Manufacturing Matters Podcast

Episode 156 - Dean Elkins, Segment Leader, Consumer Products, Mission Design & Automation

13 views · 4h ago · 37:22

Guest: Dean Elkins

Walk the floor at Pack Expo and you’ll see fillers, conveyors, robots, and palletizers, each impressive on its own. But a collection of standalone machines doesn’t make a production line. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, recorded on the show floor at Pack Expo International 2026 in Chicago, Aaron Hand talks with Dean Elkins, consumer products segment leader at Mission Design & Automation, about what it takes to connect the dots.

Episode 155 - Dr. Jae Son, Dr. Charles MacLeod, and Stu Shepherd

4K views · 2w ago · 34:13

Guest: Dr. Son

In this episode of “Manufacturing Matters,” TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin sits down with Dr. Son, PPS’s Dr. Charles MacLeod, and longtime robotics industry leader Stu Shepherd (Shepherd Solutions) to unpack why tactile sensing is finally getting its due — driven by humanoids and robots working in unstructured environments where fixed, pre-programmed grasps no longer cut it.

Episode 154 - Lindsey Sullivan, Founder, Technical Marketing Manager, CCS America

4.5K views · 3w ago · 33:20

Machine vision teams will happily argue for hours about cameras, sensors, and AI models. Then they choose the light last — and wonder why the system can’t see the defect it was built to find. Lindsey Sullivan has a demo that ends the argument. At CCS America’s hands-on lighting roundtables, she hands engineers a battery with a small dent in it.

Episode 153 - Kyle Haworth, Founder, GuildHall

2.8K views · 4w ago · 45:10

Most discussions about industrial automation and analytics concern operations with hundreds of employees. This episode of Manufacturing Matters explores a less traveled quarter: Small shops with maybe a dozen people on the floor, a founder who has run the place for decades, and a spring sales bump nobody has ever been able to explain.

Episode 152 - Gerry Vannuffelen, CEO & Founder, Mantis Robotics

2.9K views · 1mo ago · 23:19

“You can have a high speed industrial robot, any type of robot really. And it doesn’t need fences, it doesn’t need safety devices. Everything is there. So it adjusts in real time to its environment.” A fence is usually the price of speed: put a high-speed industrial robot on a plant floor and you cage it off, or slow it down into a cobot and accept the productivity hit.

Episode 151 - Juan Aparicio of ReshapeX and Ajaiey Sharma of Novanta (ATI Industrial Automation)

32K views · 1mo ago · 43:37

“It’s really a needle in a mountain of needles and you just want to find one.” For most manufacturers, the hard part of AI isn’t the model — it’s the knowledge locked in the heads of veteran engineers.

Episode 150 - Dale Hopkinson, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Services, Thales

399 views · 2mo ago · 40:58

“The value is moving from the metal to the code.” As manufacturers add AI and software to their products, the old one-time hardware sale is running out of runway when it comes to improving AI models for manufacturing. For Thales’s Dale Hopkinson, the real opportunity — and the real risk — sits in how that software and AI actually get monetized: not as a bolted-on price tag, but as a flexible, recurring business built to change as fast as the technology does.

Episode 149 - Ed Garstkiewicz, Senior Business Development Manager, Emerging Markets, HARTING

110 views · 2mo ago · 32:04

Guest: Ed Garstkiewicz

“The more we can do with it, then the more likely the humanoids are going to take off and be adopted.” Connectors rarely get top billing. Nobody designs a device around a connector — yet these humble components increasingly determine whether a smart factory, an edge deployment, or a humanoid robot works.

Episode 148 - Andre Marino, Senior Vice President, Industrial Automation, NAM, Schneider Electric

5.1K views · 3mo ago · 33:01

"AI needs data, and industrial data is not available on the general internet." “It's not like you do either AI or manufacturing. If you're smart, you optimize what you have. You would be amazed how much you can gain by just retrofitting your old asset.”

Episode 147 - Dr. Ray Hoare, Founder Concurrent EDA

107 views · 3mo ago · 41:52

Guest: Dr. Hoare

“What we bring to the table is we understand how to take the data, do real-time compute, and turn it into knowledge. So, you got raw data coming in, you got knowledge coming out.” Modern machine vision and imaging systems can throw off a firehose of data far faster than a general-purpose computer can absorb it.

Episode 146 - Sheldon Zimmerman & Isabelle Durso, Rockwell Automation

172 views · 3mo ago · 29:39

Guest: Rockwell Automation’s Sheldon Zimmerman

“The end goal for a lot of clients is this dream of a lights-out factory. Before you get there, there’s a stepping stone in between — and it’s this connected factory.” Autonomous mobile robots spent years confined to warehouse aisles.

Episode 145 - Denise Chludzinski from Miller Resource Group

116 views · 4mo ago · 35:34

Guest: Denise Chludzinski

This episode of Manufacturing Matters features Winn Hardin in conversation with Denise Chludzinski, vice president of business development at Miller Resource Group, a leading recruiter specializing in food and industrial automation manufacturing sectors. They discuss current talent trends, labor market challenges, and growth opportunities in manufacturing for 2026.

Episode 144 - Charlie Andersen and Shelby Allen from Burro

34K views · 4mo ago · 42:33

"Every Burro turns on with 12 eyes ... and if one robot makes a mistake in a train depot yard in Australia, or an airport in South America, or doing vegetation management alongside a road in Pennsylvania, the entire fleet learns from that lesson.”

Episode 143 - Eric Utley, Applications Engineering Manager at Protolabs

17K views · 4mo ago · 32:57

"Computational design and 3D printing go together like peanut butter and chocolate." For most of its history, 3D printing was considered speculative, risky, even fringe. Today, says Eric Utley, 3D printing applications engineering manager at Protolabs, it's boring, and that's exactly the point.

LIVE WEBINAR on GEO

77 views · 4mo ago · 56:34

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