Episode 106 – The Connected Factory Floor: L2L and Data Management

Connected Workforce Platform Manufacturing Data Management: In this episode, Bill Brock interviews Eric Whitley, Director of Industrial Transformation at L2L, who discusses how their connected workforce platform bridges the gap between top-level ERP systems and shop floor data. Whitley explains L2L’s evolution from an Excel spreadsheet to a cloud-based solution, their approach to manufacturing metrics, and how they’re addressing industry challenges like labor shortages through AI implementation. The conversation covers manufacturing data security, workforce retention success stories, and insights into the current state of American manufacturing reshoring.

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“Over the Air” features unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys. The mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wished they’d known when they started. In each episode, our expert guests make bold predictions, reveal unpopular opinions, and share stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the show today. My name is Bill Brock, CEO of Peridio, and today we have a very special guest, Eric Whitley with L2L, who is the Director of Industrial Transformation. Eric, thanks for joining the show today.

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to it.

Absolutely. Well, for those that aren’t familiar with L2L, tell us a little bit about the company. Yeah, so L2L is a connected workforce platform.

There’s an interesting space in manufacturing right now that’s kind of developing, and we’ve been here really from the beginning of developing that space. And that space is, you know, organizations have this top-level data set, whether it’s their ERP or their MRP systems or large accounting systems. They also have data coming from the shop floor, whether it’s through PLCs or, you know, SCADA systems, ignition systems, stuff like that.

Where manufacturing companies are lacking in data is that middle set. What happens while you’re producing the product? What happens to the quality and the safety and the throughput and the performance? What are the issues that are stopping you? All of that. And so what L2L does is captures all of that data kind of really in that middle set, and then gives organizations kind of a single pane of glass to look at.

Cool. So like, what is the, like, what are you surfacing? Like, what are you looking at? As an example, if you have your, let’s say you’re having a manufacturing run, and you’re going to run widgets, you’re going to run a thousand of these widgets a day today, that data is going to come in from your ERP system and your scheduling system to tell people what they’re going to run. What we’re going to do is we’re going to show people that information on their iPads and on out on the shop floor on kiosk.

Well, then as they produce during the day, they’re going to have downtime. They’re going to have changeovers. They’re going to have quality defects, safety issues, training issues, anything you can name.

What we do is we capture those pieces of information, those events, if you will, and then factor that into the metrics. So if it’s a downtime, if you’re down for a quality defect, if you have to scrap something, if you have all of that adds into the metrics, so you’re grabbing this big data and then pushing this small shop floor data into it in order to get a really good look at what’s going on. So OEE, labor hours, anything you want to look at, you can see from there.

So cool. So is this kind of the hero metrics that we see on the factory floor? Yeah, yeah, it is. It, it can actually, and the one thing I tell everybody is that, you know, in manufacturing, if you have these five things, if you know, and you can capture what your daily demand is, so that’s coming from your ERP system.

If you know what your actual build is, so that’s coming from that bottom level of data from your PLCs and your machines. If you know what you’re scrapping, you can, you can add that into your calculation, you know, defects, scrap, whatever you’re throwing away on the manufacturing floor. If you know what your labor is, your labor count.

So as operators begin to use the system, they check into the system or counting their labor. And then if you know your downtime, if you know, changeovers, minor stops, jams, downtime, any of that, L2L captures all five of those things in real time. There isn’t, there really isn’t a manufacturing metric that you can’t calculate if you have all five of those.

And if you capture all five of those in real time, you can calculate any manufacturing metric you want in real time and display that on charts and, and, you know, monitors out on the shop floor. And through our systems, we have the ability to build custom systems, build custom charts, build custom boards and stuff like that as well. So manufacturing is a, it’s a very brutal industry, very tough business, both from an expectation standpoint of the factories and the employees needed to get X number of widgets or cars or headlights, whatever done per day, but also the like legacy technology that exists.

