The power of Industry 3.0 with Nikki Gonzales

Willem (00:00)
Welcome, you’re listening to the ITOT Insider Podcast. And today we’re joined by Niki Gonzalez, who works at Weintek USA. Now, contrary to all those digitalization and IT related guests we had, Niki is really somebody who comes from the SCADA HMI world. So welcome, Niki. Nice to meet you.

Nikki Gonzales (00:24)
Nice to meet you guys, thanks for having me.

David (00:27)
Yeah, yeah, Nikki is the business director of business development at Weintek USA. ⁓ She co-founded and co-hosts the podcast, The Automation Ladies, and she co-founded OT SCADA CON a community conference event about industrial automation technology in Houston, Texas. ⁓ So lots of things to talk about. Nikki, why don’t you start ⁓ by introducing yourself and your career.

Nikki Gonzales (00:53)
Sure, hi, Nikki, like you guys said. ⁓ Or ⁓ maybe I will touch on my maiden name. As I started my career in industry about 17 years ago I’m from Iceland. ⁓ But I moved to the US in middle school. ⁓ I took a quick stop in the UK first before moving here. And I’ve never known what I wanted to do. I…

David (01:20)
You

Nikki Gonzales (01:21)
I ended up going to college for an international business degree, having moved a bit and you know, I’ve always wanted to travel. I thought I’d like to do something where I get to travel. ⁓ but I never exactly found, you know, kind of like a dream job for me, or I’ve never, I’ve never been one those people that had a very specific plan or path. ⁓ and so I found myself in the industrial automation industry actually after sort of by coincidence. ⁓

I graduated, got a degree, still didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. And unfortunately, there’s no starter job for international business degrees. It’s again, one of those like, you know how to do a little bit of this and that ⁓ with a little bit of international flair to it. ⁓ But my dad is an engineer. He’s an electrical engineer, ⁓ focuses on embedded controls. And I worked for him while…

basically since I was a teenager up until I graduated from college. And at that time, he owned a company that did mobile resource management and tracking for fleets of trucks, boats, vessels. And this was back when cellular service was ⁓ 2G and GPRS. And we had to use satellites to make sure to get continuous coverage. We would switch back between GPRS and satellite communication. ⁓

And I got my start sort of playing every role in a small business. I created technical manuals, I created sales material, I did accounting, I answered the phones, I cleaned the office, I made the coffee. I started to send out and qualify leads. I would send brochures to fleet managers to feed to the sales force. And then eventually I ended up doing some sales.

and we had a web-based interface at the time. This was, you know, 20 years ago, which was quite new to say, it’s hosted in the cloud and you can just log on. ⁓ I did a live demo over the phone and internet with a customer. ⁓ yeah, yeah. During that time. And I was able to close the sale and it sort of changed my view on sales. thought that sales was something that I would never be interested in coming from an engineering standpoint. It didn’t seem like a very.

David (03:17)
but that’s dangerous.

Nikki Gonzales (03:33)
⁓ I don’t know how to put this like worthwhile career. My dad coming from the engineering side didn’t necessarily think that salespeople were the best. ⁓ But what I didn’t realize that existed was this world, what we call sales engineering, which is really being more of a translator ⁓ from requirements to engineering to solution. And I found that in that first sale.

⁓ I was able to really make this customer happy and solve genuine problems that they had with our solution, tracking their trucks. ⁓ And that’s when I realized that maybe with my business degree, I could do something technical even if I don’t have an engineering degree. And so I looked for technical jobs that didn’t require one. ⁓ So I looked into technical recruiting, technical marketing, and technical sales.

And I ended up becoming a machine vision sales engineer for a Japanese company called Keyence, which you may or may not be familiar with, but they, they sell sensors, machine vision systems, measurement devices. ⁓ Now they do some PLCs and stuff like that. think, but ⁓ they’re sort of one of their hallmarks is that they have an all direct Salesforce and they train people directly out of college on their products, on the applications. So I got.

David (04:29)
yet.

Nikki Gonzales (04:51)
sort of lucky to be introduced to that world just through the campus kind of recruiting system at my college. And I didn’t really know what I was getting into. ⁓ They had me demo a sensor during one of the interviews and I just thought it was one of the coolest things ever. was ⁓ a high powered photoelectric sensor that could read through materials like plastic ⁓ to detect levels or different things and.

