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Ep. 277 - Inside the Siemens Pop Up Factory: How a Modular CPG Plant Runs Half Real and Half Virtual
Episode 262
Thursday, October 15, 2026 • Duration 01:10:35
The Siemens pop up factory is a modular CPG plant where virtual PLCs, real controllers, and a live digital twin run small batches side by side.
Most factories are built for long runs of the same product. Davide Picciotto explains why that model is being stretched. COVID supply chain shocks pushed brands to add flexible areas inside existing plants, and events like the World Cup raised a sharper question: what if a factory could be stood up close to demand, run personalized products for a season, and then move? Siemens is validating the idea with PepsiCo through what Davide calls a hybrid immersive prototype: half the factory is virtual, half is real, and both run as one system. Pininfarina, the design house behind decades of Ferraris, designed the modular shell.
Andrea Sassetti walks through the live environment that debuted at Hannover Messe. Four PLCs, some physical and some virtual on Industrial Edge, feed the Industrial Information Hub, which adds a semantic layer and pushes data to the cloud. Virtual PLCs also simplify firmware and security patching. A capability matching engine reads each recipe step, checks which equipment is available and stocked with the right material, and routes the batch in real time. The same engine builds rainbow pallets of mixed product layers, using the Simatic robot library over SRCI so the same code runs on a Universal Robots cobot or any compatible arm.
The most interesting idea is in the mixer. Traditionally, mix time and speed are hard coded into the recipe. Siemens ran thousands of Simcenter fluid dynamics simulations across viscosities, particle sizes, and impeller types, trained a model in AI Studio from the Altair RapidMiner acquisition, and deployed it on Industrial Edge. The recipe now specifies material properties, and the model infers setpoints on the fly, even when an ingredient comes from a new supplier.
Davide closes on what is still missing: digital threads between engineering and execution remain incomplete, with one CPG company counting thousands of clicks to launch a single product. PepsiCo has reported a 20 percent throughput gain at a US Gatorade plant from its digital twin work with Siemens and NVIDIA.
About the Guests Davide Picciotto is Digital Enterprise Industry Director for CPG at Siemens Digital Industries Software. In 20 years at Siemens he moved from MES in Genoa to food and beverage presales in the US, helped found the Digital Enterprise team in 2015, and ran the Siemens showcase at MxD in Chicago.
Andrea Sassetti is an Innovation Manager on the Siemens Digital Enterprise team. He joined Siemens in 2009 as an MES developer on what is now Opcenter, then moved to the US in 2018 as solution architect for the Siemens showcase at MxD.
Timestamps 0:00 Welcome and PACK EXPO details 2:10 Meet Davide Picciotto and Andrea Sassetti 5:00 What Siemens Digital Enterprise covers 8:20 What is the pop up factory 11:20 The business case for modular factories 17:50 Pininfarina designs the modular factory 24:20 PepsiCo and the validation stage 28:30 Live demo: Industrial Edge and virtual PLCs 35:00 Rainbow pallets and SRCI robots 40:00 AI mixer setpoints trained on simulation 45:00 What visitors will see at PACK EXPO 51:10 The future of pop up factories
References Siemens Industrial Information Hub: https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/simatic-apps/industrial-information-hub
This episode is sponsored by Siemens is a global technology company operating across industrial automation, digital software, smart infrastructure, and mobility. Siemens Xcelerator is its open digital business platform and marketplace. https://www.siemens.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
Ep. 274 - David Schultz on ISA 95, Knowledge Graphs, and Building a Data Model for AI
Episode 261
Thursday, September 17, 2026 • Duration 01:06:56
There is no pyramid anywhere in the ISA 95 standard. David Schultz explains what is actually inside it and how to turn it into a working data model.
