What It Takes to Build a Business with Your Name on the Door with Rob Caron

On this episode of Manufacturing Mavericks, Greg McHale interviews Rob Caron of Caron Engineering, a true pioneer and the recipient of the 2024 M. Eugene Merchant Manufacturing Medal from ASME/SME. Rob shares his journey from unexpectedly finding himself jobless to building a company known for its groundbreaking innovations in advanced sensor and monitoring technology. Hear about how his early fascination with CNC controls and a deep desire to do things better led to the creation of Autocomp, TMAC, and even the tool ID systems that have made Caron Engineering a leader in the machine tool industry for over 35 years.

Rob also shares his thoughts on building a strong company culture, meeting customer expectations no matter what, and the transition to an ESOP or employee stock-owned company.

Tune in for a wealth of insights from a leader who has been on the cutting edge of manufacturing technology for over four decades. This episode is packed with inspiration and practical tips. Rob’s advice for shops looking to get into automation is priceless.

SHOW NOTES:

• Rob talks about his early fascination with how CNC controls communicated with the metal parts of the machine to make a part and how it could be done better. (3:00) 
• How chains on the door of his employer drove Rob to start his own company (6:37)
• The genesis of the cutting-edge Caron Engineering tools of today (AutoComp & TMAC) back in the mid-1980s (9:23)
• His #1 message to employees: we're going to get this job done for the customer the way we promised it. (13:38)
• How losing money on some jobs helped Caron make more money down the road (15:54)
• Leveraging great relationships with customers to get feedback on employee performance. (17:31)
• The pros and cons of transitioning to an ESOP company (18:54)
• Rob’s insights into how shops can start incorporating automation into their business in a way that makes sense (24:15)
• The payoff of hiring engineers to work on in-house automation projects (32:35)
• The advice Rob would give to the young Rob Caron three weeks before he walked up to the door with chains on it. (34:37)

Creators & Guests

Host

Greg McHale

Greg founded Datanomix, a company delivering game-changing production insights and intelligence to manufacturers of discrete components. Datanomix was founded on the premise that the 4th industrial revolution would require turnkey products that integrate seamlessly with how manufacturers work today—not clunky workflows that depend on human input or complex data extraction. He brings enterprise data skills to a market ripe for innovation. Greg has held engineering leadership positions at several venture-backed companies and is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Guest

Rob Caron

Founder, Caron Engineering

What is Manufacturing Mavericks?

Manufacturing Mavericks aren’t afraid to shake things up and stand out from the crowd. They are embracing the best tools and technology to showcase world-class American manufacturing and grow their business.

Join Greg McHale, founder of Datanomix, as he sits down with these exceptional people to hear their stories and explore the important lessons they learned along the way. Listeners can gain valuable insights they can use in their own facilities to improve their bottom line.

Greg: Welcome to this episode of Manufacturing Mavericks. I’m your host, Greg McHale. As the founder of Datanomix, I’ve had the privilege of visiting hundreds of shops all across the country and in those visits, I have met some of the most incredible and innovative people in this industry. Our goal with the Manufacturing Mavericks podcast is to highlight those leaders, those mavericks of manufacturing who are innovating not just with technology but with culture, people, and process too, so we can all learn not just what they do but why they do it. We’ll dig into what got them into manufacturing, what fires them up to go to work every single day and pour their blood, sweat, and tears into keeping the manufacturing dream alive in our country. With that, I’m honored to introduce today’s Manufacturing Maverick, Rob Caron with Caron Engineering. Welcome to the show, Rob. How are you doing today?

Rob: Thank you, Greg. I’m doing great.

Greg: It’s an honor to have you, Rob. I think you have an incredible story. You’ve been in the manufacturing space for quite some time, you’ve pioneered many technologies that have helped countless manufacturers improve their production processes, and so I am very excited to learn from you, and hear all about Rob Caron and the Caron Engineering story. So really, really appreciate having you on here today.

Rob: Well, thank you. It’s great to be on your show, and I’m happy to tell the story.

Greg: Great, let’s jump right into it, Rob. I think I first met you at a trade show in approximately 2018, and I remember walking up to your booth and you had these great interactive setups of some sensors that were there on display, and showing what you could chart and what you could correct with it. And then you brought me over to a machine and showed me TMAC dynamically controlling the feed rate of the machine to make better cuts. And I said, “Man, there’s just a lot of insight and perspective behind the company that I’m seeing here today,” several years ago when we first met. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning, Rob. How did you get into manufacturing? When and how did the manufacturing torch get lit for you?

