15 Leaders Transforming Manufacturing Have to Say

In SME’s SMART Manufacturing magazine published in April 2021, the SME team interviews several leaders at the forefront of the transformation of the manufacturing sector. Below are a few highlights. These industry leaders show us that despite being challenging, this transformation can also be exhilarating.

Anthony Oteka
VP, Stanley Production System & Industry 4.0 Strategy & Planning—Industrial Platform and Global Operations, Stanley Black & Decker
“We have adopted several automation and robotics technologies in our machining, injection molding, assembly, inspection and packaging operations across our global manufacturing footprint,” he said. The company also has implemented Industry 4.0 solutions associated with connectivity, real-time production-performance monitoring, data analytics, simulation, and additive manufacturing. “These technologies help drive manufacturing excellence, meet and exceed both internal and external customers’ expectations and drive process standardization”

Kolleen Schneider
Director, Supply Chain, Andersen
“When I think about the future of smart manufacturing, I see an acceleration of the current path,” she said. “Integrated and connected manufacturing will extend to remote monitoring and predictive diagnostics across material supply, part quality, and end-to-end optimization.”

Sarah Lukens
Data Scientist, GE Digital
“Decades of knowledge and experience are sitting unused in unstructured text,” she said. “But due to the technical nature of such text, out-of-the-box tools from natural language processing don’t often cut it for extracting business value.”

Luca Verre
Co-Founder & CEO, Prophesee
“Great strides have been made in making AI and machine learning more accessible, and we envision more machines and processes that can perform better by using characteristics of the human brain and eye to improve safety and productivity in manufacturing,” he said.

Moneer Helu
Supervisory Mechanical Engineer; Group Leader, Life Cycle Engineering; Program Manager, Model-Based Enterprise, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
“Through demonstration test cases and best-practice and guidance documents based on our experience, we hope to provide a blueprint for manufacturers to develop their own appropriate smart manufacturing solutions,”

Andy Henderson
Chief Technology Officer, Praemo
“I concluded that technologies associated with the general field of AI were going to dramatically improve manufacturing’s ability to utilize data, but those technologies had not been developed into a product that was usable by the average manufacturer,” he said. “So, I was connected with some like-minded individuals and we set about building it.”

Edward T. Hightower
Managing Director, Motoring Ventures
“Local manufacturing of motor vehicles and automotive components will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and grow local jobs and skills,” he said. “This is essential as the population of the African continent is forecast to double over the next 30 years, and Africa will soon have the largest workforce in the world.”

Sudhanshu Gaur
VP, R&D, Hitachi America; Chief Architect for Smart Manufacturing, Hitachi Astemo
“I’m proud of the work we are doing in automation to augment workers, utilizing key pieces of emerging technology, such as AI/machine learning, 5G, robotics, and time-sensitive networking,” he said. “Besides that, we have had great success with providing solutions to improve shop-floor operations using camera/LiDAR analytics and vibration/ultrasonic analysis for equipment monitoring.”

Gabe P. Glynn
CEO, MakuSafe
“Men and women across the planet go to work every day in complex environments,” Glynn said. “The more we can understand about those environments, the more we can improve the outcomes for workers.”

Rob Bodor
CEO, Protolabs
“Smart manufacturing isn’t possible without the smart people making it happen,” he said. “When you work in digital manufacturing, change is constant. It has to be in order to support the on-demand culture we live in. So, I continue to be amazed at how well our employees adapt and thrive on change.”

Prasad Akella
Founder & CEO, Drishti
“Better data drives better decisions, and Drishti’s data helps line supervisors, industrial engineers, plant managers and line associates digitally transform the plant floor and extend the value of human workers.”

Juan Aparico
Head of Advanced Manufacturing Automation, Siemens Technology
“Just enough human-like dexterity so that robots can tackle tedious, dangerous and error-prone tasks, unlocking the human potential for tasks where ingenuity is needed,” he said. “And making robotic applications so easy to operate and interoperate that there is no barrier to entry for advanced robotics applications.”

Alexandre D. Georgetti
Director, Eaton Vehicle Group Manufacturing Strategy, Eaton
“Eaton Vehicle Group chose the smart manufacturing journey because we really believe all of the 10 solutions working in an integrated approach can help us to achieve our ultimate goal: to improve operational performance in productivity, flexibility, quality and speed to market,” he said. “By achieving it, we will be addressing the needs of all of our stakeholders, from our employees to our customers.”

Ira Moskowitz
CEO, Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute
“In many cases, the knowledge that we gain by manufacturing the products leads us to develop the next generation of innovations—because we learn so much about the products by making them ourselves,” he said. “Maintaining a strong, smart manufacturing base domestically is important to our nation’s economy, its competitiveness, and its security.”

Marcello Damiani
Chief Digital & Operational Excellence Officer, Moderna
“I think today we’re  at a fortuitous time where the advances in life sciences technologies like proteomics, genomics, and next-generation sequencing, are fueled by the revolution in IT,”