Most engineers meet ISA 95 as a layered triangle on LinkedIn and never get past it. David Schultz of Amárach StackWorks takes that image apart. The pyramid appears nowhere in the standard, which exists to define how business systems such as ERP exchange information with manufacturing and control systems. Eight parts are published today, Part 1 refreshed in 2025, with Part 9 still in committee. Start with Parts 1 and 2. Part 1 sets the scope, Part 2 delivers the resource, information and process models. Parts 3 and 4 add the activity models and the work master. Parts 5 and 6 supply the verbs and exchange patterns.
From there it collapses into a frame you can hold in your head: four resources of equipment, physical asset, personnel and material, four domains of production, maintenance, quality and inventory, and four exchanges covering definition, capability, schedule and performance. Use what works and leave the rest. On adoption David is candid. The full set runs roughly $1,400, and the paywall keeps it out of most LLM workflows because ISA would forfeit copyright by opening it up.
Where it breaks is data governance. When every site builds bespoke models, stitching them together means inventing a fourth abstraction. Vlad offers a first hand version from Procter and Gamble, where nobody at plant level owned the data structure moving from Rockwell controls into Proficy. For brownfield sites the advice is the Strangler fig pattern: leave what runs and replace functionality over time.
The second half demystifies knowledge graphs using a family tree. A graph stores a subject, a predicate and an object, and the relationship is a first class citizen, not a foreign key. RDF defines the things, RDFS adds schema, OWL adds inference so a system can derive siblings from a shared parent, and SHACL constrains the shapes. Applied to a tank, that means volume and level as properties plus the resource relationship network to map which pump feeds which vessel. Rhize implemented the entire 2018 standard as a graph. David stays cool on AI. A shared ontology means a model never guesses whether two names match, but he expects it to underwhelm. His book pick is The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.
Ep. 273 - How to Build a Systems Integration Company: Positioning, Money and Procurement
Episode 260
Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 01:22:36
Most conversations about starting a systems integrator skip the parts that sink people. Dave and Vlad spend this one on insurance, licenses and procurement.
After a month of founder interviews, Dave and Vlad close the series with their own experience. Vlad started at plant level with Procter and Gamble and Kraft Heinz, deciding how outside integrators would execute, before crossing over to work for an integrator across food and beverage and CPG packaging. Dave came from aviation and aerospace through a German machine builder and a distributor, then ran a small integration company doing MES, OEE and track and trace. Both reached the same conclusion. Integration starts after the requirements are written, so you quote to a spec and a budget, build the thing, and real handover rarely follows.
Blame does not sit in one place. Vlad puts it plainly: people resent a solution that has not actually solved something for them. But end users say they do not need training and ask for the lowest number, and training is the first line cut. Dave counters that if a customer wants five dashboards on an ugly six inch HMI that has sat in the plant for fifteen years, that is the job. Vlad's answer is that your time is finite, and a year on work you cannot show anyone positions you as the person who does that work.
The technical centerpiece is a migration that sounds nearly free. Moving from RSView 32 to FactoryTalk View gets justified because conversion tools exist. Then come the undocumented Visual Basic scripts written around tag limits on old controllers, which no conversion tool touches. Then the PLCs will not support the new terminals and servers, so the controllers go too. Then the networks underneath, often Data Highway Plus. Then servers, remote racks, IO, sensors and drives. Vlad argues these decisions get made by people who never price the second and third order effects.
An integration firm is a service firm, billing time and materials or a fixed fee, with a markup on hardware and software. Vlad quotes roughly $200 a month for $2 million of liability coverage, a capable laptop, and software licenses reaching tens of thousands of dollars per seat without preferential pricing, usually several across PLC and HMI programming. Then procurement, which nobody warns new integrators about. Dave has cleared it in twenty minutes and has waited seven months, three or four of those with lawyers arguing over a master service agreement.
Ep. 272 - Systems Integration Careers: OEM, Distributor, Machine Builder and Business Owner
Episode 259
Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 01:28:37
Most people ask how to start a systems integrator. Rich Kuechenmeister has effectively built one five times, and the lesson is that the parent business decides what you become.