And we’ve, I’ve walked the floors of different companies and in hopes of doing some integrations and finding a clean point of entry has been hard at times. So like, where’s the like sweet spot for you guys? Do you typically work with like Greenfield factory build out? Do you look for existing factories that you’re working with? What’s like, what does it look like to get started? Well, the answer to kind of the question is yes. So we can, we do Greenfield, we do new, we do older plants, we come in, you know, like what you guys do a little bit, we, we can, we can help organizations that have 50 year old machines that have no technology on them, right? So we, we have, you know, technology that we can help them install in order to go grab that data.

And we do do Greenfield. So we kind of really help across the board. It really doesn’t matter.

What we try, what we always say is we try to meet people where, where they’re at when it comes to that stuff. Whether you’re advanced in your integration or whether you have none at all. L2L, you can use L2L and start from there.

So I think one of the important things that I always try to preach with that is, is that if you’re going to go do technology and if you don’t have technology, and this has been kind of my, my platform here for 2024 is make sure you’re concentrating on continuous improvement. So go get data that is going to help you get better. Don’t necessarily just go collect data for data’s sake, but help data that’s going to point you in the right direction and help you get better, you know.

What are the industries that you’re, you’re focused on? So where, where are you guys getting the most traction? We like to kind of say discrete manufacturing. So if you’re making any type of product, so we’re, we’re really big in the packaging industry. We’re really big in the automotive industry, food and bev.

Those types of industries, consumer products, anything where companies are running production lines and spitting out, you know, hundreds to thousands to millions of parts. I mean, we have canning plants that we work with that do a million point two a day, right? They make these cans like you can hardly see them coming off the production type of deal. So that’s really kind of where we shine is in that, in that mode.

So tier one, automotive, food and bev, all of those things. Yeah. And how long have you been around L2L has actually, well, that’s a, that’s a great story.

Cause I was actually there when we started to build the software in a company called auto leave in Brigham city, Utah. I was teaching total productive maintenance at the time. One of the founders that I came to work for eventually, he was the maintenance manager at this facility.

And, and we were thinking of a better way to go capture downtime. And that started off as an Excel spreadsheet and then became an access database. And then it became some hard software that we brought somebody into code and people started to coming into the plant and going, you know, that’s really cool software.

Where’d you get it? Well, we developed it in house and then, and then, you know, can we buy it? And then, so then that kind of spurred the thought process to where finally later on in like 2011 or so, they spun off the software into its own organization, external organization. And that eventually became L2L. And so we’ve been around for quite a while.

But a software company since like, you know, 2011 or so. Yeah, 2011. So yeah, we were, we were doing cloud before cloud was cool.

I guess, you know, we were doing cloud when people would say, I don’t know if I want to put my data in the cloud, you know, now that’s changed. And that’s, that’s a good thing. But yeah, we’ve been, we’ve been cloud ever since.

It’s somewhat changed the manufacturing. I mean, it’s, it’s a tough biz. They are very, very, I mean, I’ve heard that some of the most highly secure operations are like tire tire manufacturing because the margins are so thin and the IP is so like, you said that they’re like, no, we’re not, we’re not getting this.

Yeah, I’ve done a lot. I’ve done a lot of work in like, I won’t name the companies, but like paper, like tissue diapers, feminine care, man, they are crazy secretive about their technology about, you know, it’s so competitive. And you’re right, the margins are so thin that they, they don’t want, they don’t mention a peep, you know.

And so, so, you know, we, we are from a software company, we’re SOC 2 compliant, we do all of the government, the ITAR stuff, and we have government cloud services. So we do a really, really good job of keeping our clients data, very secure. That’s probably our number one focus when it comes to, you know, having manufacturing data up in the cloud.

So yeah, it’s, it’s, it is, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge. And, and, and it’s hard to, it’s a long sales cycle.

I guess that’s the best way to put it because you have to build that trust with somebody who’s looking to buy your software that you are going to protect their data. They got to know that. They’re not just going to go put their credit card in or whatever it is, you know, we do with apps these days and do that.

They need to know that you’re, you know, what you’re talking about. We’ve been around long enough. I think we can, we tell a pretty good story.

So what’s the data that you typically leverage? Yeah. The data that we, that we grab is just kind of those five things that I talked about. So we grab any event that happens on a shop floor.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Throughput, downtime, training and skills. We track training and skills with inside of our, our system. We track digital documents.