Willem (05:06)
Hahaha

Nikki Gonzales (05:16)
I just immediately was like, this is so cool. I get to play with this stuff and figure out whether it works or not for something. And then that’s how I get to sell it to people. ⁓

Willem (05:25)
How did you

get into an engineering degree? I wonder like people who are enthusiastic about sensors.

Nikki Gonzales (05:31)
Yeah. Honestly,

I took AP Physics. So the school system is a little bit different here in the US. ⁓ And that was a challenge for me because my parents didn’t know, they had never been through it. They went through, you know, European system. ⁓ Here it’s very different. I took in high school what are considered called AP classes, ⁓ advanced placement, and you can get college credit for those classes. And so I took AP Physics in high school.

and I got enough credits to not ever have to take any more physics unless I got an engineering degree. ⁓

Willem (06:06)
So you’re so good you don’t need to follow anything and it was like it’s finished you learn physics

Nikki Gonzales (06:11)
No,

not to say I was so good. I got through it and I got good grades with the help of my dad, ⁓ helping me. But I realized that the English and writing and talking and leading and things like that, I could do very easily. The physics and the math I had to work a lot harder for. So maybe it’s my inherent laziness, but I decided to go to school for what I thought would be easier. And

I saw my dad too at that point. So he was an engineer, an electrical engineer that became a marketing manager and then eventually his own business owner and a CEO. And so by the time I went to college, I saw my dad as a CEO, not so much as an engineer. And I do, so I’m an introvert by nature. When I first moved here, it was very hard for me to get to speak to people and I was, they’re shy.

But here in America, that doesn’t quite equal success. And I forced myself. Yeah, yeah. Here I was told very often to smile and be more energetic. And I realized that if I wanted to kind of fit in here and have what is considered success, then I might need to kind of get out of my shell. So I forced myself to do things like I took theater class, I took a modeling class.

Willem (07:10)
Come on, they’re so silent and keep to themselves all the time.

Nikki Gonzales (07:33)
just to try to increase my extrovertedness. ⁓ And I found that I do enjoy connecting with people. And so I didn’t want to have what I thought was a typical engineering job, which is to sit at a desk somewhere quietly and not talk to a lot of people. ⁓ And I got to see my dad go on business trips and take somebody out to lunch and that sort of stuff. And I thought, that looks more fun.

David (07:54)
Hahaha

I’m also wondering, like, Willem, when you were in high school, was ⁓ doing a job in OT also in your bucket list because it wasn’t on mine.

Willem (07:57)
Thank

Absolutely,

absolutely, no, I don’t think you know it exists at that moment.

David (08:12)
It’s…

Yeah, it like just happens. go like at a certain point in time, I started in the chemical industry. So also right from university and I really loved every minute I was there. But I would say until the point I stepped for the first time through the gates, I was going like, I don’t know what it is.

Willem (08:42)
Plus even in IT, mean, when I was in high school, I we would be, I would be one of the few people with an email. You know, the internet was completely new. What do you do with this thing? You have a modem, it makes weird noises and it keeps your phone occupied. So mean, IT as a business even didn’t exist yet. So you roll into it.

Nikki Gonzales (08:53)
You

David (09:04)
So but in

any case, so step forward. Today, are at the Windex, so focusing on, if we just name the Purdue model here, if you don’t mind focusing on level one to two or only two.

Nikki Gonzales (09:24)
That’s a good question, actually. We kind of sit maybe closer to level two and then bridge a gap between the levels below and above. And the HMI, I think, has kind of been ⁓ shoved in a corner in our minds as just the operator interface. You think about, ⁓ it’s where the operators go to press buttons. So it’s an evolution of the button into a touchscreen. ⁓

David (09:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Willem (09:49)
So for the people who are listening who don’t really know what an HMI is, how do you tell them what you’re working on?