Rich is owner and partner at Fishbone Technical Services. Before that he built automation groups inside a semiconductor equipment OEM, an automation components manufacturer, a products distributor, and a custom machine builder where he stood up a UL 508A panel shop from nothing. Each of those businesses sold something different, and that changed the engineering. At a machine builder the machine is the dog and the controls are the tail. At a distributor you build toolkits so somebody else can build the solution, handcuffed to the lines you carry. Rich argues that constraint is what made him good, because a single vendor solution is easy while four component areas from four vendors is where real integration lives.
His definition of a control systems integrator stays traditional. SCADA and below, field instrumentation through PLC and HMI, bridging a little into MES. Fishbone works line control, process control on boilers, pumps and valves, and material handling where suppliers ship a motor and a few sensors and nothing more.
The business advice is specific. He would rather have one $100,000 project than ten $10,000 projects, because that is one project management cycle instead of ten. He cautions against mixing maintenance work and capital projects without a plan, since context switching between a vision system callout and a pump control program burns budget on both. Dave adds the pattern he keeps seeing: come in at the bottom and you get saved in the phone as the maintenance guy, never the capital project guy. Rich hires on desire, attitude and aptitude, and admits he was once the bottleneck himself.
Looking ahead, he expects acquisitions to keep rolling up integrators and leaving a void underneath, since a twenty person firm will not get out of bed for the projects a five person firm lived on. On AI he is practical. He turned three day estimates into eight estimates in a single day, but insists code writing is a subset of the job. He is also still doing a PLC-5 conversion and a DeviceNet upgrade.
About Rich Kuechenmeister
Ep. 271 - Growing an Oil and Gas Plus Mining Systems Integrator in Alberta with JPI Solutions
Episode 258
Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 01:11:40
Oil and gas automation runs on royalty accounting as much as process control. Dustin Symes explains how that shapes every SCADA decision JPI Solutions makes.
Canadian oil and gas is structured differently than most assume. In the US mineral rights usually sit with individuals, so custody transfer draws a hard line between upstream and midstream. In Canada the provinces hold most rights, so a producer can gather 100 wells into one plant and sell to a pipeline company there. That lands on the automation: much of the SCADA data collection exists to answer who is paying whom and how much royalty is owed. Once a well is drilled, automation might find 5 to 10 percent off nameplate, so the work protects a long production tail rather than chasing throughput.
Mining behaves nothing like it. Thinner margins, $100 million capital projects, an hour long elevator ride down, underground space running 20 miles across. Those are small cities: control systems cover substations, air monitoring and lighting as well as conveyors and pumps. Mining clients want programmers on site rather than remote, and they buy for continuity: a major vendor PLC paired with their DCS, meant to last 20 years. Horizontal drilling has rescaled oil and gas, from one well and a dozen sensors to a 32 well pad carrying 300 IO, pushing designs toward redundant PLCs and ring networks. The genuinely new technology lands on the data layer, where MQTT and report by exception are displacing polled Modbus.
Dustin set two gates before his first hire: enough cash banked to make that person whole for a month or two, and enough overload to have work worth delegating. He hired out of the instrumentation program at SAIT rather than a 15 year instrument mechanic. When he weighed taking on partners, dozens of people advised against it. He brought in Dan and Brent Lawther anyway in 2018, went from five people that spring to ten by the fall, and says JPI would not exist without them.
His hardest won lesson is unglamorous. Communication is the only consistent complaint he has ever had from a customer. Nobody complains about the code. They complain that nobody told them it was finished. On AI, JPI is decompiling Rockwell files into shutdown keys and landing 85 to 90 percent of the way there on a good prompt, and running log analysis across FactoryTalk directory, HMI and historian logs to find real root causes. He expects PLC code to become text so it can be version controlled like software, and customers to treat that as baseline within five years.
