Erik: The fact of the matter is technology has moved considerably and you're not seeing proportional changes in the tooling that people are using to solve problems every day in operations. Now whether you call it Industry 4. I think is far less relevant. The question for me is, how are you taking each of these individual capabilities and employing them? What you really need to do is think about how all of these are working together in orchestration to actually address the challenges that you're seeing. Voiceover: You're listening to Augmented Ops, where manufacturing meets innovation. We highlight the transformative ideas and technologies shaping the front lines of operations, helping you stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of industrial tech. Here's your host, Natan Linder, CEO and co founder of Tulip. The frontline operations platform. Natan: Welcome back to Augmented Ops. Hey, Eric. Hey, good to be here. Here we go again. I can't believe it's an end of a season. Again. Erik: Went Natan: fast. Went fast. For those of you who don't know, Eric is our chief business officer and, uh, this is a very special episode. You may have guessed from the title. Per usual, we're trying to summarize what we've learned. We learned a lot, but summarizing it is always daunting. Erik: Yeah, we need cliff notes as we go through these. We can type them up, maybe. Natan: Yeah, well, I guess Chachapiti will do it for us or something. Well, first, we want to thank the audience for tuning in and participating. It's been awesome to see. And while we're thinking about new episodes, keep sending us ideas and suggestions, that's always great. And before we jump into it, you know, what a year, you know, the Celtics won yesterday. Can you believe Erik: it? Yeah, pretty exciting day for Boston. It's like, it's like, Whatever it takes. You're, you're wearing a T-shirt. What is your, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to win Natan: whatever it takes to win and whatever it takes to transform frontline operations. Yeah. Possession by possession. That's like what Missoula is like. You play the game possession by, it worked Erik: for the Celtics, it's gonna work for frontline operations. Natan: And what a team, it's inspiring like to think about this 'cause we talk a lot about continuous improvement and like how to build more perfect teams and things like that. And how 50% of the battle is not about technology or this tool or that tool or architecture. All important. What is the most important thing? Erik: It's the people. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause if you look at the way the Celtics played and how they won, you don't have one superstar that comes in and saves the day. What you have is a team of superstars all working together. Everybody knows their job and they work together to get the job done and whatever it takes, that's what it takes to win. Natan: Yeah. And it's not just, they don't have one s. They can cover because even superstars have bad days on court or they get injured or whatever. They have this redundancy and I think that's so different and that was part of how they positioned their entire season because like whatever take was one thing and then the other thing was like different here. Yeah. And I think that's really powerful. Yeah. But Erik: I mean, it's a pretty obvious corollary to, uh, I think what we see in frontline operations. We talked about a number of themes, uh, over the course of this season and we're going to get into a lot of these, but the first thing though is making the point that, you know, we talk about whatever it takes to transform frontline operations. The first thing that it takes is, you know, one superhero is going to get the job done. You know, a single superstar doesn't win. What it takes is a team of folks working together. IT operations, the operator on the frontline, you know, the frontline production manager, all these people working together, everybody understanding what the problems are, working together, understand those priorities, and then figuring out how to deploy these solutions in a way that at the end of the day, creates value where it matters. So let's talk about some of the themes. We covered a bunch of stuff. We talked about the evolution of this term industry 4. 0, evolution or demise, I don't know, TBD, we'll see. I think we're squarely at this point in the era of the open and interoperable ecosystem. We talked a lot about the rise of AI and the role that this has, I mean. Is it still rising? Natan: If you think about AI, like the yeast that makes the bread, so it rises at some point you need to put it in the oven to make a bread, because if you do it too much, what the yeast kind of collapses inside. That's right. Where are we going with this? I guess it's pretty clear. I guess the East hype machine is still going with the rise of AI. We'll get into it. We'll see how much of this has Erik: already rise or whether or not it's time to bake the bread and get some actual value out of the hype. We talked about, uh, democratization and how the