused on the education and training system. As many of your listeners probably know, Germany has a very envied apprenticeship and training program in their country where highly skilled workers are produced in scale. A big part of that is hands-on experience, so the concept of being an engineer and being a theoretical engineer is kind of like an oxymoron to them. If you’re going to be an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, or a manufacturing engineer, the idea is you need hands-on experience with the equipment that you’re going to be working with in the factory. 

What Festo Didactic does is we work with universities, technical schools, community colleges that have some interest in industrial maintenance, industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering and say, ‘We can help you build that laboratory so that the students actually get hands-on experience with the exact equipment or very similar equipment to what they will see in these factories when they graduate.’ We work with the school, the professor, or the program and ask, ‘Do you need some robots? Yes, of course, everybody needs some robots. Do you need a conveyor? Yes, we need a conveyor. Do you need an automated storage and retrieval system? Yes, we need that.’ 

We put together what we call a learning factory. The learning factory starts with the customer placing an order for some sort of widget into their system, and at the output, if they do everything correctly, the widget comes out and students learn about programming, cybersecurity, maintenance, mechanics, and more. All of the products are coded with RFID and updated continuously in the manufacturing process, so there’s no black hole of manufacturing, right? That’s what I do. It’s pretty cool because I get to go out to campuses and talk to people who are very leading-edge folks in the field and publishing papers all the time. They have their own ideas, and a lot of their ideas get incorporated back into what we offer to the rest of the world. So, it’s very fulfilling.

Adam Honig: Is this type of program primarily offered to engineering schools?

Mike Nager: Yes, typically engineering schools and technical schools offer programs in industrial maintenance, industrial mechanics, or mechatronics, which is a relatively new term for us in the US. Truthfully, many graduates coming out of two-year schools receive job offers that are just as lucrative as those coming out of four-year programs. There’s been a real shift in the last ten years towards fast, hands-on, practically oriented training or education that gets people out into the workforce quickly. 

Part of what we try to do is shorten the on-the-job training period for future employers. Maybe the person coming out of the program already knows how to download a program into a robot, or how to pull that program off of the robot. They don’t need someone to show them because they did that in their school project. We’re just trying to make it a little bit easier for everyone involved.

Adam Honig: Definitely. But it also seems like it would really reduce the risk. I mean, a big challenge for all employers is hiring someone. It’s hard to find them, it’s hard to evaluate them. You get them in, and then you wonder how many will work out? I would imagine that if they go through that kind of program, the success rate would be a lot higher too.

Mike Nager: The success rate is a lot higher. I think there’s probably some evidence that people are more likely to stay with a company longer when they have that training because they’re quickly integrated into the whole system. They’re placed on tracks for promotion faster and things of that nature.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. So, are you seeing a trend? A lot of people have been talking about bringing a lot more manufacturing capability back to the US. You must be seeing that happening all the time, right?

Mike Nager: Yes, we’re seeing it happen. The tricky part about it is there’s a lag time. For those in industrial controls, you know that lag time is something that’s very hard to deal with. It’s the period from when you say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do something,’ to when you start to see results. We’re talking about training programs that are typically at least 18 months long, or two years at a minimum. But it even goes further back from that. You have to establish the program, get the space, and hire the professors or instructors. So, that keeps on coming back.

Adam Honig: Well, that’s okay because we have to build the factories, get the materials, and find the customers. There’s all this other stuff that can go on while you’re taking care of all of that, I imagine.

Mike Nager: Yes, there are a lot of things that have to work in parallel to make it work. But definitely, I think the writing’s on the wall. Reshoring is a real thing now. It’s become a national defense issue, not an economic issue, which I feel is the shift. In the ‘90s and 2000s, everything was done on an economic basis. ‘What’s the lowest price I can get for this widget?’ And it doesn’t matter where it’s produced. 

But when the Department of Defense says, ‘Well, we need that widget for our F114s or Abrams tanks, and we should have a domestic supply,’ that’s a whole different set of criteria. That’s what has kicked this off. The Department of Defense, over ten years ago, looked at the supply chain and realized that we were in pretty bad shape, should hostilities break out in different parts of the world and our supply chain was interrupted. They actually started manufacturing institutes all around the country to try to jumpstart this process. So there are about 15 of them all around the country right now, doing something in parallel.

Adam Honig: So, was this all kind of happening at the same time as the Industry 4.0 movement was taking place? Would you say it was a parallel development, or is it related?

Mike Nager: Yes, I would say it’s parallel because Industry 4.0 is the result of these technologies that have been developed outside of manufacturing. I mean, manufacturing in a lot of ways leads in some thought processes, but in other ways, it’s a follower. All these IIoT or IoT type concepts and devices are making their way into manufacturing today. So, the Germans were able to come up with Industry 4.0 as a nice little way of encapsulating what was happening. I’ve seen it throughout my career working in industrial controls. Having more sensors pick up more pieces of information, having more controllers analyze that and take some action on it without human interaction. It was all kind of morphing this way. But until Industry 4.0 came out, we didn’t have a nice little term to encapsulate it with. It’s kind of a marketing term.

Adam Honig: Well, I understand. But I think you’re right when you say that it encapsulates. It gives people a banner to rally behind and gives people a sense that things are changing, which is important.