All the spare parts is in L2L. We have, we have a saying and I don’t know if you can see it back here, but like we say, if it’s not in L2L, it didn’t happen, you know? So basically we try to capture everything that happens on a manufacturing floor, because really you want to capture everything so that you are secure and confident in your metrics that you’re, you’re not missing anything. So we do a lot of different cool stuff.

Yeah. My primary experience, my wife used to work at Volkswagen automotive. I’m originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

She was in communications there and they were just, I mean, the Germans are notorious for efficiency and margins and I have a detail and I remember that very clearly would have all the, you know, the car count for the, for the day, the goals for the year, they would even calculate the employee cell phone plan against the value of the margins they’re getting on the cars. Yes. Everything was back to like individual car produced.

That was like the metrics. What are, like, what are some, are there any like interesting customer stories that you can talk about? Any, any highlights that, you know, you’re particularly proud of that, you know, something that you unlocked, I see some pretty awesome brands on the website right now, Mueller, Energizer, Dart. Yeah.

Yeah. We, one of the, one of the cool stories that I like to tell is that we have a customer jelled when windows and doors, they have a plant down in Datsun, Louisiana. And one of the, we just had our conference this year here in salt lake city.

We have a user conference every year, every other year or so, something like that. And we had their plant manager speak a guy by the name of Keith Holloman. He’s a great guy.

And he was telling us a story that since installing L2L, like the, the, the workload, the, the, you know, just the day-to-day grind of trying to get information, trying to communicate, trying to understand what’s happening in the shop floor has gotten so good that the word is out that you want to work at this plant. So in a, in a, in a moment in manufacturing, where we are having a hard time finding people to work, this Datsun, Louisiana plant actually has a waiting list of people wanting to get in and come to work at this facility. Quantify the output, show your personal impact.

Yes. Yes. You can, you have, you know, you’re being heard, you know, that your contributions are being measured and you can see that and people like that, you know, that’s the, that’s the big deal.

I mean, to the point that Keith was telling us that he actually had, he’s actually having to go build another parking lot so that he has room for all these new employees coming in. And this day and age, it’s such a cool, such a cool story, you know? So that’s one of the ones that we like to tell. That’s, that’s nice.

Yeah. Louisiana, Utah, you guys are all over the place. Yeah.

Like, what are you, what are you seeing as like this, like reshoring of American manufacturing? Is that a real deal? Is that actually happening? Are you seeing increased adoption in the States? I would say right now there’s a lot of chatter, not necessarily a lot of action. You know, we’re seeing, we saw a lot of movement and, and on my podcast, we talked about it a little bit last year with the chip industry, right? The chip industry is coming back, stuff like that. We’ll see what happens here with the election.

You know, I think that’s going to have a, a change either way on it, whether it, you know, whether it starts to happen exponentially or not. But yeah, in manufacturing right now, I mean the, the number one thing that we’re concentrated on is the fact that we just cannot get the labor force needed in order to go be, be effective. I just did, I put out a video yesterday and talked about, L2L did a survey here at the 600 manufacturing folks.

And out of the 600 folks that we talked to, like 80% of them says that the labor issue, whether it be lack of skilled workers or no workers is having a dramatic impact on their throughput and quality of product, right? Just the resignations and the turnover and just the lack of skills. So everybody is kind of focused on that. That’s where kind of, that’s kind of where our AI capabilities kick in a little bit here because our AI capabilities and what we’re focused on is being able to upskill and give people information they need in a much quicker format than having to go search for it or have somebody standing by them to ask a question or whatever.

So accelerate onboarding and training. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, big deal. Big deal in manufacturing. So what’s the, what’s the root of the manufacturing employment crisis here? I mean, what’s, is it compensation? Is it training? Like what do you think’s going on? Well, we, when we asked the question, obviously compensation always is number one, right? But it’s always been an issue in manufacturing.

It always is and always will be, right? People will always default to compensation. But I say that because you know, it’s, it’s interesting. You mentioned, you know, whether you’re building cars or whether you’re making cookies.

The one thing about manufacturing is that we know that once you have a set of skills on how to basically run a production line, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re making cars or cookies. So 50 cents will take you from one job to the next because it’s all kind of the same. Do I know how to run a machine? Do I know how to load product? Do I know how to, yes, I know how to do that.