Rob: Well, I actually started at private aircraft in East Hartford Connecticut a long, long time ago, right after school. That was, kind of like, my first foray into seeing what manufacturing was about. From there, I took a job with a machine tool company that sold CNC machines, and kind of doing a service engineer job. But while I was there, I started kind of doing more of the engineering role, looking at the machines and the controls and trying to decide how things could be done better.

Greg: And what was it that you saw, looking at the machines and the controls, that made you start thinking about that?

Rob: I was just fascinated by CNC controls in general, and how they worked, how they communicate to the metal part of the machine, and servo systems, and PLCs, and all the things that go along with the integral part of a CNC machine was just, you know, real exciting, and looked like fun things to understand more. So, I started to kind of dive into it on my own, and really understand sort of the exact workings of the inside of the CNC control, not just how you program a machine to cut apart, but really what happened behind the scenes, from the CNC program to the tool changer to all the functions that go on in a CNC machine, it was just really cool and fascinating stuff. So, I started to spend a lot of time on my own, really learning all those pieces. And as I did, I started getting more ideas of how can we make these things better? Some of the technologies like AutoComp, where we automatically feed back data to the control, I started doing that in the mid-’80s—

Greg: Wow.

Rob: —just to show the technology. It was a lot harder back then, but I found ways to do it. And that was probably the first thing I actually did from that aspect. And then kind of motivated me to say there’s other areas that must be able to be improved on, so I kept going from there.

Greg: And now, Rob, did you go to school for manufacturing? Did you grow up around manufacturing? Like, what got you to that level of curiosity?

Rob: No, I actually went to school. I went to a technical high school, and then college for electrical engineering, and just kind of—Pratt & Whitney was a job offer that came up, and I happened to go in there. I didn’t really know anything specifically about manufacturing. But when I was in high school, it was a technical high school, and we were exposed to the machine trade, the tool and diemaker trade, so we were exposed to all that throughout our high school. So, at least understood what it was all about. It wasn’t like something that I said, “Oh, manufacturing is definitely one I’m going to get into,” but once I started in the arena, then I got incredibly interested in it.

Greg: So, you start looking at these machines. I’m guessing now that I know electrical engineer, the first thing you did was pull the schematics on all the controls—

Rob: Exactly.

Greg: That you were looking at. And how did you decide what the gaps were? Like, was it customer motivated? Was it hands-on problem motivated? Did you see it in the design and other workings of the controller? How did you get there?

Rob: Back in the ’80s, there was a lot of NC controls—not even CNC—that were on the market, and the whole concept of retrofitting and putting newer controls on machines was around. And so, I got really interested in that, started really learning how that all came together. So, I started doing some of that work for the company I was working at, and started actually adding controls to older CNC machines, replacing the motors and drives in the CNC control. And so, that ended up basically creating an incredible knowledge behind the scenes of everything about the CNC control. As that kind of move forward, I started going into shops and looking at customers’ processes and kind of how they were doing things, and I started getting these ideas of, boy, this is something that the operators making a mistake all the time. There’s got to be a better way to do this. What can I design to improve this process? And that’s when I started coming up with things like the AutoComp, the TMAC, even the tool ID systems that we have now, all started way back in the ’80s.

Greg: And so, when did you decide, I’m going to go off on my own, and I’m going to make this happen? Did you do a project first, and then you’ll get confidence from that? Or did you just know, and you jumped and said there’s a big problem here?

Rob: No, it was actually even simpler than that. I had started doing some of this work for the company I was working for at the time, and I went home Thanksgiving weekend. When I came back Monday morning, there was a sign on the building, “Closed by Bank,” and the chains across the door. So—

Greg: [laugh]. No way.

Rob: I didn’t have a job, at least at that point [laugh]. So, I had already been doing this type of work. I had plenty of contacts in the industry. In that first week, I basically called a lot of the people I knew, asked them if they would continue doing business with me if I started my own company. And I had already developed a reputation that I got things done, and I did create the technologies that I said I would, so I got some pretty good-sized companies to sign up.