Ep. 270 - How to Start a Systems Integrator: Scope, Hiring, and the Bottleneck That Is You
Episode 257
Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 01:15:05
Most people who start a systems integrator expect to keep doing the engineering. Dylan DuFresne explains why that stops being true inside two years.
Ask ten people what a systems integrator is and you get ten answers, so Dylan DuFresne starts from first principles: a third party that connects systems which used to sit isolated. The market then splits in two. One is the generalist who has seen a hundred platforms across a thousand facilities and knows how they behave together. The other is the specialist who lives inside one or two stacks. If you know what you are building, hire the specialist. If you are still deciding, the generalist saves you money.
Abelara exists because of a pattern Dylan hit repeatedly during more than a decade inside other integrators. By the time a client calls, the platform is chosen, the budget is set, and the outcome is locked in, even when that platform cannot deliver it. His answer was to move upstream into architecture, change management, and business process work with VPs and C suite sponsors. His first question is always why. Why this site, why this machine, why this platform, and what outcome is attached to it.
With no clear scope of work, Abelara declines to bid or sells the consulting engagement that produces one. When scope is fuzzy but workable he prices it all in and writes explicit exclusions and assumptions up front. His test before a proposal is one question: what does done look like. A striking number of buyers cannot answer it. He also corrects an instinct: a $200 sensor may beat a $30,000 camera technically and still be the wrong call, because the expensive option is a known quantity and carries less risk.
Scaling gets treated as line balancing applied to a company. Find the bottleneck, find the gap in skills or availability, and staff it. Each hire moves the constraint somewhere new, and the hardest part is emotional: letting go of work you enjoy and are good at. On AI, Dylan predicts integration goes back to being integration. A generation of integrators drifted into custom coding, with companies of 400 and 500 people building MES and SCADA stacks from scratch, and he expects code generation to strip that work away. Writing a tool that pulls PLC data to the cloud is easy. Running it reliably and securely 24/7 for a year is not.
Ep. 269 - Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace: Digital Transformation SMB Manufacturers Can Afford
Episode 256
Thursday, August 13, 2026 • Duration 01:13:53
Siemens says a small manufacturer can start production optimization for $2,000 a year. Martin Valkysers and Flemming Kongsberg explain what that buys you.
Most digital transformation advice assumes a budget and an engineering bench most plants do not have. Flemming Kongsberg, who runs the SMB focus inside the Siemens CTO organization, discards the usual revenue and headcount definitions: an SMB is any manufacturer without the skills to absorb a complex digital change, and that includes some very large companies. He describes one customer running 900 devices across 17 locations where 90 percent of the machines are 30 years or older with zero connectivity. Siemens research also found 40 percent of SMB customers have no IT department.
Martin Valkysers frames Siemens Xcelerator as the open digital business platform tying hardware, software, data, and services together, with more than 600 partners today. The SMB starter package is where that becomes concrete. Instead of asking a plant with no IT staff to assemble something from hundreds of apps, Siemens curated roughly 10 to 12 into one bundle covering device connectivity, Performance Insight dashboards for OEE and quality, and a slice of Mendix. A partner installed it in a lab in 24 minutes on an ordinary Windows machine, against the roughly 60 hours a traditional Industrial Edge deployment takes. It is $2,000 per year for three machines with the first three months free, and PROFINET, Ethernet/IP, and the standard protocols are supported, so competitor PLCs connect too.
The most useful argument here has nothing to do with buying anything. Flemming makes the case that reaching for AI before you own your data is a losing move, because a model built on information everyone else can reach produces no strategic advantage. You also do not need AI to build a Pareto chart of where your quality losses sit. Martin adds the discipline that gets skipped most: be clear about the problem before you pick the tool.
About the Guests
Martin Valkysers is Head of US Market Launch and Growth for Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens' open digital business platform spanning industrial, building, grid, and manufacturing sectors. He has been with Siemens roughly 12 years, previously leading a US operations consulting team focused on lean manufacturing.