role of the frontline operator, the frontline engineer, uh, is changing with a lot of these themes. And then we talked a lot about focusing on that frontline, that frontline worker. So some of the themes we talked about this season. Natan: And you know, shameless plug, in October 8 to 9, 2024 in Boston, we're going to have the second operations calling in which we will continue to discuss all those themes, including whether AI becomes breadcrumbs and many, many other exciting topics. So we should invite you all to sign up and join us. Erik: The first one was a blowout. All right. We were overbooked. Yeah. It's moving fast this time around. It does. So reach out quick. We'd love to have you in Boston, but space is limited. Natan: Space is limited. Sign up. And if you have cool stuff to share on the themes we discussed or otherwise, uh, please let us know. We'd love to hear more and let's jump into it. Maybe I'll kick us off with one of my favorite topics, if not the favorite topics, Industry 4. 0. Erik: I have a question. Natan: Yeah. Erik: What is Industry 4. 0 exactly? Natan: Can I talk about how I feel when I say Industry 4. 0 first? Yeah, how do you feel? I feel old. Erik: Uh huh. Natan: You know? It's been like a decade people talking about Industry 4. 0 and yet what is Industry 4. 0 is still debated. And you know, we had like good discussion, you know, me and Jeff Winter have like exchanges around numbers sometime 0 and he's done a tremendous work defining all sorts of things for the community. But I feel like it's a term that lost meaning. Erik: Yeah, I think 10 years ago, this was the promise, right? This is what electricity was going to do to manufacturing, what automation was going to do to manufacturing. And, uh, you know, the tools are there, the capabilities are different, but you aren't seeing it take off and achieve these order of magnitude productivity gains across the board that was promised 10 years ago. And every year, I feel like they said, well, you know, this is the new answer. And for a while, I think blockchain was thrown in there. We certainly talked about augmented Natan: reality, Erik: wearables. All of this stuff was a part of the industry 4. 0 hype train, but it's not panning out that way. I think that when you, when you step back and take a look at the technologies that are built or the tools that are built on top of these technologies that are actually moving the needle, it's kind of hard to categorize them under one umbrella of industry 4. 0. I think like what I'm seeing is a lot of very specific capabilities employed together to solve very specific problems. Natan: And you know, I don't think. Customers really care. What they care about is like changing how they work. Yeah. Sustainably, meaning not just sustainably from net zero perspective, also that, but that they can get to a better stage of digital transformation than they were meaningfully better than what they've done before, which is sometimes nothing and sometimes a system that, you know, maybe five years ago, a decade ago was like pretty okay. But in the world we live in now, it's not okay. But this brings the question to like, well, what about Industry 5. Erik: 0? I think you leapfrog Industry 5. 0. You go right to 6. You go right to 6 while we're at it. Because Natan: you know when Antonio Padovano was here, the characterization we heard there was, this has to be human centric, this has to be focused on the integrating people. And I like, the ideas are good. But why do we need to give it like a number sort of notation? It doesn't make any sense anymore. Erik: Yeah. I think the industry 4. 0 industry, industry X, I don't know, call it whatever you want. Look, that's not the point, right? The fact of the matter is technology has moved considerably over the last 20, 30 years, certainly, and you're not seeing proportional changes in the tooling that people are using to solve problems every day in operations. That's fundamentally the tension in my mind. Now, whether you call it Industry 0, I think is far less relevant. The question for me is, how are you taking each of these individual capabilities and employing them? And I think a key point here is, You can't just take one point solution technology and move the needle here. What you really need to do is think about how all of these are working together in orchestration to actually address the challenges that you're seeing. Which Natan: is a perfect segue to topic Erik: number two. Take us away. I think one of the biggest things you saw this year, when I look across the industry and across the various conversations we've been having here is this transition and thinking from a closed sort of walled garden to an open ecosystem that is interoperable? So I think that at this point we can confidently say we are firmly in the era of open and interoperable ecosystems. And this, I think, is an interesting departure. Because if you were to rewind five, ten, fifteen years ago, uh, you know, you saw a lot of the, Big incumbents in the space building competitive advantage on saying, no, no, no, you buy