One of them was GTE [unintelligible 00:07:36] at the time. They had a gauging division. I was designing all of their gauging interfaces to feed back to controls. But I got an initial contract with them. That kind of was a seed money to start the company, and I developed quite a bit of technology immediately in those first few months when I started the company. And it just kind of was a stepping stone to continue on from there.

Greg: Man, a couple things to dig into there. So, did you have any idea you were going to show up to a building with chains on the door [laugh] that Monday?

Rob: Not—I had no idea. There was no indication on Wednesday, when we left for Thanksgiving vacat—weekend that there was anything wrong with the company.

Greg: Wow. What was the backstory?

Rob: Apparently, the bank had decided to close on a line of credit. So, they had a fairly large line of credit. They were trying to build a new type of machine. Apparently the bank said they want—you know, it was in the millions, and they said, “We want that money back now.” And so, it basically shut the company down.

Greg: Wow.

Rob: There was just—I don’t think the company even had an indication that it was happening. They thought they were going to be able to continue to keep this line of credit going. That’s basically the backstory that we heard after.

Greg: So, you had the unfortunate but convenient on-ramp into, you know what? It’s time to be an entrepreneur.

Rob: Right.

Greg: You didn’t have to sit there and think about it for months on end and agonize, you know, do I want my paycheck? Do I want to do this?

Rob: Right. Exactly [laugh].

Greg: You were just there [laugh].

Rob: And, you know, I had been thinking about it before, but just not that serious about it. I just thought someday—one of these things—someday I might want to do that. But when this, sort of, catastrophic event happened, I said, “I think someday is right now.” So, I talked to my family, and said, “This is what I’m thinking about doing. It may be tough for a little while, but I think we can make it.” Moved forward and started the company.

Greg: That is so awesome, Rob. And you did it the best possible way, which is that you solve real problems for real money very early on.

Rob: Yeah, I had no marketing at all. So, it was literally just go in and say, “I can do this,” to a customer. I went in right away and did it, and moved on to the next thing that we were working on. It was a pretty straightforward process.

Greg: And what was the evolution of your products? Was AutoComp the first thing? Was TMAC the first thing?

Rob: No, AutoComp was actually the very first thing, started with that. I had actually started on the tool ID as well. The customer base for that was much smaller. In other words, not a lot of people back in the mid to late-’80s really understood the concept of presetting tools in RFID. But the TMAC started right at the end of the ’80s, started developing that right after that.

But AutoComp, and it was really the sort of the first product that kind of took off. It was what I really kind of started the company with. Also, I didn’t mention, but I started in the business doing technology with touch probe software. So originally, I went to Japan in 1981 and was exposed to the macro programming language and Fanuc control. I came back with that, kind of, little training on it, and started reading, and I started developing the first touch probe software that I ever did. And nobody was doing it at the time.

So, I developed touch probe software. So, that was another product that, when my company started, did quite a bit of that. We still do that today, by the way. It’s just with Datanomix and other companies, it’s not as talked about, but our local customer base, especially in New England, buys a lot of touch probes and laser tool setting from us.

Greg: That’s awesome. And just out of curiosity, how do you feed back offset data to a machine in the mid-’80s?

Rob: So, I had to rewrite the PLC to be able to strobe data a bit at a time, and then build up a number inside the PLC, and then strobe it again into the tool offsets. So, there was a lot of strobing and ladder logic that had to be written to. So, there was no serial communications, there was no Ethernet—

Greg: Right. Right.

Rob: —there was literally—I developed microprocessors that would take serial data in from a gauge device and then convert that into digital bits and strobe the bits in through a PLC ladder than I would write, and then I would reassemble it in the PLC, and then actually update the tool offset in the PLC.

Greg: That’s incredible. That is a million times harder than anything anyone would approach today.

Rob: It was a lot more work than it is today.

Greg: [laugh].

Rob: [laugh]. I will say that. But I was persistent.

Greg: Yeah. Well, now I understand, too, where the confidence in the expertise comes to then go into something like TMAC, which I think is just such a fascinating product. So, you mentioned TMAC comes about in the late-’80s. What was the inspiration for that?

Rob: Same thing, sort of. I was in a shop where [laugh] we’re putting AutoComp on a machine, and a maybe a touch probe, and the guy broke three tools while we were there. And I said, “Why are you breaking these tools?” And he said, “Well, they start wearing down and then they just snap off.” Just from, kind of, general concept and knowledge of electrical motors and whatnot, I said, “It seems like the power should get higher when these tools are breaking or before they break.”