Ep. 268 - David Nichols of Loupe on Claude Code, AI Retrofits, and the End of the SI Moat
Episode 255
Thursday, August 6, 2026 • Duration 01:08:01
David Nichols of Loupe explains what actually changed in automation engineering this year, and why control retrofits just got far cheaper.
Nearly twenty years into building high performance controls, David Nichols is blunt about what AI did to his business: what used to take six weeks now takes two, and his team ships roughly five times more software per sprint. An engineer dropped the raw documentation from a failing robotic cell into a folder, asked Claude for a state diagram, and got a reverse engineered flow chart in thirty minutes that beat anything the customer had. The error recovery gap causing the downtime was visible right there in the chart. A SASE member handed a model a hundred page ethernet specification and got working code for every function, plus tests, on the first try. That was a six week project. It took a day.
The implication is the sharpest part of the conversation. Software rewrites used to be the dumbest thing an engineer could propose, because software was expensive and full of unknowns. That logic has inverted. If a rewrite takes a week and produces better documentation, better tests, and better coverage, then brownfield modernization stops being a risk calculation. His words: open season on old controllers. For an industry sitting on Windows 7 machines and undocumented cells one PC failure away from stopping a line, that is a different economic picture entirely.
Vlad walks David through the full project lifecycle, and the answers stay practical. Discovery becomes a context gathering exercise where interview transcripts and a drawer full of legacy PDFs turn into control diagrams and proposals in days. Development becomes worth treating as a real software engineering project, because source control, digital twins, and automated testing are exactly what these models are fluent in. David is equally direct about platforms: the bottleneck in automation was never technical, it is cultural. His analogy is a shop that insists on carburetors because that is what the technicians know. The close tackles the chat's harder questions, including what is left of a software moat once building software is trivial. His book pick is Richard Rhodes and The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
About David Nichols David Nichols is co-founder of Loupe, a West Coast automation engineering and systems integration company he started in 2007. Loupe does high performance controls work across aerospace, semiconductors, and metal cutting, built largely on the B&R Industrial Automation platform. He also founded SASE, the Society of Automation Software Engineers, a free community of roughly two thousand engineers. This is his fourth appearance on Manufacturing Hub, following episodes 29, 53, and 127.https://loupe.team
Ep. 267 - Ujjwal Kumar of Siemens on Deglobalization, Reshoring, and Adaptive Manufacturing
Episode 254
Thursday, July 30, 2026 • Duration 01:02:23
Deglobalization is rewriting where factories get built, and Ujjwal Kumar of Siemens explains what has to change on the plant floor before reshoring actually works.
For thirty years the manufacturing playbook was labor arbitrage. Move high volume, low mix production to wherever disciplined labor was cheapest, then ship it back. Ujjwal Kumar, President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas, argues that model has quietly stopped making sense. Demand has fragmented into high mix, lower volume, regionally specific production, and the factories in Suzhou running on robots and autonomous systems no longer carry a cost advantage over the same operation in Chicago. When the labor content collapses, the business case for distance collapses with it. That single shift explains more about the current reshoring wave than any tariff headline.
The trigger was not one event. Supply chain disruption after COVID proved that geographic proximity to supply was a profitability advantage, not a nice to have. Then came the political shock: vaccine access turned out to be governed by country of citizenship rather than global distribution, and leaders across every region started sorting industries into a folder marked critical. That folder now holds semiconductors, steel, power generation, defense, space, and life sciences. Ujjwal walks through where the money is actually landing right now, including AI data centers in remote locations that demand autonomous and remote operations, power generation across fossil, renewable, nuclear, and hydro, and a level of greenfield life sciences investment in the United States he has not seen in decades. The life sciences point is the sharpest one in the episode. Drug manufacturing left as mass produced batch operations and is returning as cell and gene therapy, personalized medicine, and precision biologics, which means lot sizes of one and R&D sitting physically next to production. The design it here, build it there model taught in business schools simply does not survive that.