So it doesn’t matter. There’s, there’s a small percentage. I’m going to say 15% of the technical know-how that people have to have in order to build a car or make a cookie, right? When it comes to recipes or whatever, but generally to be a manufacturing worker, you have to have this basic set of skills.

And once you have that basic set of skills in manufacturing, you’re very marketable. So 50 cents an hour will take you down the street from the car plant to the cookie plant, right? And so that’s where, that’s where, yeah, that’s where compensation comes in. What, what I’ve seen over the years is that, you know, and you can blame it on COVID.

You can blame it on automation. You can blame it on a number of different things. Federal reserve actually, it just made a video of this, this morning.

Federal reserve actually put out some data here at the beginning of the year, last year, that shows that since like 2012, the output of the worker per hour has leveled off and even started to trend downward, where from 19 late 1980s, all the way up to 2012, the productivity of the worker was constantly rising. And you can go, you can go look at that. You can go check out my video on, on our YouTube channel.

But I actually show that chart. One of the things that I see is that if you think about the timing of like 1985 to 2012, this is where we were talking about the Toyota production system, single minute exchange of die, all of those improvement initiatives, five S six Sigma, all of those things that we were doing to drive up productivity. We were, we were eliminating waste out of the production.

And in 2012 is exactly when industry four dot O got introduced. And I think that what happened is that everybody kind of sat back and said, I’m going to let the technology solve the problems. I’m going to, I’m going to go grab so much data that I think it’s going to solve this problem and stopped concentrating on the continuous improvement thought process.

And that’s where I go back kind of our first sentence we talked about is that it’s important for people to get data and have data and go, go get it. But are they using the data to concentrate on how do we go improve the business, whether it’s availability, performance, quality, or, you know, just the culture of the people. Yeah.

And these AI tools aren’t helping this mindset. And the promise of AI is that this productivity will lift. That is like what we’re, what we’re hoping.

But I think that folks are becoming too reliant. And at least for now, a machine can’t turn a wrench, can’t like fully evaluate a physical system. Like you can, you can track pallets, you can, you can see things, but it’s not going to give you that holistic understanding and higher level thinking.

It created summarizing this call and writing a blog post, but not going to be able to hire an AI to manage the whole factory. So right. Yeah.

The one, the one thing that we’re concentrating on with our AI tool is making it very, very practical. And I think this is where manufacturing has to, has to concentrate. They have to make it practical for the worker.

Right. So I gave the example, let’s say you’re a mechanic and you go out to a piece of equipment and, you know, your PM says to grease this bearing. Let’s just be very general with it.

And, and we say grease the bearing and, and as a mechanic, you asked the question, well, what type of grease am I supposed to use? Well, okay. So in the old days, what you had to do is you had to walk back to the shop, pull the machine manual off of the old dusty bookshelf that’s in the maintenance manager’s office, thumb through it to you found the bearing and it’s going to tell you what type of grease to use. Right.

So now what we want to have happen is we want that mechanic to be able to just ask the AI tool that question, what grease should I use on this press? Well, what bearing are you using? Well, I’m, I’m greasing this bearing. Okay. Use this type of grease.

And we didn’t really change anything. What we did was we just eliminated the wasted time in motion of that person having to walk back and forth to the shop. And that creates uptime.

Right. So, so looking at it from a very practical aspect, instead of this great big thing that’s going to change the way we do it. No, I just want to ask a question.

And then I get the question and then it just makes me more efficient as a mechanic. So and what’s your, there’s a lot of, a lot of cool tech coming out right now. What’s your, what are you excited about for these interfaces? So like some in my mind factory floor awesome for wearables, maybe an earpiece with an AI and glasses, a tablet, obviously it’s kind of easiest first, first of step here, but what are you, what are you saying? What are you optimistic around? You know, I have to be honest with you.

The, the, the wearables are still in beta. They really are in manufacturing people. I’ve had a couple of clients now who gone out and bought glasses.

They’ve tried to use those with maintenance guys to be able to pull up drawings and stuff like that. A little clunky, a little cumbersome. And so they’re, you know, I mean, you can picture a manufacturing maintenance guy.