And I started doing some testing. At the time we were buying sensors, power sensors, off the shelf. Eventually, like today we make our own because the off the shelf ones just aren’t as capable, but back then, you know, I made do with what was available in the market, and just it was more about software and integration to the control.

Greg: And so, first TMACs come about in the late-’80s. Are you still the only employee at that time, or have you added additional folks to the company?

Rob: I actually had an employee right from day one. I had a guy that worked at the other company. He worked for me but didn’t really ever fit anywhere, so I kind of brought him on more as a helping me write manuals for the things I was developing, just general kind of office stuff at the time. So, I did have an employee, right basically day one. And then I had a couple employees that came on after that.

But I was doing all the original TMAC software and development at that time. Did hire one or two guys that were doing some PLC work for the controls we were integrating to. And then probably, it was about ’91 or 2, I hired the first software person that started helping me with some of the software development.

Greg: So, early-’90s, you started building out a software team. And how many employees are you at today, Rob?

Rob: We are at 35 right now.

Greg: Awesome. I know that, having visited your facility many times and spent some time on the road with different folks from your company, I know that culture is a very important thing to you and to all the folks that work there. So, when you went from that two, three, four employees, scaling up to the number that you’re at now, what kinds of things did you do from a culture standpoint? What’s important to Caron Engineering?

Rob: I think one of the most important messages I tried to get to all the employees is, we’re going to get this job done for the customer the way we promised it. If it means we need to add extra hours that we’re not going to charge them for, then that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make sure that it’s right when—if that’s what we said we’re going to do. If it’s a case where the customer asked for things that were never intended from the beginning, that’s a different story, but if we promised them something, it’s going to happen, and we’re going to make sure it happens. And just, lets get the job done and give them what we told them we were going to give, and that’s important.

And then just from a service standpoint, if they’re having a problem, that’s the most—any customer that’s having any kind of an issue is the most important person that day. We can drop some development or whatever else needs to be pushed aside to make sure that the customer’s issue is resolved and that they’re happy.

Greg: And those sound like pretty much day-one principles, if you go back to the very first project you ever did. I mean, that sounds like how you built your reputation, right, and how you built the company.

Rob: Absolutely, yeah. That was my motto from day one, and that’s how I lived it. You know, there was many jobs we lost money on because things happen, it went over, problems that occurred that were not part of something we were doing, but they still occurred. But we’re done. The job came out right, and it worked, and it did what we said it would do.

And we always kept those customers for life because, you know, we certainly were open with them and said, “Listen, these things happen, but we fix them, we made to workaround, whatever it needed, and we’re not charging any more money for it.” So, you know, I think that was why we kept these customers for a long, long time.

Greg: And I bet in many of those cases, they come back and buy more, right? Buy more systems for—

Rob: Absolutely.

Greg: —additional machines because you earn that right.

Rob: Yep. I remember some big jobs where we lost a lot of money on the first one, and they come back to do a second one for say, a six machine sale, and they wanted to do another one, and they’d say, “Well, we expected a lot less—for less money now because you’ve already done it.” And my answer was, “Well, we lost this much on the first one, so if you want us to be around, we need to charge the same money again, and try to make up some of the loss.” And they would do it. They got it right away.

Greg: That’s such a great way to say it back to the customer say, “Hey, if you want me to be in business [laugh] going to be able to support you, I do have to do this little thing called make money.”

Rob: [laugh]. I have employees that want to get a paycheck every week, so I do need to make sure that happens.

Greg: [laugh]. If I sold them all at this price, I wouldn’t be here to sell you the next one.

Rob: Exactly.

Greg: How do you—as you bring people into the company, talking about it with them is one thing. How do you make sure they live it and breathe it every single day?

Rob: Well basically, the people that come on, anybody that starts here works with current employees. There’s nobody, really, I don’t think there’s a single job in the company that we can hire someone tomorrow, and then they’re completely on their own all of a sudden. There’s a lot of complexity to this business. And so, the people that come on, our newer employees work with the existing employees. And not just one of them, but typically several of them.