Nikki Gonzales (09:57)
So HMI stands for human machine interface. ⁓ It can also be called an operator interface, depends on sort of the application of it. But ultimately, it’s going to be a screen somewhere on a line or on a machine, oftentimes on a standalone machine that controls that machine or lets the operator interact with the machine. ⁓

And I think an underutilized or underappreciated role of the HMI can also be as a controls gateway to a machine ⁓ and connecting that machine to the larger plant network. ⁓ So depending on whether you have a plant that’s controlled by a PLC network or a DCS, a distributor control system, ⁓ typically anywhere where you have operators interacting with the line or with the machine, you will have an HMI of some sort. ⁓

And the HMI of today, the sort of standard, is a touchscreen interface that is programmable. It’s ⁓ typically by the machine builder, whoever initially built that machine ⁓ or the line. In some cases, again, depending on the type of plant, it also may be ⁓ programmed by plant personnel. But typically, it’s just kind of a standard interface that comes with a piece of equipment. ⁓

and it will have multiple screens on it in some cases, buttons that show the operator or give the operator the options to turn things on and off, make selections, but it’ll also show alarms. ⁓ But its primary role is typically, again, for the operator to interact with the machine and the machine to display or give information back to the operator about the status of the machine or what it’s doing. But those are really just the basic functions of an HMI. ⁓ And again, that’s kind of just replaces buttons with a screen.

⁓ But the HMI does have and can have a lot of functionality that does a lot more than that. ⁓ I would say it’s kind of also the gateway between the operator, the machine, and then the greater plant network.

Willem (11:58)
Okay. Do you guys also work on SCADA because you organize a SCADA conference?

Nikki Gonzales (12:04)
That it, yeah, so slightly misleading name, ⁓ but the way that Allie puts it and Allie, ⁓ Alicia Gilpin is my partner in my podcast, Automation Ladies. And this was really her brainchild, this conference, ⁓ which is kind of a mix of a technical training. ⁓ She calls it automation speed dating, because they’re very short, 30 minute sessions ⁓ focused on different topics ⁓ of OT or industrial automation.

The name came from, the way she sees it is like the movie Lion King when Mufasa describes that everything that the sun touches is your kingdom, Simba. ⁓ Everything that is under SCADA, like everything that falls under the supervisory control and data acquisition system is our domain, is our OT industry three devices, PLCs.

David (12:48)
You

Nikki Gonzales (12:59)
things that control and make the plant move and things that make things go and not go. That’s kind how we see what subject matter ⁓ OT SCADA CON focuses on. So it’s actually less about SCADA and more about everything that’s underneath SCADA. But we do talk about SCADA as well and that’s kind of as far as we go. We have one 30 minute session that we call Industry 4.0. ⁓

David (13:17)
this.

That is, it’s refreshing, Nicky. That you have a 30 minute focus on industry 4.0 and a, what is it, two or three day focus on industry 3.0.

Nikki Gonzales (13:27)
Yeah.

Three.

Yeah, yeah, so we have, think 20, I’ll have to check the schedule for this year exactly the number of sessions that we have, but I think that there are around 23, 24. And yes, one of them is industry four. One of them is like trending graphs and SCADA screens. So there’s one SCADA related, maybe two.

So there will be topics, starts kind of from the basics from PLC and field devices. We have a section on VFDs. We have a section on motors. We have a section on HMIs ⁓ and remote access. We’ve got sessions on different industries. So kind of best practices where things are at, what people like to see in agriculture and oil and gas. ⁓ There’s process instrumentation. ⁓

safety, both machine safety and process safety. But we really look at kind of what are the primary things that our, a lot of our community is smaller independent systems integrators that have either worked at plants or worked for large integrators and they’re frustrated that they are hampered by something. They’re really kind of doers and people that like to get their hands dirty and just get stuff done.

And so they end up kind of freeing themselves of those constraints for better or worse and going into business for themselves because they want to get more done ⁓ or be able to, you know, be flexible for their customers, work on different types of stuff. ⁓ A lot of us, think, are maybe neurodivergent a little bit. So ⁓ on the autism spectrum or have ADHD, we kind of fall in love with this control stuff. ⁓ But also for the reason that it’s constantly challenging and it’s constantly different.

And I think most of us in the OT SCADA CON community would have a really hard time being in IT for instance, because there’s maybe, and I can’t speak to it, I’ve never worked in IT, but like the constant firefighting and being the one that’s like sitting on a bucket at 3 a.m. and the whole plants like, you know, down and they’re depending on you to get something back up and running. ⁓ That sort of stuff is kind of what drives a lot of these people. And so.

Willem (15:46)
We never have

in IT any urgent incidents that require… No, actually we would like to have less firefighting.

Nikki Gonzales (15:50)
I know, right?

