Augmented 114
===

Trond: Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is the Industry 4.0 journey, and our guest is Scott Phillips, founder of i4Score. In this conversation, we talk about a journey towards a data driven culture.

Benchmarking owned by the organization itself. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform. Augmented, industrial conversations that matter. 

Scott, welcome to the show. How are you? 

Scott: I'm great, Trond. Thank you.

Trond: I'm excited. This is going to be another, uh, Michigan manufacturing conversation. We had this little chat earlier. It seems like you're all in manufacturing up there. 

Scott: You know, it's all Henry Ford's fault. You know, it's all we do here is, uh, college football and manufacturing.

Trond: It's not a bad gig though. 

Scott: Oh, it keeps the economy going.

Trond: Right. So Scott, you are, as I alluded to, you're a Michigan and Detroit area native, you went to Michigan state, and then got your MBA at Wayne State and you've had a career in manufacturing, right? So, uh, if I'm correct here, Burger King and Whirlpool, now you're a consultant and a founder with this tool called i4Score that helps small and medium sized businesses with Industry 4.0 challenges. Which I'd love to understand more about because it is a journey, isn't it? It's not something done in a day. 

Scott: That's right. 

Trond: How did you get on this journey yourself? Was it very clear to you that you wanted to work in, in big company manufacturing? 

Scott: Yeah. So most of my career was with Whirlpool, which is a big company and a big manufacturing company.

And then I did some other things for several years. And then had the opportunity in 2016 to join a trade mission from Michigan going to Hannover Messe. Uh, to the Hannover Messe show and was just immediately mesmerized by the whole concept of Industry 4.0. And, uh, I don't know if it's a German thing, but I, I felt like the Germans had it all thought out and saw trends coming with, you know, shortages and labor and different things.

So I was there for a week, walked all the halls there for anybody that's been to that show, it's just enormous. Came back with blisters on my feet and um, began, when I got back, consulting with small and medium manufacturers in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio as part of a federal program. And what I found immediately though was it was, it was not easy to talk to them about what Industry 4.0 is, or why they should even care about it.

And so I spent many years just finding different ways to talk to organizations, small mediums about the technology adoption and the challenges, the adoption challenges they had. And i4Score is an online tool that is the result of basically five or six years of trying to find ways to talk to small medium manufacturers about the journey, how to start it and how to move along the journey.

Trond: So tell me a little about that journey then, give me a little sense of how you, how you see the operational challenges of a small and medium sized manufacturer, you know, in real life. Paint the picture for us a little bit. 

Scott: Sure, so Michigan is a, I guess a fairly common representative state from a mixed standpoint.

So we have 13,000 manufacturers. We of course have many, many big manufacturers here, automotive manufacturers and Whirlpool and big companies. And then, you know, a decent amount of, of what I would call midsize, but 80 to 85% of the manufacturers are 50 to a hundred people and less. And that is the kind of mix that you would see in most states.

In the upper Midwest, especially where we have a lot of discrete manufacturing, we have a lot of people who are making parts and components as tier one, two or three suppliers to the automotive industry, or aerospace, or med device, or whatever. And so, for a small medium manufacturer trying to understand and adopt new technology, they have three big challenges.

The first is bandwidth. Often, it's a smaller, maybe family owned business, where the owners and leadership team is working in the business instead of just on the business. They don't really have the luxury of stepping back and understanding the technology and then how to implement it in a project. You know, they're often in the business every day.

The second challenge they have is they don't have what I call a people closet. They can't reach into a closet and find some project managers or a, a controls engineer or an IT person. You know, they have a small staff who often wear a lot of hats. And then the third is the money chest. You know, a small medium manufacturer doesn't have an annual capital budget like a big company would have, or even a mid market.

It's more like repairing things as they break and so forth. So it's also hard for financial resources, and there aren't a lot of grants and things available to small medium, so you know, you've got a small medium manufacturer who's risk averse. They don't have the luxury of making a bad choice about a new technology.

They can't afford to lose the jobs or the customers they have. So they just don't have the runway. 

Trond: And you told me that you, when you were working in these federal programs, you were charged with working with businesses that, for one reason or another, were becoming uncompetitive. Probably not because they were, you know, doing anything different, but rather that, uh, competition environment was changing foreign competitors, low cost, other, you know, other challenges.