And so, the hope and the goal is that they translate what they know to the newer people—the culture, not just the knowledge that they need to know, but the culture as well—and then we’re constantly looking at them, working with them, making sure that it’s retained. We also talked to our customers. You know, your customers, oftentimes one of the most honest people on what your people, what your employees are like. So.

Greg: Sure.

Rob: Fortunately, we have a fantastic relationship with our customers, and I can call them up and say, “How was this guy this week? What did you think of our new service guy?” Even our sales guys, you know, we evaluate through our customers as much as anything.

Greg: That is a fantastic nugget that, especially where—again, you’ve built up the reputation, you’ve established great relationships with some significant customers, and you want the best possible evaluation of a new employee, who is a customer-facing employee, just ask the customer what their experience was like, right? We all get annoyed by the manager in the restaurant who comes to the table and says, “How was everything”—

Rob: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Greg: [laugh] you know, after it was all done, but you’re kind of trying to do the same thing, right?

Rob: No, you’re right. Absolutely. That’s exactly what they’re doing.

Greg: And I’ve almost never complained to that person, by the way [laugh] when they come by the table. I’m not sure what that says about me as a customer.

Rob: [laugh].

Greg: I know, as well, Rob, that you do some pretty significant, like, company outings with your team. I always see this, I think, this yearly post on LinkedIn of everyone in your company in a bathing suit on a lake with a beer in their hand, which looks like a fantastic time. Always a beautiful day. And then in addition to that, I think you also, in the last number of years, transitioned to an ESOP or Employee Stock-Owned Company. Would love to hear your perspective on that, and going through that process was like, and how that impacts employees and their perspective on being part of the team.

Rob: Back in around 2017, I had a partner in the business, and she wanted to move on, retire, basically, she owned a portion of that company, and we investigated different ways to do that. And we found the ESOP program where she would sell her stock to the ESOP, and then the employees would own that portion of that company. Basically, they have ownership and merit in the company where the better the company does, the more value that stock is, and the more money they get back from it. So, it was a great way to incentivize people to do everything, including, like, look around every day and say, is there wasted money here somewhere, things we could do to save some money? A lot of different things.

And everybody gets to a point or jobs sometimes where they just get a little low and don’t feel quite like the best about it, but this was a good way to say, “Okay, I’m going to move forward, I’m going to do things better, and I’m going to improve this company, and I’m going to work better with the other people.” And so, that’s the whole concept behind it. And I think it’s worked quite well, actually. We have ESOP functions every year. We have an ESOP committee, so that’s all made up of employees.

When we have those company parties that you mentioned, like, my house at the lake, the ESOP committee actually, kind of, arranges and organizes that whole party from the standpoint of food, and they set up games, and events for people to do. So, it’s kind of extending a camaraderie to all the employees that may not have been there without something like that.

Greg: So, one of the things that you observed is basically, that because the stock price is really a function of the profitability of the company, every year—I’m guessing. Is that how it works?

Rob: Yes. Yep, absolutely.

Greg: So—

Rob: We get evaluated every year.

Greg: —that causes employees to look around and say, “Hey, if we saved a little money over here, that means the price of my stock goes up.”

Rob: Exactly. That’s the exact concept.

Greg: Yeah, that’s—there’s no better connection than that [laugh] if you want to get people motivated.

Rob: It’s a simple thing. You could say something like boy, that door keeps getting left open, and it’s letting cold air in. We’re losing money on heat. It’s something that’s simple.

Greg: Yeah.

Rob: So no, there’s a lot of things like that had happened. And then they started this little other piece to it, where they—where you were caught doing something exceptional. And they would post it. Kind of like, this employee did this to save some money. And they put it in, like, a little newsletter kind of thing. So, the ESOP committee has been active in doing a lot of really neat things like that. They do go and visit other companies, and they have different ESOP events around the New England area, just to learn other ideas. What are other companies doing that are ESOPs?

Greg: Oh, so there’s sort of a community of other ESOP companies that share this kind of information?

Rob: Exactly.

Greg: And how did you find those folks?

Rob: So, through the person that kind of got us introduced into the ESOP, they introduced us to a couple of the companies in Maine. Once we met with those companies, they kind of told us about these different organizations and meetings that happen that they were going to. And so, it was just once you meet one or two people in the ESOP world, the network grows exponentially after that because there’s just so much information. And it’s hard to search it online. It’s much easier to get it word of mouth from all the companies that you visit. And we visited several companies that are ESOPs now, and found it just really interesting how the different ones do it, different people do different ways. It was just a wealth of information.