About Ujjwal Kumar Ujjwal Kumar is President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from the Michigan Ross School of Business, he began his career at General Motors in Detroit and went on to spend ten years at GE and seven years at Honeywell Process Solutions before leading Teradyne Robotics, one of the largest physical AI based robotics platforms. He oversees the Siemens automation portfolio spanning discrete, process, and intralogistics automation, and he continues to mentor MBA students at Michigan Ross.
After several weeks away from the podcast, Dave Griffith and Vladimir Romanov return to Manufacturing Hub to unpack their experiences at Automate 2026 and discuss what the event revealed about the current state of industrial automation.
Automate showcased an enormous range of robotics, industrial AI, machine vision, software, cloud connectivity, and emerging automation technology. However, some of the most revealing conversations were not about futuristic factories. They were about PLC 5 migrations, aging SLC systems, obsolete PanelView terminals, industrial networks, basic data collection, and how platforms such as Ignition actually connect to plant floor equipment.
Vlad shares what he learned from demonstrating a complete packaging line environment built around a CompactLogix PLC, an industrial computer, Ignition, and production performance data. The demonstration was designed to show how manufacturers can use OEE, downtime information, and machine states to identify production bottlenecks and determine where capital investment could deliver the greatest return. Instead, many attendees wanted to understand the underlying architecture, where Ignition runs, how it connects to PLCs, what protocols are required, and whether it can replace traditional HMI and SCADA platforms.
Dave discusses his experience inside the Ignition ecosystem booth, the FactoryStack cloud demonstration, the advantages of MQTT in a difficult trade show network environment, and his Automate panel on software defined automation and the factory of the future. He also introduces Elephant, an industrial log analysis and contextualization tool being developed to help users identify meaningful patterns across Ignition gateways, reduce system noise, compare facilities, and diagnose intermittent problems.
The conversation then moves across the industrial automation stack. Dave and Vlad examine virtual PLCs from Siemens, Phoenix Contact, and other vendors, including where software based control may provide value and where it may add unnecessary organizational complexity. They discuss AI generated PLC code, the limitations of translating functional specifications into reliable control applications, and why tools that produce 80 or 90 percent of an automation solution still require experienced engineers to validate the final result.
About David Schultz David Schultz is a principal consultant and co founder of Amárach StackWorks, a consultancy describing itself as standards based manufacturing operations management built on a modern technology stack. He has spent close to 30 years in process control and factory automation, starting at the device layer before moving through SCADA into MES and ERP integration. He was previously a senior consultant at Rhize Manufacturing Data Hub, where ISA 95 was implemented as a knowledge graph. He last appeared on Manufacturing Hub for Episode 85. https://www.amarach.io
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and ICC preview 2:05 David Schultz and Amárach StackWorks 4:10 What ISA 95 actually is and why the pyramid is not in it 7:20 Where to start with the standard 9:40 The ROI of a shared data model 15:00 Which parts of the standard to read first 20:40 The adoption gap: cost and misconceptions 24:20 Who inside a plant should own the model 32:50 Knowledge graphs: RDF, RDFS, OWL and SHACL 43:30 The standard is not prescriptive about protocols 47:40 Knowledge graphs, ontologies and AI 53:40 Future of standards, career advice and book pick
References ISA 95 Standard and Training: https://www.isa.org Rhize ISA 95 Learning Resources: https://docs.rhize.com/isa-95/
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Manufacturing Execution Systems: https://www.joltek.com/blog/manufacturing-execution-systems-mes Unlocking Industrial Data in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/unlocking-industrial-data-in-manufacturing
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
Vlad closes on complexity. Industrial equipment no longer ships with a full schematic and a six dollar replacement sensor, so ramp up time climbs while the population who understand electrical, mechanical and process together shrinks as the best of them retire. Dave sees it from the other side. Entry now takes an LLC, a laptop and a phone, and he expects private equity to keep buying medium and large integrators over the next five years.