your full stack from us. You buy, you know, you know, your MES system, your piece system, your scale layer, you buy all of this, your PLM, all this stuff you buy from one company. And I think what you're seeing now is a real shift. One, a lot of times those companies, they might've had the best PLM, but they don't have the best, the rest of the offerings. So you saw the market demanding sort of best of breed capabilities on each of these and then saying like, why do I have to standardize on one? And so I think the market's demanding it. And I think. You know, a lot of the new entrants, and I think Tulip frankly deserves some, quite a bit of credit here as well. I think we're helping drive a lot of this, but we don't necessarily ask if we can integrate, you know, we just integrate. We Natan: assume that that's what customers need and then try and provide it. And sometimes the customers said, well, I just built this integration to XYZ. And it's like, great. So yeah. How many other people need it? And then they sometimes share through us. We got to build better sharing mechanisms, like to push this ecosystem and interoperability, because like people are doing just awesome stuff, solving their problem. And you know, I mean, those are kind of big words, ecosystem and interoperability. But if there is like no architecture, you know, reference architectures that make that possible, that people adopt, it's just not going to happen. Erik: Yeah, well, I think, first of all, it's the right conversation to be having. More and more, I'm having conversations with customers and prospects, folks who are starting their digital transformation journey, and we're not having a conversation around, at the application level, like, what are necessarily the specific problems that I want to solve. Precisely, yeah. We're having more of a conversation around, how do I make sure that I have a scalable architecture? What am I using for my ERP? how is that integrating with a platform that I can, you know, build MES on, I can build CMMS on, I can build other sort of capabilities on top of. How does that integrate with my physical infrastructure? How am I equipping my frontline operations people? These are more and more the kind of conversations that I'm having. And I think it's really interesting because architecture, you can standardize on at the enterprise scale. When you talk about specific solutions. Oftentimes, you need a lot of last mile configuration and nuance, depending on the environment in which you're employing. So I think, first of all, the conversations have evolved quite a bit in the last even just 12 months. I don't, I think, you know, this is a conversation I'm having much more now than I was even just a year ago. And I think it's, it's for the better. I think, frankly, a lot of this is being enabled by some of the standard infrastructure that's being made available now. Yeah. Natan: The protocols. Like we had Dominic from HighwayQ here, and we had Vatsal, CEO of Litmus, and those companies are working on taking protocols that matured. So I think about MQTT, PubSub architecture, or UNS, sometimes people apply it immediately there. And really the edge architecture or the protocol architecture, it's just so mature by now. Like, adopting it is different, like that's another maturity curve you have to start. Because not overnight all your machines are going to speak UA and everything's great. But it's definitely maturing and they told really, really nice stories on how the new text act is kind of emerging. So I thought that was, that was pretty cool. Erik: Yeah, and these are companies and capabilities that, you know, 10 years ago didn't exist. And if they did exist, certainly not in their current form, where Some Natan: standard bodies, some experiments, and like you spent a ton of time with Walker. Oh yeah. And, um, yeah, he's been educating anybody who Huge advocate for Erik: this movement. Anybody who would listen. Natan: How to do it and very practically. Erik: And what's the benefit? Why is this so important? And Natan: why do it? And yeah. Erik: And I think a big part of that is you take control of your infrastructure. You're not being held mercy to the whims of your vendor. You're in a sense, you become vendor agnostic. You know, one of the things we talk about, um, you know, it's like, look, we, we use Salesforce here at Tulip. Now we're always going to need a CRM. Do we always need Salesforce? Maybe, maybe not, but there's a role in our business architecture and Salesforce certainly has its place and that's pretty important. But if we decided to replace that with something else. We could probably do that. Natan: And, um, paraphrasing what you've said before we move to the next topic, what do those architecture give you, this new type of tech stack for operation? It's, I think it comes down to two things. One is freedom. Freedom means that you can design solutions in and out and like fit that architecture to what you need. Today, you need this approach and tomorrow you'll need something else. But the other thing is, if the architectures