Greg: That’s awesome, Rob. And I know a number of shops in our line of business that are ESOP, but still, it’s not as prevalent as I would expect it to be. I wonder if you feel the same way, and what your take on that is?

Rob: Yeah, it’s not—I will say that the process to become an ESOP is complex, and the Department of Labor makes it somewhat challenging. You have to be tenacious, [laugh] to deal with some of it. But yeah, I can’t understand why more companies aren’t doing it either. I think once you see the benefits of it, I think it really is a valuable thing. Especially when you have a couple owners in a company where they want to move on at some point, and your choice is to sell to an outside company, or potentially turn it over more to be an employee-owned company. And I think if you like the people that work for you, [laugh] that’s the better option.

Greg: I think that also says a lot about your approach as a leader, and again, your view on culture, that—

Rob: Yeah.

Greg: —you’re really trying to lay the foundation for the team there to be able to carry the mission for a very long time.

Rob: Yeah. And you know, we have a lot of employees that have been here a long time, many than the 20s and even 30 years, and they’re like family, really. They’re not just employees, they become family to you. You see them as much as if not more than [laugh] your own family, so you kind of have that feeling, or at least I do anyway.

Greg: Definitely. Can’t avoid that one. It’s great to—which is why it’s so important to work with great people, and to have clear values, and to share those values. It just makes it better for everybody.

Rob: Absolutely.

Greg: So Rob, I mean, you’ve been on the cutting edge of technology for quite some time. You’ve been in probably some of the most impressive manufacturing facilities, not just in North America, but on planet Earth. I know you’ve been everywhere, and you’ve probably seen everything, so with the amount of exposure that you’ve had, and all the years of perspective and experience, what do you see the next five to ten years looking like here for precision manufacturers?

Rob: Well, I think the number one piece right now is certainly the automation. Everybody is moving in that direction. And if they’re not moving in it, they’re thinking about what to do because they know that there’s—they’re not going to be able to get around that. It’s just a necessity. And with that, I also see a lot of companies struggling to move to automation.

Because there’s a lot more to it than just saying, “Let’s throw a robot on the side of this machine, and we’ll be all set.” I think the whole infrastructure that’s building and being created that ways is definitely where everything’s going, but it’s also presenting challenges to the manufacturing world. And I think there’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done from all people that provide technology to help manufacturing companies get into this space in a better and easier way.

Greg: And what’s your definition of automation? Because I agree with you; if people just think it’s slapping a robot on a machine, there’s a lot of other opportunities for what can be automated.

Rob: Sure.

Greg: And I mean, you mentioned the origin of your very first product was reducing operator error, right—

Rob: Right, exactly.

Greg: So, what is your definition of automation, and how do you think people should think about it?

Rob: I think they have to take it in, sort of, steps, you know? If someone wants to just start learning about automation and how do we implement it, take the low-hanging fruit and the easy parts of it, where potentially just a simple robot unloading a machine and putting it in a gauge, and automatically measuring the parts, and then maybe either boxing it up or just putting it in a tray so it’s ready to go to the next process. It doesn’t have to be a fully-loaded load the part of the machine, and all the things that go along with it. So, I think that many times, they have to start out—and it’s better to start out—in more of a simplistic way of doing it, and then start migrating into, sort of, bigger projects where it’s completely automated: parts in, parts out. There’s the automated guided vehicles and all that comes along with some really large [cells 00:27:25], but for most manufacturing companies, even the larger ones, it’s a lot to step into, day one.

And you can get a bad taste in your mouth because there’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and most of the times, it’s the customer maybe didn’t provide all the information that was needed to really design it correctly. So, I really think that everybody that wants to get into any kind of automation should start in a small project, kind of, atmosphere.

Greg: I think that’s fantastic advice. And I know, you know, further to your point, where the vast majority of precision manufacturers are job shops, a lot of times they look at it and say, “Gee, I don’t know how to amortize an automation investment because I just do so many different things.” What have you seen for projects that the job shops of the world can have some early success on?