Once the thing doesn’t work one time, you know, you can just picture a bunch of BS or whatever, you know, so they start to fight. Lighten seal, lighten seal drive you crazy. Crazy.

Just nuts. Right. Well, we’re really excited about what’s coming is, is, is the digital workflow process.

So leading workers down the right path of how to do work and how to do processes out on the shop floor. As an example, we’ll go back to my maintenance guy. When, when that maintenance guy opens up that what we call a dispatch, this is the event inside of L2L.

The system and AI begins to present to them all of the pertinent documents, all of the pertinent information they need and helps them walk down the correct workflow so that they’re not having to guess as to which way they have to make decisions. It’s helping them make decisions as they’re doing the work and giving them the right documentation, the right information, the right drawings, all of that just as they’re working on it. So yeah, we, we have a, we have a technology called flow engine where you can go build those custom flow engines inside of the software.

So it leads people down the correct path to do the right thing out on the shop floor. Nice. Nice.

Very cool. Yeah. What are you most excited about next for you guys? What’s, what’s on the roadmap? We just bought a company called swipe guide.

Swipe guide is an amazing technology that allows people to do like, yeah, swipe. Yeah. It’s a swipe.

Exactly. Exactly. So it allows him to go in and build processes, standardized work, okay, very easily and make changes to that standardized work and then share that work around the world, right? When I worked at auto leave, uh, auto leave is an airbag manufacturer, probably the largest in the, in the world.

There was an initiative called one auto leave and one auto leave was how do we make a driver side airbag in Utah? The same in Japan and the same in Romania and the same in Brazil. We want it to be exactly the same, right? The old two all beef patties, special sauce lists, cheese, pickles, onions on the sesame seed bun thing for big Mac, right? Oh, and McDonald’s is much better in France than it is in the US. Definitely Austria.

I can vouch for that. Cheese Royale as, uh, as Quentin Tarantino famously wrote, right? Yes. Yeah.

So, so being able to share digital documents immediately around the world and being able to share best practices immediately around the world is really when the connected workforce is going to be global. If you will, um, we have companies now we have 86, 87 sites around the world using our platform and having somebody be able to change the process and have that process be updated around the world so that everybody around the world is doing exactly the same way. Uh, it’s an amazing, it’s an amazing time.

Well, and I mean, manufacturing is just so, uh, internationally connected. It’s such an amazing, you know, ecosystem and back to the Volkswagen, uh, conversation, uh, they, they cycle leadership, like it’s international organization and they have this group of, you know, VPs and CXOs and they just, you know, you do your tour in China, Mexico, Germany, and it sounds like, you know, with these technologies, we could really help, you know, limit and give local centers without having to do as much care. So, well, and that’s what’s cool.

That’s what’s cool about our, our system is that, you know, if you’re in Germany, you can look and see what’s happening in Utah. You can take a look and go, okay, what are they doing there? Why are they more efficient than I am? You know, so just having that connected, uh, connected workforce around the world is, is really kind of the next really, really cool thing. So awesome.

Well, um, hard pivot, hard pivot would start to start to wind down to just fun stuff. Um, Utah, Utah is you’re probably like the sixth person on this show from Utah and we don’t, we don’t target Utah, but there’s just so much tech going on there. What’s, uh, what’s your perspective on what’s going on with Utah? Yeah, a lot of tech, a lot of manufacturing were, you know, we’re really growing, um, just a great work ethic here in Utah as well.

And I think that’s why a lot of companies are coming here because just a really, really good people are hard workers. They, you know, they’ll come in that they’re, they’re very entrepreneurial. So the, even the day-to-day manufacturing, uh, technicians, the workers are always constantly thinking of better ways to do it.

I will tell you though, back 19, this is just kind of an interesting Gee-Whiz story, but back 1992, when, um, when we started doing what was then called just in time way back when, uh, this little hub here in Northern Utah for some reason built an entire, um, I just want to say like a hive of lean leaders and tech, tech leaders. And now if I look to all of my friends that I worked with back in the early nineties, they’re all running companies and plant managers, and they’re all applying these tech techniques. And so it all kind of spurred from right here in Northern Utah, where right, we’re right by Utah state where, uh, the Shingo prize comes out of, you know, and stuff like that.