David (15:52)
No, no, no, but it’s… ⁓

Nikki Gonzales (15:54)
⁓

David (15:55)
Although… ⁓

Nikki Gonzales (15:56)
But yeah, they find that there’s a lot of rhetoric in the industry about what people should be doing and what the future looks like. But then when they go to these plants every day to service and or upgrade or do what they do, which is usually smaller projects, ⁓ that stuff doesn’t mean a whole lot to them because they still have to upgrade this panel that has no drawings.

Willem (15:58)
Yep.

Nikki Gonzales (16:17)
⁓ Or, know, program a PLC who the program was developed by someone 30 years ago in ladder logic and it wasn’t well documented. It’s more of the reality of kind of like the ground situation in manufacturing that isn’t where it should be today.

David (16:33)
But it is very interesting and also I would even say necessary that we touch this topic because obviously we are called the ITOT insider. So yes, obviously we talk more about data and the cool stuff. I would say the cool AI stuff, et cetera. But one of the things I come across every single day is a lack of a decent foundation.

And there is no AI and there is no BI reports. you know, if your sensor is faulty, then the data is faulty. Full stop. And it might be a bit, I would say, it’s a pity that there is this industry 3.0 and then you have industry 4.0. then because probably people needed a new concept, we started talking about industry 5.0 because

⁓ we forgot human in industry 4.0. So why don’t we go for the 5.0 thing and now we reintroduce the operator.

Nikki Gonzales (17:35)
Yeah.

David (17:43)
But it’s it’s fugazificazis, it’s clouds. So can we go back to the foundational work? So if you, with your experience with the customers you’re working with, what is the state of the industry from your perspective? Where are we at?

Nikki Gonzales (18:07)
So it’s definitely, it depends on what markets you look at, but the majority of manufacturing here in the United States is small businesses. So yes, we have very many large conglomerates that make consumer goods or that make energy or whatever that operate a number of plants. And they have these initiatives and they’ve had these initiatives in the works and they may be mature already with a close to lights out or very efficient. ⁓

digitally transformed operation across all of their plants. Those absolutely exist. But the majority of manufacturers here in the US are small. ⁓ know, 10 to 50 people and they really don’t have that level of digital maturity. ⁓ Some of them have gotten over the years to…

They have a plant level SCADA for instance, right? So SCADA stands for supervisory control and data acquisition. It almost seems like an outdated term at this point. And I know there’s been a lot of rhetoric that like, SCADA is going to die because we have so many other ways that we can visualize data and work with data in this old kind of model of the, you know, going from one level to the next, especially when it comes to.

things like the UNS, instance, Unified Namespace, trying to have one source of truth that multiple systems can draw from and bring context back and forth rather than kind of one feeding the next feeding the next. ⁓

David (19:19)
Mm-hmm.

Nikki Gonzales (19:33)
say we’re still very much at this level of these manufacturers have been buying equipment ⁓ from vendors that typically have closed ecosystems. ⁓ But at the same time, they may have a you know, we’re plant that runs on this right? Less common here in the US to be Siemens, for instance, we’re more likely to be a Rockwell ⁓ sort of house or ignition skater is also really popular here.

and is a little bit more open. you, and yeah, there’s Aviva. mean, there’s a number of these like skater companies that have been around for a long time. And of course they’re innovating. So they’re creating newer systems, newer ways of doing things. But what we have here is really a lot of plants that have been able to make some investments over time, but they are typically mixtures of equipment that has been around for 10, 20, 30 years.

and they typically will have a mixture of hardware vendors that come in on those machines. Because unless you’re a very big player, you’re not going to be able to specify what PLC you want on a machine that you buy, what sort of communication protocols you’re going to have on a line or a skid or some sort of piece of equipment that you didn’t build yourself. And so you end up with these plants that typically have a mixture of different equipment that speak different languages.

that in some cases have been brought up into a SCADA system. ⁓ And in other cases, you have kind of a mixture of hodgepodge, right? Some things may be very clear to access in the SCADA and other things may be still completely disconnected. And we still have manufacturers that operate off of the air gap principle, right? If I don’t connect it, it’s gonna be safe. ⁓

Willem (21:22)
There’s something to say for that. You don’t need to pay a cyber security expert.

Nikki Gonzales (21:24)
Yeah, yeah, and.