are done right, Then it gives you future proofing in the sense that you can't anticipate everything you need to do. You can't make an architecture just for application A, B, and C. You have to make it for application X. And so when application X come in, it's like, you know, the architecture is already set up. Data is going to the data warehouse. And the, uh, UNS event pub sub is like, Making everything flow and like you have some way to get, uh, orchestration on the front line, say something like a tulip and maybe litmus is handling your edge and maybe, and so on. And that, this is not a prediction episode. This is like a here and now episode and at scale, like that's what people are doing now. Well, Erik: and it's, a lot of it's driven by the fact of the matter that look at these operations change over time. Nobody knows what product line is going to sell, what product line is not, you know, you need to ramp up production. You might need to make a build versus buy decision 12 months down the road and you can't, uh, anticipate these types of challenges. And what you need to do is make sure that you're building your capabilities, your core infrastructure with this uncertainty in mind and giving yourself the flexibility to deal with the challenges. The Unknown. I mean, if the last few years have taught us anything, it's, uh, you know, things can happen fast, right? And you need to be able to respond quickly to them. So I think a lot of the improvements, a lot of the developments we've seen over the last 12 months take the customers closer to this future stage. Natan: Let's, let's go to the next topic. The rise of AI. Back to the, to the rise. Matt and I did this post Hanover. It was like AI overload. Everybody's doing all these features and unclear what is actually doing. I think we've seen every vendor in the space and adjacent pushing some use case. A lot, a lot of it is, um. Pretty interesting stuff, but unclear what's the long term utility. How do we move beyond kind of rudimentary implementation of AI features that are kind of like, of course, you can do this new type of search and information wrangling with a chatbot. You know, we had on the show, Lisa Graham, who runs She was talking about using natural language to create a new interaction modality for business intelligence and making analytics. And I think that's a very clear thing that's already happening and we're seeing it too. So, but also Gen AI is not the only thing in AI. Yeah. So what else have we seen? It's getting Erik: all, it's getting all of the attention right now, but there's still good old fashioned AI. It's Natan: kind of like when you have like a little brother. That everybody loves. Erik: It's true. Yeah. There's still good old fashioned AI, you know, still quite a bit of value that's being created by a lot of the computer vision advancements and capabilities that have been, uh, I think more closely integrated into people's day to day experience. So, you know, for example, we spoke with Kai Yang over at Landing AI about a lot of the capabilities that bring, we're seeing lots of our customers going to market with them, but more importantly, you know, customers taking the Tulip platform is that. Means of interacting and accessing this backend capability, but then rapidly being able to configure tune models. And then I was talking with a customer just the other day, and they were talking about how they're walking around in their operation, taking pictures of objects, taking pictures on their cell phone in a tulip application, sending that back to landing AI and then getting. Defect data categorization, and then defect data back on their phone immediately, characterizing the nature of these, and then getting real time visibility into what is the upstream root cause of these things. That's Natan: like, you know what's amazing about it? We were talking about this like from day zero of doing Tulip, and it's like 10 year overnight success of these use cases. That's one reason that's amazing. So it's like, there's always this like, We know this is gonna happen. Like when technology and everything is actually gonna be, but you know what? The other part is amazing. You actually build it in like an hour, Erik: two hours. You said it an hour, but you're maybe exaggerating, but like I I'll say literally, that app took less than two hours to build the application. Yeah. And to train the model on the backend. So only exaggerating like two x. Yeah. But I mean two hours. And I'll tell you, the customer said they had a project going on with a different vendor. Yeah. They spent two years trying to develop. This, they got a better resolution in two hours with Natan: this Erik: capability. Natan: And back to the, what we talked about before, it's not just the AI is ready. Yeah. And like you can do all those things, but you know, we had models that can do computer vision and like this type of labeling that it could do it like even two or three or five years ago. Not the plumbing, not the maturity of the platform that can move the stuff, not the understanding of customers