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 10:30 Vlad and Dave's paths into integration 18:40 Why integrators start after the requirements are written 23:40 Who is to blame when training gets cut 30:00 RSView 32 migrations and the hidden cascade 36:40 Choosing where you sit on the integration spectrum 42:20 How integrators make money and what it costs to start 48:40 Procurement and getting paid 53:10 The future of integration and rising complexity 1:01:40 Career advice 1:13:20 The industrial app marketplace
References The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Red-Book-Selling-Principles/dp/0743572548 Influence, New and Expanded by Robert Cialdini: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-New-Expanded-Psychology-Persuasion/dp/0062937650
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Rich Kuechenmeister is owner and partner at Fishbone Technical Services, a nationwide remote technical services company he co-founded in 2021 with business partner Robert Summers. Fishbone is based in Texas and covers plant engineering and control systems integration from field instrumentation through PLC, HMI and SCADA, with some MES. Rich began his career in the United States Navy working on radars, servos and guidance systems, then spent three decades in industrial automation building engineering groups before starting Fishbone. https://fishbonetechnical.com
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Inside Fishbone Technical Services 5:20 From the Navy to OEMs, distributors and machine builders 9:00 Becoming unafraid and starting a company 15:40 What a control systems integrator actually is 20:40 How the parent business shapes the work 31:40 Filling the sales hopper and qualifying projects 36:40 Maintenance work versus capital projects 43:00 Hiring for desire, attitude and aptitude 48:20 Letting go of the client relationship 56:20 Distributors, acquisitions and the void they leave 1:04:40 AI, estimating and reverse engineering PLC code
References PrOTect IT All by Aaron Crow: https://www.amazon.com/PrOTect-All-Plain-Spoken-Cybersecurity-Protecting/dp/B0HBM3F4XS ISA/IEC 62443 Series of Standards: https://www.isa.org/standards-and-publications/isa-standards/isa-iec-62443-series-of-standards
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Dustin Symes is Chief Technology Officer at JPI Solutions, a Calgary based systems integrator serving oil and gas and mining clients across North America from four offices in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. A Red Seal journeyman electrician who moved into automation, he founded JPI in 2017. JPI covers process control from the sensor to the HMI, then up into SCADA and corporate data. https://www.jpisolutions.ca
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 5:50 Why he started JPI Solutions 10:50 Oil and gas primer: upstream, midstream, downstream 12:50 What makes mining automation different 16:10 Where JPI sits in the automation stack 28:30 Bigger well pads, redundant PLCs and MQTT 41:20 Bringing on partners when nobody recommended it 51:10 Communication as the only consistent complaint 1:04:40 The future of integration, AI and knowledge graphs
References Radical Candor by Kim Scott: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/1250103509 Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012 ThredCloud: https://www.thredcloud.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: System Integrators: https://www.joltek.com/blog/system-integrators PLC Scan Cycles and SCADA Polling: https://www.joltek.com/blog/plc-scan-cycles-polling-scada-systems-data
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
About Dylan DuFresne Dylan DuFresne is co founder and lead architect at Abelara, a manufacturing transformation firm that works with plants as coach, consultant, and integrator. He spent more than a decade inside systems integrators covering robotics, PLCs, SCADA, HMI, recipe management, and ERP integration before starting Abelara with co founder Glenn. He also wrote The Phantom Pallet, a manufacturing fable about data, trust, and transformation. https://abelara.com
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 4:30 What a systems integrator actually is 9:00 Why Dylan and Glenn started Abelara 14:00 Following the customer or picking platforms first 20:00 Consulting versus integration work 25:00 Why integrators get brought in too late 32:00 The $30,000 camera and business trade offs 36:30 Scope of work and what does done look like 43:20 Handing projects to the team and subcontractors 52:10 First hires, bottlenecks, and forecasting 57:40 AI and the future of systems integration 1:05:40 Predictions, career advice, and books
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
Flemming Kongsberg leads Global Technology Partners at Siemens Digital Industries Software and runs the company's SMB focus in the US. Before Siemens he spent nearly eight years at Amazon Web Services building partner infrastructure and strategic ISV alliances.