Yeah. And, and that is a huge problem right now in the U S where a big target, I’m sure just as Europe is right. have low resource actors that are becoming more more powerful with AI and things like that. And they don’t have a whole lot to lose and they want to ransom or whatever, you know, our companies here in the U S which are considered high value targets. ⁓ and so they’re

Right now it’s a really rough time to be a small manufacturer, I think, in the US because margins are typically thin. The way that CapEx and budgets have been run at these companies for many, many years now is we can justify a big CapEx project ⁓ with a payback period of X, Y, Z, but there’s not a lot of budgeting for ongoing maintenance and upgrades to that equipment.

David (22:21)
Hmm.

Nikki Gonzales (22:23)
And so we have a lot of equipment that’s coming close to end of life that has components that are already discontinued. ⁓ There’s a lot of this, well, works, don’t break it, don’t touch it, don’t upgrade it because it’s running. And that’s a mixture of downtime is very expensive, downtime is typically not budgeted for very well.

And when these companies are running like that, you tend to have unexpected downtime events happen regularly enough that it eats up budgets that would otherwise maybe be used for transformation. ⁓ so it’s really important, I think, to be able to work with those types of manufacturers and help them piece by piece, you know, get to where they need to go.

versus trying to get them to wholesale, make some big upgrade to their plant. And again, it very much depends on what side of manufacturing you look at. The long tail of the majority of companies or the big fortune 500s, right? They’re gonna have obviously a very different ⁓ set of, or very different ways of doing things. ⁓ These smaller manufacturers also typically don’t have very mature IT departments.

David (23:38)
Yeah.

Willem (23:40)
they’re small I mean even big companies only can have that much IT I mean they’re not Google or Amazon. ⁓

Nikki Gonzales (23:40)
Yeah.

David (23:47)
like me, me, John, the

everything IT guy who…

Willem (23:52)
You also have everything engineers in IT. ⁓ Nikki, from your perspective, what does, you mentioned transformation. What does transformation look like for that long tail? Because we hear about those big companies and cloud platforms and everything, but what would that mean for a small company with a couple of machines?

David (23:54)
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales (24:14)
think honestly, what does it mean for them? I mean, it means the ability to stay competitive and to stay in business, I think ultimately. Whether it’s next year or probably in the next five years, we are making a push to reshore manufacturing back to the US, ⁓ but we have a huge problem with workforce. We don’t have enough people that wanna work manufacturing jobs.

Willem (24:20)
Is it relevant even?

Nikki Gonzales (24:41)
So a traditional manufacturer that operates most machines independently with manual labor. Those jobs are not attractive to the current generation. They can go, you know, I don’t know, make videos on TikTok and probably make more money. ⁓ There’s not a lot of creativity or, ⁓ you know,

It’s not super pleasant and younger kids too, like having a specific shift where I have to go and I can’t have my phone and I need to wear safety devices and it might be loud. ⁓ That’s not very attractive as a job. And those jobs by nature can’t pay a whole lot because they, you those manufacturers don’t have a ton of margins. ⁓ They’re not looking to, you know, pay top, top dollar for somebody to push a button.

repetitively throughout the day. So it’s a really big challenge, ⁓ I think, for the manufacturers here. If they don’t transform some of their operations, they’re going to continue to have really high turnover and they’re going to have a hard time getting employees to work there. ⁓ And so I think it’s a survival necessity at this point to embark on these if they’re not already, ⁓ so that A, they can be more competitive in their throughput.

in the quality of the products that they make, in their cost of running the plant due to unplanned downtime. But then a huge part of it is that they just can’t get people to operate these machines.

David (26:08)
Yeah, it’s maybe funny that’s, I guess you’re right when people talk about digital projects, it’s typically the big ones who showcase something. even then, it’s like they showcase just something. It’s like people then go like, yeah, companies such and such, they are doing crazy stuff. No, they ran a pilot.

Nikki Gonzales (26:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,

like one department, did something with one process and they were able to get these crazy results. And then like the rest of the plant, has knows nothing about it, right?

David (26:38)
Yeah.

And

it’s even I had conversations with small manufacturers where they go like yeah David but we’ll never be able to catch up with company x y or z and then I go like yeah but you’re not that different after all. ⁓

Willem (27:01)
I think the advantage

of a smaller company is, I work in a bigger company, mean, it takes a lot of talking, a lot of politics, lot of getting everybody aligned on something, talking about the budget of I don’t know what year. mean, there’s a lot of overhead in a big company before you get something done. Sure, you can get a bigger budget, but you also are wasting a lot of budget, you could say, just to get everybody aligned, I think.