Rob: A couple things I’ve seen that I think are really interesting is sort of like a job shop that may get 100 to 200-part run, building, like, a small robot on a cart where it can go up to a machine, just load and unload parts very easily, and have a fairly straightforward connection to the machine so that you can get, kind of, your feet wet, basically in getting some automation going, getting the understanding of what are the pitfalls. Then you can also take that, and if you get a job on another machine, maybe somewhere else in the shop, you can move it around, and you have something that’s fairly straightforward to implement machine to machine. And then you can add on pieces as that goes on. And eventually maybe get enough work where you want to have these robots that are staying at each machine, and you’re putting your higher production jobs on those.

Greg: Do you think that after folks get their feet wet, as you said, and maybe get that first more mobile robot to help with that one long-running job, do you think that incentivizes job shops to then go find different types of work that are more applicable now that they’ve made the investment? Do you see that happening?

Rob: I do. And, you know, obviously, one of the biggest issues of any job shop manufacturing plant is having today is finding someone to be in front of the machine to load parts and unload parts. I think that is an issue. I mean, how many times—I can’t imagine how many times I’ve heard, “Well, I’ll buy the machine if you give me a person with it.”

Greg: Right [laugh].

Rob: You know, “Well, I would quote this work if I had the people to run the machines,” is probably another comment. So, I do think it would give people more confidence to look at some larger run jobs knowing that they’ve got the automation capability to run that job once it comes in the door, and actually be able to produce what they’re being asked to produce.

Greg: Sure. So, it’s really just fundamentally a change to their capabilities as a shop, which then opens them up to other types of work?

Rob: Yes. And I’ve had conversations with job shops where they said, “There’s no way this could be an automation project because of this.” Well, it’s just something that they’ve had in their head. It’s not necessarily a fact. There are ways around it. So, taking some of these jobs and taking it from start to finish with the automation side gives you a good understanding of the workaround, sometimes, when the basically out-of-the-box tending solution is not going to be there.

Greg: In addition to what I would call, I guess, physical automation, in the form of some of these load-unload and process improvement type stuff, I would argue every one of your products is also a form of automation, reducing operator error, simplifying flow of information. What other things are you seeing there?

Rob: Back to what we talked about earlier, just simply the auto-compensation, that sort of fits into it, as well, where that’s something that should have been done all along, before the automation comes in. But once you start doing automation, probably the biggest help that you can provide is having some way of having the robot measure the part and getting rid of that whole process. That’s a real struggle, but what it forces you to do is maybe invest a little more into some more sophisticated gauging that can be used in systems like that, things like a vision gauge, a 2D micrometer gauge, things like small shop, job shop or on-the-floor CMMs that can be doing things like that. So, I think it really pushes different manufacturing companies into learning and understanding some of that technology a little better. There’s really a lot of cool stuff on the market today to measure parts. It’s a little more expensive than the micrometer caliper, obviously, but it allows you immediately to move in automation because you’ve got the pieces put together where you can eliminate having that person standing in front of the machine all the time to measure parts.

Greg: At the end of the day, it sounds like, find a project that gives you a reason to say yes, not a reason to say no, and make some investments.

Rob: Exactly.

Greg: Just try some stuff.

Rob: Try some stuff. If you’re struggling getting this part measured, find the right equipment that will measure the parts so that a robot can load something in to it, in front of it, or wherever it needs to be, and get that understanding. And that will certainly be used in many other systems as you move into more sophisticated machine tending and automation.

Greg: And I know definitely one of the things that I’ve seen, and I’m sure you have too, is once companies develop that automation mindset, whether that’s triggered by starting with a robot or starting with automated information or something like an AutoComp, all of a sudden, everybody’s mind opens up to hey, should we be doing this that way? Should we really be==it’s sort of like your ESOP story, of—

Rob: Exactly [laugh].

Greg: Once people understand that the company is predisposed to innovating to solve problems, then all of a sudden, there’s a lot more ideas that come up to the surface.

Rob: And, you know, I think the other sort of side benefit is that smaller shops or smaller manufacturing facilities start thinking, “Hey, should I really hire somebody to actually do the robot programming and have them here all the time? Because now that I see this is working, I’ve got another six or seven [cells 00:33:40] right away that I could be doing this on. Maybe I want to hire my own person to start integrating this and not hire companies from the outside.” It starts changing their mentality about how these cells get put together.

