In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Smart Industry's Scott Achelpohl spoke with Matt Wise, CEO of E Tech Group, one of the largest engineering and system integration firms in the U.S. 

E Tech Group specializes in industrial automation, control systems, and IT and OT solutions and is certified by the Control System Integrators Association.  

See also: Why manufacturers are rethinking system integration 

The conversation highlighted a recent article that Matt Wise wrote for Smart Industry, in which he argued that manufacturers are moving beyond project-by-project system integrator work using vendors and toward ongoing relationships with strategic partners that preserve knowledge, improve consistency, and support long-term modernization across facilities.  

In September, Matt also wrote about AI and why manufacturers are in need of long-term, OT strategic plans to turn today's AI opportunities into tomorrow's scalable applications. 

Below is a partial transcript of this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast:   

Scott Achelpohl: In your story, you emphasize continuity of knowledge as a key benefit to repeated engagements with a partner system integrator. Why is institutional knowledge so important for a system integrator specifically, and why else is that continuity so important?  

Matt Wise: If you think about your traditional manufacturing floor, there are thousands of pieces of equipment there, and each of them probably has code that is connected to earlier ones. Just as an example, if you have bottles going down an assembly line and a bottle falls off that line, what's supposed to occur? How does all that machinery and all those elements connect back to one another? 

That legacy of knowledge of having the same people in the facility gathering information about that facility is key because you may not know that machine number 53 is on line seven is counting on information from five steps earlier in the process.  

See also:  The missing link between AI strategy and operational reality 

Institutional knowledge would know that, and historically that was stored in the head of your automation engineer at the plant level. The difficulty is the plant has become more and more complicated, and having all of that knowledge in one person's head is difficult. So that's why you have a partner who can catalog it for you and keep an eye on it.  

The second challenge fo a lot of our plants is, as the systems have become more complicated, those plant managers are, one, challenged to understand all the technology, and two, some of them are just aging out. They have been there for decades and they're retiring, and there isn't a good flow backfill for them.

If you have a good partner who can continue that knowledge on, then your downtime is very short. Something goes wrong in my example before at that last machine, you know it's connected to an earlier machine. Whereas if you don't have a continuous partner, when a problem occurs, you're down for a while everybody runs around troubleshooting where that problem came from. So the continuity of a good strategic partner at the SI level is essential. 

See also: AI has a trust—not a technology—problem 

SA: Speaking of continuity, we have to mention that system integration successes can be transported from one plant to the next within an organization with the correct SI partner. You said manufacturers don't have to repeat the same four mistakes in your piece another plant has already made. Tell the audience more about how an SI partner moving beyond a project-by-project system helps organizations with multiple facilities to operate.   

MW: Great question, Scott. I mean, I just gave you an example in one facility, but that can happen all over. Again, well, I'll use a client example. We have a client who has about 30 manufacturing facilities. They have similar processes that need to be executed in each one of these facilities. Historically, the way they managed all 30 of those facilities is an individual plant manager would make decisions at their plant level. 

And I'll go to the palletizer, for instance. Plant A, plant number one, used a palletizer. Plant number two used a different palletizer. Over time, that manufacturer realized that's inefficient making all these other decisions,they're going to standardize that palletizer. So great, they get economies of scale, they buy one palletizer, they put it in. Well then, as that palletizer gets optimized in plant one, if they don't have a partner stretching over different plants, that information rarely gets shared. Why? Because generally what we see is these companies have isolated silos of information at each manufacturing facility.  

See also: Smart Industry's annual State of Initiative Survey is open!

If you have a partner who has integrated this device and then we have found a better solution, it's relatively easy for us to go then to all the other facilities they have and make that same upgrade. So what ends up happening is the overall company does better, but plant number two and plant number three are reaping the benefits of those enhancements made by the other plants.  

It's a hugely powerful level or lever for good manufacturers to use. And that comes back to this whole using a system integrator as a strategic partner, using them as part of your operating plan. It helps an individual plant, It also helps the whole network of plants work optimally.