Manufacturing Matters

“AI will be disruptive, but our job, not only as manufacturers but also policymakers, is to make sure that that disruption is good for society, it’s good for our country, it’s good for promoting our values.”  For hundreds of years, emerging technologies — from the automated loom to the PC — have elicited fears or doubts from naysayers. Today, AI is a lightning rod for discussions both within manuf...

“We were talking about AI assistants a year ago. Now we are deploying advanced AI agents on the factory floor, and that shift is transforming how manufacturers approach automation, data, and solving some of their biggest challenges.”  In this episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Ozgur Tohumcu, General Manager for Automotive and Manufacturing at Amazon Web Services (AWS) , joins TECH B2B M...

When you walk into a data center and see thousands of cables connecting endless rows of servers, you're only viewing the tip of the bandwidth iceberg. The real bandwidth revolution is happening inside the semiconductor chip packages driving those connections.  Wolfgang Sauter, Senior Distinguished Engineer at Marvell Technology, takes us deeper into the world of advanced semiconductor packagi...

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, podcast host Winn Hardin speaks with Debra Phillips from NEMA and Tom Lawton of TESCO Metering about the impacts of tariffs on American markets. Winn’s guests share how both large and small enterprises are dealing with new complexities and supply chain management issues that started during the pandemic and continue during new tariff negotiations between gl...

The National Association of Manufacturers reports that there were more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs open in June 2025. The labor shortage has been an ongoing challenge, but like many other challenges manufacturers face, some of the best minds are tackling the issue, with industry leaders like ABB leading the way. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, co-hosts Jimmy Carroll and Amanda Del Bu...

If you’re a first-time climber trying to tackle Mount Everest, the only way you’ll make it to the top and come back alive is if you’ve got a great set of Sherpas to carry your stuff and show you the way. That’s how Ted Larson , CEO and co-founder of OLogic , views his company’s role as it helps startup companies navigate their way from lab to volume production.  Building a good working prototype i...

When manufacturers miss deadlines for capital project startup, that can have a huge impact on product and business success. Operational readiness is not just about production hitting set goals — ultimately, it’s about getting product to consumers faster. For its latest Horizons report, Operational Readiness, project delivery experts at CRB surveyed almost 400 consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufact...

"Businesses in manufacturing and beyond face significant challenges today, whether their reshoring operations, skill shortages, labor shortages, or political strain, but today’s automation technologies can help solve these problems." In this episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Darcy Bachert, CEO of Prolucid Technologies and Chairperson of the A3 Board of Directors joins TECH B2...

“While many applications within the food manufacturing space have been successfully automated, some gaps exist when it comes to high-mix automation, including the handling of prepared sandwiches, salads, and other meals. By augmenting robots with advanced AI, automation can be scaled to all parts of the food supply chain, starting with manufacturing.” In the automation of food manufacturing, certa...

"As much as we feel like the change is never ending right now, that's going to be the constant for the next couple of decades. We're going to have more options for how we increase productivity, how we collaborate with robots and each other, and how we build value. " Right now, we are at such an incredible moment in history in terms of AI and robotics, and we’re just at the begi...

“From a fab perspective, you’re not only looking at submicron structures, but then some of these fiber interfaces may be centimeters. You have to be able to inspect and fabricate structures which vary in orders of magnitude.”  Photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which use light instead of electricity to transmit and process data, will enable faster, more efficient communication critical for appli...

"How can lessons learned as an Apache pilot in the military translate into aerospace engineering and the general world of manufacturing?" Lead like a pilot means placing an importance on structure, guidance, and community, says Operation Lead’s Craig Coyle. A former Apache pilot, Coyle joined TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll on this episode of Manufacturing Matters to discuss this conc...

" With AI technology, anyone can be a programmer. If you have an idea, whether you can code or not, AI can write the RealSense code, and you can deploy an AI-enabled 3D camera for less than $100." Walk any robotics show floor and chances are you will see RealSense cameras in many of the robots and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) on display, which made it surprising years ago when erroneo...

"Today, video AI agents exist that turn your existing cameras into AI teammates across a range of applications. If you can leverage this technology to make your assembly line operate 1% more efficiently, that can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in a year." In this episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Dunchadhn Lyons, Director of Engineering and Allison Lilly...

Artificial intelligence has been around for many years, but the face of AI is continually changing. Today, by applying well-engineered AI to manufacturing toolsets, we can get closed-loop control and automation that has more humanlike characteristics than ever before. For this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Aaron Hand caught up with Kence Anderson, founder a...

"Manufacturers and businesses of all types must always be ready to pivot, whether it means dealing with tariffs and geopolitical strife, labor shortage, supply chain issues, or other disruptions, everyone must be ready to pivot. Indeed, it’s a dance." When tariffs were first announced, many businesses, including systems integration company Creative Automation, already had containers full...

Katana Cloud Inventory powers inventory and manufacturing workflows for 1500+ small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and routinely tracks over $300 million in monthly procurement data. That gives Katana a unique near-real-time window on the shifting interplay between unit costs, inventory and market demand in sectors like manufacturing.  In this episode of “Manufacturing Matters,” TECH B2B Marke...

"We’re on a mission to build climate resilient homes for all…leveraging the latest robotics and automation technologies."   Construction costs have doubled in the last decade, and we have a shortage of skilled workers to build them anyway. In addition, climate events are getting more severe, so how can we start designing products that are climate-friendly, more resilient to changing weat...

"We must teach kids that they can be a manufacturer too – not just a doctor, lawyer, or fireperson. You get to work with cutting-edge machines and with your hands, but we haven’t really been able to create this feeling yet." There’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to reaching down further into school systems to help them understand, and to help teachers and faculty understand that...

"When it comes to AI in the industrial world, it represents supply chain optimization with demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, machine vision for quality control, and much more. But it also represents the elimination of manual tasks." Views on AI have changed drastically over the last five or so years, suggests Naresh Ram, Chief Science Officer at AAXIS. Today AI represents the e...

“Whether its tariffs, COVID-19, the chip crisis, shipping issues, changes in EV direction, or beyond; every market disruption is a chance to adopt or adapt your strategies and methods of getting things done.” In this special panel discussion episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Jeff Stello ( Metaphase Technologies ), Jason Covar ( The Imaging Source ), Gerd Walter ( Creative Automation ),...

The waveguides, modulators, microscopic lasers, photodetectors, and other optical components that form photonic integrated circuits (PICs) all need to be perfectly aligned to minimize signal loss on the chip. PICs simply cannot improve yields, lower costs, or efficiently scale without ever-faster alignment tools able to perform with nanometer precision. In this episode, TECH B2B ’s Dan McCarthy ch...

When systems integrators hit roadblocks where they must design something brand new that’s never been done before, that’s what we’re good at. There are a lot of great systems integrators out there that build industrial automation systems that can do exactly what you need, bringing together industrial robots, controllers, vision systems, control cabinets, PLCs, and so on, explains Doug Harriman, Vic...

Systems integrators can become victims of their own success. In these cases, remote support becomes a much more viable and cost-efficient option. Some systems integrators can become victims of their own success. When integrators deploy many systems and the crew that built the cells don't have the bandwidth to travel and see all these customers and can’t staff up massive service departments –...

By some measures, the production of optics and photonics core components is $400 billion a year market now, and the technology’s downstream value far exceeds that figure — particularly when calculating in new developments like photonic integrated circuits (PICs). But will photonics ever challenge the value of electronics? Or is it more of an analog to electronics’ early days? Or is photonics simpl...