Mike Nager: Yes, because before that, everyone was referring to it as a different thing. I think GE got out there with ‘smart factory,’ so that was probably the most popular alternative. But other people said ‘smart manufacturing,’ and some other folks called it ‘advanced manufacturing.’ They all meant something a little bit different, so it was a little bit confusing. So, Industry 4.0 was nice because it kind of wrapped everything up nicely.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. So, I’m super curious. I know you’ve published a number of books focused on this training and awareness sector. Could you tell me a little bit about the thought process of transitioning from being in the industry to becoming an author?

Mike Nager: Yes, I described a little bit about what I did with Festo Didactic, going into schools and ensuring that their learning factories were up-to-date and looked fantastic. Some prospective students coming by would say, ‘Oh, I’m going to get to work on that in this program. I want to come here.’ So, the aesthetics of what we provide are outstanding. That’s what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. 

But as I visit these schools, I started to notice something, which alludes a little bit to your earlier point. If that classroom could hold, let’s just say, 20 students, when I went into them for the most part, I’d see six students, seven students, eight students, nine students. Barely half of the capacity was being fulfilled with actual students in seats. And I thought, there’s something going on here, right? We can build the mousetrap, but if there are no mice coming by, we’re not going to catch them.

Adam Honig: You needed some cheese, it turns out.

Mike Nager: We need some cheese because I think one of your previous guests, Chad Moutray from the Manufacturing Institute, said something like, ‘There’s like 600,000 job openings right now.’ Well, the truth of the matter is, if every technical school and every technical university was at 100% capacity, and we made three shifts of them, so we had an eight-hour shift, an eight-hour shift, and an eight-hour shift, we would be hard-pressed to come up with that 600,000 workers being produced.

To further that, I’m going into a lot of classrooms and I’m seeing they’re at 50% capacity, 40%, 60%. If it drops below 40, then usually the program’s canceled. So I was like, ‘There’s something going on here.’

I think what is needed is someone in the industry has to reach out to students, to parents, to guidance counselors in high schools, to maybe even elected officials that control the school board budgets and direction, and tell them that manufacturing is coming back. Manufacturing is not dirty, dull, and dangerous. Manufacturing can offer very good benefits and very good salaries and very good job opportunities. Someone should do that.

It took me a little while and I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’m the somebody and what could I do?’ And that’s where I came up with the idea of publishing books written for laypeople, people not in the manufacturing or engineering industry, but someone that has an interest or a potential interest in it that could open it up and read without needless complication or jargon or acronyms what’s going on in manufacturing.

Adam Honig: You don’t have to know about MRP or bill of materials, in other words, to really get into this.

Mike Nager: Yes, no three-letter acronyms, or TLAs. No TLAs are allowed. So, that’s what I kind of envisioned my purpose to be in this secondary endeavor. How can we encourage people to even consider a career in manufacturing?

Adam Honig: Yeah. Well, I, completely agree with you. I mean, obviously spreading awareness and getting people to understand that these are well-paying, you know, lucrative positions in good industries, but they actually that require a lot of technical, you know, insight. There’s real challenges here to be solved, which are quite interesting for people.

Mike Nager: Definitely, the skill sets that you learn in these types of programs, I always like to say, are not limited to a very narrow manufacturing field. We’re talking about the service industry as well. A lot of people left manufacturing and got into service, for one reason or another, their choice or not even their choice.

But even the service industry is changing. Robots are now being utilized in fast-foods and restaurants, and automation is hitting that as well. So, there’s going to be a need for people with these types of skill sets and this type of mindset, even outside of manufacturing.

So, you’re in no way limiting yourself to a certain field. It’s coming everywhere. People with these skill sets are going to be very well served going into the future, for sure.

Adam Honig: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Now, for our listeners, Mike has agreed to give a free copy of his book, ‘The Smart Student’s Guide to Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0’, to anybody who reaches out on LinkedIn. Mike, maybe you can just tell folks how they can get a hold of you on LinkedIn.

Mike Nager: Yeah, I’d love to hear from anyone that’s interested in manufacturing or technical education, or just interested in the subject in general. On LinkedIn, my username is ‘Mike Nager:’, no spaces or underscores or anything, just ‘Mike Nager:’ and you’ll find me pretty quick. There’s not too many of us out there.

Adam Honig:

Cool. Well, it’s been great having you on the podcast, Mike. I think this is extremely important work that you’re doing, building awareness and giving people a set of skills that they need to be productive. I would love for people to be doing that for me, to be training employees before they came to Spiro. If anybody out there is doing that, just let me know. I definitely want to hear about it. But it’s been really great to have you on the podcast and learn all about that.

Mike Nager: Thank you for the opportunity, and thanks for championing the cause. I’ve listened to several of the other episodes. I was very impressed by the content, and I agree with all of your other guests as well about this. Thank you.

Adam Honig: Thank you. As a reminder to our listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. And, I don’t know, Mike, do you think we should have people give us a good rating or something like that if they like the episode?

Mike Nager: Yeah, I definitely think you should get a five-star rating.

Adam Honig: I think a five-star rating for this episode, for sure. Don’t forget to subscribe. If you got value out of the podcast, feel free to tell a friend too. Maybe they would like it. Thanks, everybody for tuning in, and we look forward to speaking to you on the next episode.