There’s differences between companies. But in a small company, I don’t know, I’ve worked in smaller companies too, say, hey, I think it’s a good idea. Okay, do it. I mean, you can be, you can make super fast.

Nikki Gonzales (27:44)
With Weintek now, ⁓ we are about 20 people here in the US ⁓ and I work directly for the CEO. And one of the things that I’ve learned that I appreciate and is a good place for me is where we can actually, where I can take what I would consider to be smaller steps with a larger goal in mind, right? But where that individual step or Lego block or however you want to put it, right? Plays a part in a larger system, but you don’t need to get to the end to realize value.

David (28:02)
Mm-hmm.

Nikki Gonzales (28:13)
Each sort of step in and of itself should have a value associated with it so that if you get stuck or you need to reverse course, or you need to pivot a little bit, you haven’t gone down the road of a whole lot of development and things that then are now not useful at all. ⁓ and I actually, so I know I can be long winded, so I didn’t get to, you know, kind of like the middle from my career, early career until now.

But I worked ⁓ for another company from Germany called Festo, which you may have heard of. They’re big in motion, mechatronics, pneumatics. ⁓ And then I worked for another German company, a software company, where we did ⁓ simulation. So electromagnetic simulation, ⁓ simulating prototypes for their physically manufactured to see how they will behave electrically, to optimize their design for manufacturability, for cost, for performance.

David (28:42)
yeah, of course.

Nikki Gonzales (29:05)
Um, and also make sure they meet regulatory requirements before you manufacture the full prototype. And then from there, I actually went into enterprise AI, uh, back in, this was like back in 2014, 15, 16, when it was a lot newer, um, less mature and we were, I meant to, I joined that company to kind of bring it to industrial companies because I know it’s a struggle. It’s a challenge, right? Not only do you have to have clean sources of data, but then how do you.

you know, take them to that BI layer and then get some AI suggestions and you know, that sort of thing, right? And ⁓ back then, and even now, it’s still kind of in the enterprise layer that that makes sense, right? Enterprise companies have the money to invest in this sort of thing. And it’s usually not a plug and play. I think we’re probably at some solutions now in our industry that are meant to be a lot easier and maybe they can be done like without managed services and things like that. ⁓ But back then it was

Much more like, we would do a pilot. We would build a thing. It would be very custom. It would be supported by our engineers. It would be supported. So we used to do ⁓ using machine learning in forecasting for supply chains, predicting demand for products that have never been released by predicting demand reviews, other things for similar products, ⁓ taking, you know, weather data and popular, just sentiment from the internet, all kinds of things like that. ⁓

But back then we did a lot of, worked with big companies that would say, yes, we need to do, you know, business intelligence and we want more AI in our business intelligence. And we want to be able to make more accurate forecasts and predictions and things like that. ⁓ but we’re in the middle of a 10 year, you know, digital transformation project, changing our ERP system. And, know, it was supposed to be done five years ago and it’s now five years over budget. you know,

David (30:58)
Thank

Nikki Gonzales (31:01)
I don’t know how many millions of dollars over budget and you know, we’re going to get to this AI stuff as soon as we’re done with that. And our philosophy at our company, Algo that I worked for at the time was, no, let’s just take small steps and you you can, let’s look at your maturity where you are. And there is always, it’s a step up from where you are, right? It’s not a, you have to go from here to here. ⁓ and a lot of companies were kind of like that. They’re like, well, we’re doing the ERP now and that’ll get us from here to here. And then we’ll go from here to here.

David (31:28)
No.

Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales (31:32)
And that I saw over the three years that I was doing that, ⁓ as just, those ERP implementations were generally not very successful. ⁓ And they were usually being run kind of outside of the people that were actually going to be using the damn thing. And they didn’t really have input into how it was going to work. And maybe the new workflow was not as good for them as the old one was. And so people would bypass it.