Greg: That’s a great point, Rob. I know, one of the trends that I’m seeing as well is companies actually trying to hire more engineers instead of more operators, so that they’re in the position to be able to implement different systems, whatever those may be. They could be, again, automation, could be related to information flow, data, helping with something with the ERP, just anything that is more of an engineering task versus, sort of, an operator task to say, “I’m trying to innovate a solution here.”

Rob: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And if you put a manufacturing engineer or a mechanical engineer running a machine for a while, and say, “I want you to understand how this runs, and I want you to figure out a way to automate it,” I mean, that’s… going to flow very well [laugh] because they’re going to see all the pitfalls in running the machine, and all the things go along with it. And as they start working on machine tending and automation designs, it will come together much better.

Greg: That almost sounds like the Rob Caron story [laugh].

Rob: [laugh]. Exactly.

Greg: That’s how it started for you.

Rob: Yep.

Greg: Put an engineer on a machine—

Rob: Get them in front of a greasy, dirty machine, and understand what goes wrong.

Greg: [laugh]. And then not like the way it’s working and come up with a better way to improve it.

Rob: Right. Improve it. Exactly.

Greg: That’s a good way to close the circle, Rob, on the journey from what got you into it to some of the things that you’re seeing as trends in the industry. So, what we like to close with on Manufacturing Mavericks is to get all those years of wisdom turned into advice. So, if you could go back in time, and you could speak to the young Rob Caron about three weeks before he walked up to the door with chains on it [laugh]—

Rob: [laugh].

Greg: What would you go back in time, and what advice would you give him?

Rob: I think the most important thing is, from even your young days into the industry, you just meet so many smart people that know a lot. And I just think it’s important to just glean everything you can from anybody that you think knows what they’re talking about. Just be the biggest sponge you can think of to absorb that information, but don’t be afraid to ask questions, either. And just try to understand as much as possible from as many different people as possible so that your knowledge base is as broad as possible. Also, I think, just retain your ethics, and kind of how you want to be in life. And be honest, be ethical, and you’ll always be respected by everybody that you work with.

Greg: Such great tried-and-true wisdom, Rob. Be humble enough to ask anybody anything, and be willing enough to learn because there’s always more.

Rob: That’s right.

Greg: That is such fantastic advice. Actually, the last guest I had on the episode just before this is a gentleman named Gus who recently purchased his first machine shop after working his way up through a number of companies, and when he just started out, I think at 15 years old, he would buy coffee for the machinists in the shop and say, “Can you just tell me what you’re doing”—

Rob: Yeah—

Greg: —“And why do you do it that way?”

Rob: That’s fantastic. I love it. I love it.

Greg: And that’s he took—

Rob: —[crosstalk 00:37:17] concept.

Greg: He took your advice. He took your advice.

Rob: Yeah, he did [laugh].

Greg: Directly from you.

Rob: Before I even gave it, he took it.

Greg: [laugh]. That shows how powerful it is, right?

Rob: Yeah. He must have been reading my mind.

Greg: That’s fantastic, Rob. I really appreciate having you on the show. You’ve been an awesome guest. This episode was everything that I hoped it would be when I knew that we would be speaking together. Rob Caron, I consider you one of the founding fathers of Industry 4.0. You were doing it before it had a name, before it was cool, before anybody knew what it was.

Rob: Yes.

Greg: And actually, before we close, weren’t you recently honored for something like that, Rob?

Rob: I was. I just received the Eugene Merchant Manufacturing Metal for, basically, developing exceptional technology in the manufacturing industry to help further and promote high-tech manufacturing.

Greg: What an honor. That must have felt great.

Rob: It was fantastic, yeah. Very honored. And the list of former recipients was pretty incredible, so to even be considered in that list was an amazing honor by itself.

Greg: That is incredible, Rob. I think we can end on no higher note. I want to thank you again for being a guest on the show. I wish you continued success, continued innovation. I know you’re never going to stop working on the hard problems because that’s who you are, so I’m looking forward on seeing what else you guys have cooking in the future. I know you guys will continue to do great things. So, thanks a lot, Rob. Awesome to speak with you.

Rob: Thank you, Greg.

Greg: Thank you for listening to Manufacturing Mavericks. If you’d like to learn more, listen to past episodes, or nominate a future Maverick to be on our show, visit mfgmavericks.com, and don’t forget to subscribe to and rate this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app.