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Martin Valkysers on his path to Xcelerator 4:20 Flemming Kongsberg from AWS to Siemens SMB 7:10 Four challenges facing manufacturers 13:40 Why data comes before AI 18:00 What Siemens Xcelerator actually is 22:30 Partner ecosystem: build, service, sell 31:40 Inside the SMB starter package 35:50 What the package costs 38:20 A 24 minute install and non Siemens PLCs 45:50 Redefining what counts as an SMB 53:50 The future of industrial marketplaces
References Getting Started with Production Optimization: https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/industrial-edge/production-optimization-get-started/ Operational Efficiency Pack for Small Manufacturers: https://news.siemens.com/en-us/siemens-small-manufacturers-operational-efficiency-pack/
This episode is sponsored by Siemens is a global technology company operating across industrial automation, digital software, smart infrastructure, and mobility. Siemens Xcelerator is its open digital business platform and marketplace. https://www.siemens.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/digital-transformation-in-manufacturing Edge Computing and the AI Value of Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:45 Loupe, 20 years of controls, and the SASE community 8:40 Carburetors in industrial automation: culture, not technology 11:20 The ChatGPT moment versus the Claude Code moment 20:20 Inside an integrator: six week sprints become two 21:30 Reverse engineering a robotic cell in 30 minutes 26:10 A 100 page ethernet spec turned into working code in a day 27:50 Does this change who gets to be a builder 40:40 AI across the project lifecycle from discovery to handoff 49:00 How to actually get started, and what to prompt 53:20 If software is no longer a moat, what is 57:50 Predict the future, career advice, and the book pick
About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:00 Career path from General Motors to Siemens 6:10 What deglobalization means for manufacturing 9:00 COVID, vaccine quotas, and the reshoring trigger 13:05 Labor arbitrage versus automation arbitrage 15:50 Attracting the next generation of factory workers 19:35 Why semiconductor reshoring will take years 23:00 Tribal knowledge and the documentation problem 26:00 Where the investment is going right now 32:30 Adaptive manufacturing and the AI hype question 35:30 Platforms, ecosystems, and Siemens Xcelerator 43:20 Careers, AI, and advice for engineers
This episode is sponsored by Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare, and it supplies industrial automation hardware and industrial software to manufacturers worldwide. Its Digital Industries business covers discrete automation, process automation, intralogistics, and the Siemens Xcelerator platform. https://www.siemens.com
About Your Hosts Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results. Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation. Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub
They also explore AI assisted HMI and SCADA development, Ignition 8.3, MCP servers, high performance HMI design, and the risks of providing AI agents with uncontrolled access to production systems. At the MES layer, they question whether manufacturers should build custom applications through vibe coding or focus instead on creating clean, contextualized, well governed data that can support many future applications.
The central conclusion is that AI tools, virtual controllers, cloud platforms, and dynamically generated applications will continue to improve. However, manufacturers still need reliable controls, secure networks, maintainable architectures, experienced people, and ownership of their operational data. The companies that establish those foundations today will have the greatest freedom to adopt whatever technologies emerge next.
Dave and Vlad also preview the 2026 Ignition Community Conference in Sacramento, upcoming Manufacturing Hub conversations, new demonstrations, and several projects the community will see throughout the remainder of the year.
Join us for a detailed and candid discussion about Automate 2026, Ignition, industrial AI, virtual PLCs, HMI and SCADA development, MES, MQTT, data architecture, and what manufacturers should prioritize next.
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