and the speed of the networks and the clouds. And it's just all coming together in like this crescendo of. Availability. Well, and it's, yeah, Erik: I think availability is the key point there because the capability might exist, but the capability also has to be accessible. Accessible is the keyword. Accessible. Accessible is the key, right? So my point is like, I walk around with a cell phone in my hand, and I have my computer, and I have my stack of applications that I use to manage my day to day, right? If I don't have access to these very powerful capabilities via some modality that I'm used to interacting with, I'm not going to use them, right? And so the key here is that We need to make it, I think I view it as an obligation of, of ours, but also more broadly within this open ecosystem that we're talking about, we need to make these capabilities available to people in those mediums that they're already familiar with. So if you're building and working in Tulip, we need to make that accessible to you. Maybe we provide, uh, the whole thing. Maybe we just provide the, the entry point and we send it off to AWS or Azure or landing, or you pick the, you know, you pick whatever works for the customer precisely. And so I think that's really, really key here. Natan: Yeah, but you know, my definition of accessibility is like, there is an easy button, or that the effort in investing in the learning curve is low enough, plus the cost of running this thing, which is usually like, you know, no software is free, and you need to maintain it here and there, and there's cloud, and there's like cost of this and that, and the business model around it. Makes it economically viable as in it's like adding value to the operation. That's the accessibility equation. Maybe we should define it somewhere and like write it down. You can reach out and touch Erik: it and use it when you need it. And also it runs in a way that's cost effective. It creates far more value than it consumes. Natan: And you know, this is also like when people, and I think we had this in various forums this year and like people ask me, well, what's the real value of AI, you know, what is the real value of AI? At the end of the day, the thing that all this Gen AI stuff does today, and those algorithms that we call AI, like landing, that AI will eventually, when it works, it kind of disappears and it's like, oh, it's just a program we use that works. It's all about one thing, like from the operation perspective, and it's like pure lean thinking. It's like you're giving the operation back the most important waste in the form of time. Because if it took them like half a day to grab the data, make the spreadsheet, analyze it, send it to three people, put it on the screen, like. Who has time to do that? Like, you need to get the data now. It needs to go in dashboard automatically. Actually, it needs to be five dashboards that, you know, four you throw away. You just tell, compile it today, compare line three and line four, and you get an answer. And then you say, put the reference line. And that's what they do. Analyze data at the speed that you can talk. Erik: So I fully agree with that. I think there's another source of value here, which is making accessible insights that were previously Buried in raw unstructured data. You know, I'm thinking about a customer that we did some work with. They've been running on Tulip for a number of years and they have literally thousands and thousands of records talking about, Hey, we had a problem. Here was the deviation. Here was the corrective action. Yeah. Now we have the dataset. Great. We can go ahead and train a model on that in Tulip. And now you have basically this sage wisdom for anything that happens in the, uh, you know, in the operation. Here's a problem I'm observing. Here's what's the recommended next best action with references to, you know, when this was solved. To their own, Natan: to their own data. Erik: Yeah. It becomes like this, like sage, sage guide within their operations. Now this is, Based on data that already exists, that they've captured for years. Now they're just able to unlock that insight in new and interesting ways. Natan: Totally. And I think it's not slowing down. And so like, AI is still rising. It's still rising. Yeah. Still rising. Erik: But you can eat it already. It's like, I think we're making muffins, not a big loaf of bread. We're making Natan: muffins. We're making Erik: muffins. I don't know if muffins even have yeast, but let's just say the muffins rot. Maybe they're dinner rolls. Maybe Natan: biscuits. You know, barbecue is basically a great metaphor for an ecosystem because like you need all sorts of meats and all sorts of sauces and like that's the, yeah, so probably AI is the biscuit. Yeah, sweet, crunchy, small, substantive. Yep. I think we covered it. So anyway, we're about to, uh, switch gears here. Switch gears. Yes. Erik: Two more. Humanly topics. So democratization is the theme here. Talk to me about how you've seen this evolve over the last year or so. When we talk about who's being involved