So, uh, it was just an amazing time to be a part of that. And you can see that in Utah because there are people everywhere who have legacy learning from those early nineties, lean practices, Toyota production system practices, and now they’re leaders amongst all of the, all of the organizations in and around Utah here. So that’s, that’s very cool.

Yeah. We, uh, um, obviously huge Mormon population. I have some family members in Nashville that are Mormon and it’s just, um, it’s really interesting how, um, entrepreneurial, uh, folks from that, you know, way, very independent thinkers, you know, very independent free thinkers, always, always mindful of being self-sustaining.

And so always looking for, looking for ways to self-sustain themselves, their families and their companies, you know, and they get that mindset into a company. They’re always looking for ways to make the company stronger and self-sustaining in order to, you know, kind of secure their own future type of deal. So yeah, it’s really, really powerful.

Yeah. It’s just, uh, it’s really cool. Like whether, you know, Mormon or not, just like how that has become some of like the cultural foundations of the areas and the businesses and the ecosystem and the economy out there is, uh, yeah, I mean, the state, the state’s motto, you know, we are the beehive state and, and the reason why it’s the beehive state because the beehive stands for hard work and industry.

I mean, that’s really how it comes in. So yeah. And so, but I, you know, on a lighter side, we just got a brand new hockey team.

You know, we’re excited about that. And, uh, we got, you know, there, there we’ve got plans to, to get a professional baseball team and yeah. So it’s, it’s a good place.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They actually, we have a, the people who used to own the Utah jazz. Now the Miller family is now part of the, uh, kind of a base owner group trying to draw major league baseball here into Utah. We thought we were going to get the Oakland A’s, uh, in the short stint between the time that they left Oakland and went to Vegas.

And so, uh, you know, and, and, and so we’re, you know, we’re hoping that we either we get an expansion team or somebody moves in, you know, there’s a chance at the Tampa Bay or it raise may move. And I know they’re trying to draw them in. And I think, I think the, uh, they actually, the two cities that are going to get expansion cities for major league baseball is Nashville and salt lake city.

And so, um, we hope it’s all like city. Sorry. Well, yeah, we’ll, we’ll see.

I mean, I just, you know, being in Nashville, the, the entertainment economy is huge. It’s really fun to just, you know, see all the activity. I mean, I wish your teams would win more.

I think the predators are predators are okay. Titans are Titans are not on it. We got a new coach.

We got a new team. It’s, it’s, it’s a building year. It’s always, there you go.

There you go. The standard answer. It’s a rebuilding year.

Yes. Yeah. We’ve been rebuilding for 10 years now, but other than that, yeah, we are.

I bought tickets to, um, the bangles game. So we got our coach from the, came from Denver, Cincinnati, a new head coach this year. And I was like, really excited.

I’m like, we’re going to kill them. And like, I’m just, I’m, I don’t know if I’m going to box. So I’m just going to stay at home.

Right. Right. Well, we have, I, my son and I and my family, we have BYU season tickets.

So, uh, we were big BYU football fans and they’re at eight and no right now and ninth in the country. And so we’re excited. And yeah, things are just good.

Things are good for the sports, the sporting around here. Why, uh, I made an attempt at going to college at the University of Laramie, Wyoming. My first, first pass a little bit too much.

Yeehaw, not enough studying. I had to get serious later, but that was the, that was the big game every year. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You were a cowboy for a little while there.

Yeah. There for a minute. Yeah.

That’s nice. That’s a great place to be though. Laramie is a great place.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. Well, Eric, it was, uh, it was awesome having you on. Uh, I really enjoyed the show.

And, uh, when I get out to salt Lake, uh, hopefully ski season, or if you, uh, if you feel like trying your hand at fly fishing, I, uh, even better. Let’s do it. Second passion in the world.

So I, I’m, uh, I’m always willing to take somebody for a float down the, uh, Henry’s fork. So perfect. Perfect.

Let’s do it, man. Okay. Good.

Thanks a lot. We’ll talk soon. Yeah.

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