| Lenawee Now

The following program is brought to you by Lenawee Now and Align Center for Workforce Development. Building a more vibrant Lenawee County. Visit Lenaweenow.org or alignLenawee.org for more information. I’m Steve Tibbetts. I’m the Business Solutions Manager with Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center.

I live here in Tecumseh. Been here for 20 years. I was a manufacturing engineer for 30 years. Spent 10 of those years at the ACH. Ford, Vistia, and Saline plant, and now I’m out helping manufacturers and guiding and mentoring. I’m here also today with Chuck Werner. Hi, I’m Chuck Warner. I’m the manager for Operational Excellence, lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, currently the lead of the Industry 4. 0 Technology Adoption Team. I actually graduated from Onsted back in 1985 and am living in Tecumseh right now. spent about 19 years at the Libby Owen Ford and then the Pilkington plant out on Tecumseh Clinton Road. And, spent a couple of years with L& W Manufacturing, in Blissfield.

All right. So we want to talk today about the Lenawee Industry 4. 0 Roadshow is coming to Hudson, Michigan. But before we do that, we want to talk a little bit about what the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center is. So MMTC is an MEP, which is a Manufacturing Extension Partnership. There is one in every state of the union and one in Puerto Rico.

We are the MEP for the state of Michigan. We are a nonprofit and a 501c. And our whole mission is to help small and medium manufacturers work on their business, not just in their business. So, the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center is a statewide organization. We have five locations around the state.

Basically, works to get manufacturers to have what they need to be successful. There can be a lot of things we can do training, we’ll provide training in quality skills, lean manufacturing. consulting, mentoring, so it’s not just skills to work on the problems that are coming in and helping folks to work on the problems in their businesses.

We mentor businesses with succession planning, employee retention, and quality performance, you name it. and we have teams that can drop in and actually help with process improvement, and utilizing the tools, for Lean and Six Sigma. , basically just identifying and implementing anything that you need to help your business, including manufacturing technologies.

So, what is Industry 4. 0? About every 100 years, there is an industrial revolution. Usually, it centers around the invention of a new technology and or a new energy source. For example, the first one was the invention of steam power and the ability to power machines by means other than water, human, or animal power.

The second was, electricity and being able to bring power to the point of use, basically being able to put machines closer together and that’s Henry Ford and, the ability to do mass production. The third provided the use of computers and the ability to analyze large pieces of information. And use them to control processes.

And so that brings us to Industry 4. 0, right, the current one. And it’s all about leveraging interconnectivity, networking, and the age of information, right? Bringing information all together. It helps manufacturers to look at how a business is performing. It allows them to look at their business in real-time and understand how the business…

is running, and we want them to see problems and opportunities as they surface, not after the fact when I’m looking at a financial report. So it also allows for the rise of technology, like digital design, additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, advanced robotics, and cobotics, so people are able to work right alongside a robot, and, of course, artificial intelligence.

There’s really nothing if we want to look at technology and we want to understand it and we want to know how it impacts our business because the point of adoption is to see what it can do for your business is to actually get face to face. and hands-on with it. So, Steve, why don’t you tell us a little about the event out at Hudson?

So, coming up, the morning of September 27th, out in Hudson, from 9 AM to 11:30 PM, we are going to be hosting what we call a Technology Opportunity Roadshow. It’ll be held at the Southern Michigan Center for Science and Industry out there in Hudson. The roadshow provides opportunities for manufacturers to interact with all these various technologies in a hands-on way.

There will be demonstrations. We’ll have industry experts and industry partners there to guide them on applications to help people understand how they can leverage and use that industry 4.0 type technology to help their business grow, improve their processes, mitigate worker shortages, and improve their supply chain.

You name it, all the technologies that you would normally see in the industry 4. 0, your robotics and cobotics, automation, in work cells and machinery, automated, guided vehicles, autonomous mobile robots, as we call them, augmented reality, and, virtual reality, vision technology, ways to be able to faster train and, and help people pick up on how to work the job, additive manufacturing, and 3D printing, machine sensing. How do we sense our machines? I had 30 years of figuring out that we would run a machine, basically like we stole it. We’d run it until it was broken. We’d duct tape it together and we’d run it until it was good and broke, the difference between good and broken is that you have to order a part and that’s going to take about three weeks to get here.

Machine safety systems, ERPs, MESs, all the information that you need to run your business. So, as I mentioned, we’re going to also have technology suppliers and other partners out there with us, to present, to answer questions about applications, benefits, and how to get started in leveraging technology.

We will also have resources on hand to explain. How to obtain funding and how to go about assessing the need through our free technology opportunity assessment in the afternoon. And this is very important. We’ll be opening up the roadshow to the high school mechatronics students who attend the Hudson SMCSI and Adrian LISD.

We’re doing this to help stimulate excitement for technology and manufacturing careers. It’s an opportunity to show them that. Manufacturing isn’t just dirty and dull and dangerous, that it’s, it’s a highly lucrative and exciting opportunity for careers. Absolutely. If you’re interested, go ahead and get online to the center.

org. And you can sign up for the, for the roadshow. Yes. So, this is Chuck Warner and Steve Tebbetts from the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center. We want to thank you for your time and listening., we want to remind everybody about the Industry 4. 0 Technology Roadshow going on in Hudson. At the Southern Michigan Center for Science and Industry on the morning of September 27th from 9 o’clock to 11:30.