in these projects, what does that look like? Natan: Yeah, so I think this is sort of the warm up act to our last topic. How do we focus frontline human centric technology on people? People don't exist in some void, you know, they kind of live in organizations. So if you think we can cover the themes of, you know, we talked about the architecture, we talked about the new stack and AI and all that, and all of that technology adoption. It happens in the context of some organization trying to change how it works. And people often talk to us and say, Oh, you're actually democratizing X, Y, Z for us. Sometimes it's democratizing the access to technology on shop floors. Sometimes it's democratizing access to data, like we just discussed. Sometimes it's democratizing how you impact, you know, with augmented lean on our minds, like reemergence of production systems. So to me, There's like a wave of democratization that actually happened in knowledge driven organization the past, you know, 20, 30 years that is now at full swing in manufacturing organization and manufacturing that have all those areas where people don't necessarily have a desk, whether it's the lab, the machine shop, the assembly floor, the warehouse, the logistics center, RMA, MRO, like all those things. And that is pretty exciting to see. It is very, very hard. It is very, very hard for organizations to do it. Erik: So it's easy to talk about the benefits of democratization, enabling citizen development and giving power to the people who are closest to the problem, giving them tools to solve problems and create value, right? I don't think anybody disputes the fundamental value proposition associated with that. I think one thing that I do hear a lot still, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on it, is there's a lot of times a lot of fear around this. And generally, if I were to represent sort of archetypes here, you talk to your operations folks, they're like, Oh, Get everything else out of my way, darn it. Give me the tools that I need. I know the problems. I know how to solve the problems. Get out of my way. You talk to IT and a lot of times you hear, those guys have no idea what they're asking for. They're going to create a total mess. They're not going to get themselves out of it. A lot of cost. Super complex. Integrated with our infrastructure. They want to do transactions with SAP. Are you kidding me? We're going to fail. We're gonna fail. The sky is gonna fall, we're all gonna get fired. But I mean, the Natan: reality is there's merit in both positions. Totally. And you know, this kind of described well the IT, OT, canonical conundrum. And you know, we spent a lot of time with the mitigating folks. They could be, you know, You see the quality people would say well, decide, figure it out, because we have to. Or we spend time with the COO who is like, I don't care. We need five more factories, like, go. Or the COO is like, we are gonna change the culture of this company. And by the way, operations, you're part of it, so everybody fall in line. And at the end of the day, you know. Back to this thing we talked about, it's like the changing how people work. Honestly, to me, it sounds like a very simple type of insight, but sometimes those are profound, you know, and it's like, what is the most sustainable, so long term impact on a company that you can affect this? Like it doesn't, you can hire the best consultant and like do a million offsites and you can do, but at the end of the day, like then all of this is done. Consultants went home and left the deck and offsite, like, who knows? Trust falls are all over. Trust falls, done, done, and done. Then you get back to work, and then who is actually making change happen day in, day out? It's the people doing the work. You let them choose the tools. Because the stuff you were talking about is the issues around governance, around how do we control this thing, we're afraid of like people going rogue and whatever, all fine. But if you trust the people, and if you build the right set of belts, suspensions, and tools, and those people will be able At least involved and sometimes directly impacting what tools they choose to work, then they will continue to work and then there's like this like force feedback of like, hey, we're changing, we decide on the change, we're committed to change, we own the change, we are the change. And then the organization learns how to do that again. So that's my view. We started seeing organizations like that. Sometimes it's super fast. Sometimes it takes Erik: years. Well, and I would say the, the folks who bring home the world championship, let me put it that way, right? The folks who are knocking it out of the park. Like the Celtics. Like the Celtics. But the folks who do this well, it's not ops running alone without IT. It's not IT running alone without ops. It has to be a team of superstars working together. Everybody know in their role and everybody committed to, The collective success as opposed to just saying, no, no, no, no, I'm going to minimize risk. I'm an IT person. Your