⁓ Or they would just continually wait for this giant digital transformation to be done in order to take any other steps. And I always just thought like looking at that, ⁓ that there’s gotta be a better way to do it. So what we started doing is kind of consulting and we would go in oftentimes with this meeting of like, yeah, we want AI. And then we’d look under the hood and say where you are. And we say, actually, you know, let’s start by getting your data.

organized and off of these excels and into you know something where we can start to run some models But you don’t you don’t go from here to here all in one project and you shouldn’t right You should have some Manageable steps that you can prove out and work with your people at the next step before you go, you know all the way up the stack and that’s kind of how I look at this stuff from you know now that I’m kind of back in the manufacturing as well and I

personally don’t love all these big buzzwords, because I think too many vendors take them and use them in marketing material and make them irrelevant, because they’re kind of not saying anything of substance. But to me, there is a whole huge opportunity. just, it’s not as sexy, it’s not as fun, it’s not as easy to sell a lot of small things to a lot of small companies than it is to do a one big giant, know, cool POC with a brand name that everybody recognizes.

So it’s a slog down at the bottom end of things to help these manufacturers kind of upgrade one thing at a time and come up with a strategy that’s not going from zero to a hundred, but to go from zero to 10 and 10 to 20 and 20 to 30, that sort of thing.

David (33:42)
⁓ This reminds me, well, ERP migrations running over time is like, I think it’s almost by definition, but I was visiting a customer, ⁓ they had huge high voltage air compressors, but really like directly linked to the high voltage net. And they were just all running at 100 % capacity. And I went like, this is gonna, this, ⁓

has to cost you a gigantic amount of money every year. So I actually proposed a very simple ⁓ control mechanism to control these high voltage compressors. ⁓ But yeah, they were running in a ERP migration project.

Nikki Gonzales (34:31)
Yeah, and they were too busy with that to focus on any of these other small things that really would have produced gigantic savings or gains. And a lot of these companies, they’re not looking at their energy usage. I mean, there’s so many what you would consider to be low hanging fruit to an outsider. ⁓ But when you’re not used to being in that plant environment and understanding how the budgets are allocated and who gets attention for what. ⁓

There’s, think, you know, there’s a lot of underserved ⁓ people, stakeholders, departments. ⁓ And it can be, if it’s a boardroom situation, then of course it’s a lot more shiny to say we have a new digital transformation project that’s gonna give us outsized gains and huge transformation than to say, I’m gonna, you know, put a little control system on some air compressors.

David (35:20)
There it is. Hey, there is one last thing I really want to ask you ⁓ is how does someone start organizing a conference? That has to be a lot of work.

Nikki Gonzales (35:35)
Yes, you need somebody like Allie, ⁓ my partner, who thinks of things and then decides to do them and puts them out in the world and then somebody has to pick up the ball and keep it rolling and that’s me in this case. ⁓ We did kind of the opposite with the podcast. I proposed the podcast and I was like, I just need you to come on it and you’re gonna have to do nothing, which turned out to be completely not true. ⁓ But it took her.

kind of pushing things along for it to really materialize. So I think we found a really good partnership in each other. She’s an engineer by trade. She’s a chemical engineer that went into controls. ⁓ She has an insatiable curiosity like I do, but we come at it kind of from different sides of the industry, different worlds. ⁓ She is not as much of a people person as I am, so we have that dynamic of like,

She can just be quiet and let me talk if she doesn’t feel like talking that day. So it works out for the both of us. But she came up with this concept. She came up with the list of topics that she wanted to teach. And then she was like, we’re going to do this. And then I was like, oh, how? And she was like, well, I don’t know. We’ll figure that part out. I’m like, OK, well, let me figure that part out. Yeah. And so I think part of it is being naive and being OK with.

Willem (36:47)
That’s your job, Nicky.

Nikki Gonzales (36:55)
diving into it before we look into it too much, because once you do look into it too much, you realize how much work it is. You go, this is crazy, we should never do this. And yeah, that’s kind of our MO with a lot of things. We jump and then we figure out how to build the plane on the way down.

David (37:12)
think that’s a perfect way for another fun episode of the ITOT Insider to wrap this one up. So OT SCADA CON takes place this year, July 23 to 25. Are there still tickets available?

Nikki Gonzales (37:29)
Yes, I think we have about 20 tickets still available.

David (37:32)
All right, that’s not too much. So once you are listening, ⁓ bye today. ⁓ And the Automations Ladies podcast can be found on all major channels or via automationladies.io. ⁓ Nicky, thank you so much for joining us.

Nikki Gonzales (37:52)
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

David (37:53)
And to

our audience, thank you for tuning in again. Make sure to subscribe via itotinsider.com and until we meet again, bye bye.