phones don't ring at two o'clock in the morning. If something goes wrong, my do, right? And if you're in operations, understanding that, look, those concerns, they're real sometimes. And we need to work collaboratively to understand, how do we define our left lane and our right lane? Where do I need to bring in somebody else? And where do I need to, where can I just go ahead and run? And, uh, as far as digital transformation goes, That's how you get to the world championship. Natan: So that brings us to the champions or the people who actually do this. Yes. And you spend a lot of time with them. Let's talk about them because this has been an amazing year for what we called for a very long time and I think it's still calling this like process engineers of the future. Yeah. You know, the ground breakers, the people who are like changing, not only themselves, but how work is getting done by self training, educating. What are you seeing? Like, what is important for those people? Erik: Well, I think the first thing is more and more, these sort of digital native capabilities, the ability to. Yeah. Solve problems based on data, the ability to create and handle complex applications. These are sort of becoming table stakes, technical capabilities for those that have entered the workforce in the last, you know, five, 10 years. And I would say that that as a trend is increasing, not decreasing. Right. And I think this also converges with another trend, which is the accessibility of these tools. The barrier to entry is also going lower and lower every year. So these things are converging. And I think what. What you see here is this new world of possibilities that's being made available. And pardon, but I'll just go back to a conversation I had with a customer, but you know, she had just entered the workforce within the last couple of years. She was at one of our bigger customers and she found Tulip. I never knew who she was. She was not part of any central governance thing like that, but she just had a problem and she said, how am I going to solve this problem? And this is a complex data problem. She said, what tools exist? Her company had moved forward with Tulip. So she had access to it and she just said, Oh, no, I didn't think much of it, but this is it. An appropriate tool to solve the problem that I have. I need to build out a set of applications, capture this data. I need to control these parameters in the process. And she actually ended up winning an award because she did a fantastic job, but she's like kind of flabbergasted. She's like, I don't understand why I'm winning an award. I don't understand how else you would. Think about solving these problems, you know, and I think that's like, in my mind at least, sort of represents the moment in time that we're in, where there's this transition for this being new, shiny, scary, requires a big initiative to like, this is just how work gets done, you know, Natan: yeah, you know, Joachim Hensch, who was here on the show, he used to run production for Hugo Boss, For many, many years. He has this amazing story. He was a tailor becoming an operations leader. So he knew the craft. So he lived the reality of the people who are doing the work at scale, which I think is, first of all, it's beautiful and so important because a lot of time there's like this talk track around like, Oh, rescaling, upscaling, which is very true. It's a very real problem. We're missing two or 3 million people. And every day people are like, Hey, where can we get more people who come help us do this? Which, uh, yeah, if you're interested, let us know there. We'll put a link in the comments, but he was talking about actually something that what they're saying is very, very profound. That is like the use of technology is a motivator to perform. And sometimes this comes from the leadership, not necessarily from the workforce, because who talks to the workforce? So you're like, well, it's going to be big brother. Is this going to follow us? Uh, this is too complex. I don't need this, blah, blah, blah. But I mean, I've seen enough anecdotally myself to see that when people get into it and like, you actually tell them, Hey, this is for you. Is this working? Do you care? Hey, what's your feedback? Let's do an iteration, a sprint. And suddenly let's scrum around this. And it's not scrum like why we suck delivering lot, you know, 1517 4 by 22 seconds above talk time. It's like in the true lean sense. Then they get into the technology part and it's like actually motivating them to perform. Yeah. And then the leadership becomes kind of unblind to that and to the data that comes along and they're like This is a better state to like push the people and then they go and they click on ideas, systems and say, and that was like really interesting. Like I heard some folks who are starting to measure the quality of their production system among other metrics and like how many pocayokes and things like that and proposals they get per week. It's kind of classic, but usually it's been like put in a box and like the lean person, OPEX person takes it and and they know about this and there it stays Yeah. But then you see people like, you know, and this is, this has been on on LinkedIn for a while, but like all the tulip pers in Hermo. Yeah. From Stanley Black. Shout out to our tulip pers shout out to all the tulip pers out there. That is the culture change I was talking about when we were like at the stratospheric level of this conversation. Erik: Yeah. You know, when we talk about. So, this is a motivating performance. There's kind of two aspects to this one, I think, but of the hundreds of customers that I've talked to across Europe and North America in the last four or five months, I don't think I've talked to one that isn't worried about their ability to attract and retain high quality workers into their operation. Folks who come in, have buy in, do all these things. So I think one, Technology has a really important role to play here because it can be a differentiator. If your competitor is adopting these new and advanced capabilities and you're not, that's a real point of differentiation. But more importantly than that, these capabilities give you the ability to incorporate these people to get buy in and to get, not just buy in in some sort of superficial sense, but to have sort of collaborative problem solving. So we are saying, look, if You're on the front line, you're doing this work every day, we're trying to make improvements here, you know, don't just write your idea and put it in a suggestion box and we'll review it at the end of the week, but like, no, no, no, I want your perspective, collaborate with me, and you get a more engaged workforce as a result of this, and I think technology is a vehicle to accomplish this, and when we talk about real from an employer perspective, it's that more engaged workforce using technology as one of the vehicles to do this. Natan: So I have a great story that sits on this to close this part. So I heard this from a manufacturing engineer. Because you're coming in and you're asking questions like so. How's it going with Tulip? Or like, what are you building and what is it doing for you? And from time to time you get like a pretty interesting perspective and that's what I'm going to share. It was like Tulip has been reducing the time they need to translate their requirement into a tool that solves the problem they're working on. Because previously they had to scratch and claw. For stuff, but after the scratching and clawing, or like some mandate was given, then you go to IT. Then you need to explain it to IT. IT might need to explain it to a vendor. The vendor might come back and say, well, I need to do a conversation with the They'll deliver it wrong three times. Yeah, so then But the fourth time. So, and like, by the time it's delivered, it's not relevant, and all that kind of story. But really, like, the word that Stuck with me is like the reduction of the translation times because they go directly from their context of the problem to here's a tool and they don't always get it right and it doesn't, it's not perfect and it might not look as, uh, polished, but it's better than a spreadsheet and they solve the problem and they own it. Erik: And your iteration cycles go from six months to an afternoon. So who cares if you got it wrong? You spent an hour figuring it out. And you fix it. And you fix it. Yeah. And you've got your solution in two days Natan: instead of one day. Yeah. So that to me is like, not some distant future, not some utopia. It's like here and now. And you can call that industry 4. 0 if you want. Erik: You can call it industry 5. 0. Call it industry X, call it whatever you want. But the fact of the matter is like, the technology that is being made available is no longer Just a bunch of siloed capabilities that don't work together. You can stitch them together and it's easier and easier to do this. This capability is being met with an increasingly capable workforce that is hungry for and expectant of solutions like this, that is very well accustomed to solving complex data problems in the context of a complex system, which is frontline operations in almost all contexts. And I think. This is a very, very exciting time to be in the industry. Absolutely. Natan: So what's next for Augmented Ops? We'll be taking a summer break starting in July, and we'll be back with new episodes again in September. In the meantime, be sure to follow our LinkedIn page for more content over the summer. Erik: You can also head over to tulip. co backslash podcast to sign up for our monthly newsletter. You'll get sneak peeks of what we've got in store for next season, and you'll be the first to know when the new season kicks off. Natan: Thank you again to everyone who tuned in to Augmented Ops this season. We'll be back before you know it. Voiceover: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Augmented Ops podcast from Tulip Interfaces. We hope you found this week's episode informative and inspiring. You can find the show on LinkedIn and YouTube or at tulip. co podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time.