What is that gut reaction then when people in those businesses realize that this is happening and, and what are the tools that they typically have? To the alternatives that they will kind of reach for.

Scott: The challenge with something like a digital transformation or Industry 4.0 is that it's hard to make it urgent, right?

I mean, these are big, complex journeys and strategies and to wrap your head around. In in the United States, you aren't necessarily at an advantage to other parts of the world in your supply chain. What I mean by that is, is that in the United States, from a government standpoint, we don't really even have a manufacturing policy per se, as compared to Europe or Germany or China or places like that.

Also from a employment standpoint, you know, we overly focused on white collar education for decades and decades and as opposed to apprenticeship programs or things like that. So what the United States Department of Commerce realized was that there's a lot of things working against a small medium manufacturer in the United States.

It was competing with people in Asia and Europe in a particular supply chain. So what this program did was it offered some matching funds to small mediums who needed to become more competitive. And that could take many different forms, but one of the most common forms was just simple things like educating them about the benefit of getting off of spreadsheets and paper.

And into something, into an MES system or a basic ERP system, you know, small mediums are often just really straddled with inefficiencies about how they manage information and store information and use it to make decisions. So it isn't the co bot or the additive printing machine or the VR goggles. It's the first thing that we would recommend.

Most often it was just becoming more data driven, just understanding what that even meant. 

Trond: So let's get into this journey then because you, you have this journey and you call it a roadmap and I believe you have four different sort of aspects to it. Tell me, what is it that you introduced your SME to when you get to talk to them?

Scott: Yeah. So a lot of it involves just helping them understand what this is, you know, what do we mean when we say Industry 4.0? Some people think it's nine technologies that they might hear on a webinar or something like that, or particular use cases that they've seen at a show or in a magazine article. But really, you have to strip that away and help them understand that it's really about design principles like interoperability and information transparency.

And you have to find ways to talk about that in their language. And so often, like I say, their first steps can be just getting off of tribal knowledge and paper and Excel and into just a basic enterprise piece of software or some piece of software to break down the data silos. So the first step is all about understanding what it is, which that's one way to describe it, but they also have to understand why they should care about it.

If they can't imagine or picture an ROI or that their OEE is going to improve or that their labor efficiencies are going to improve, they have to believe that. Because if they don't understand what it is and why they should care, they're never going to move forward with the next two, which is where to start and how to scale.

And so they got to get past those first two hurdles. 

Trond: On the first one, you know, what is Industry 4.0? What is your quick answer to that? Because the concept has now been out for quite some time. It is originally a German concept and it had a somewhat clear definition, but then, you know, technologies have been added to it, and I would argue that it has gotten somewhat muddled also over the years, but what do you tell people about Industry 4.0?

Scott: So, it's particularly difficult, I hate to keep coming back to this, but in the United States it's particularly difficult just because of the capitalist society we are. I mean, we like to sell things here. 

Trond: I've noticed that. 

Scott: Yes. What I mean by that is when I listen to a webinar or a podcast originating from a European vendor, It's really tends to be more educational.

Yes, there's commercial bias to it, but when you come and listen to the similar type of webinar or podcast, you know, I'd say there's almost no effort to clarify what the Industry 4.0 is because it's just slanted towards whatever bias they're trying to sell. And what I mean by that is it's hard enough to understand what it is when you're listening to a trusted advisor that is biased in their presentation of it or you're maybe just ignorant of it. So again, when you go back to Industry 4.0, there are six design principles from 2011 from the German government, which never would get talked about in the United States. All that you would ever get talked about in the United States are the nine technologies from Boston Consulting in 2016, the myriad of use cases that might get talked about in a podcast or webinar.

But what you would never hear anybody trying to explain is like concepts like interoperability or information transparency or modularity or autonomous decision making. Those are the core principles. That's the there there. Everything else is just an enabler to make those things happen. 

Trond: That is funny because like you said, these technologies, first of all, these enabling technologies, they do evolve and they have different buzzwords and they might not even be called the same as they were back then, right?

Where, you know, IOT for a lot of people now has become Edge or, you know, regardless, but, you know, it could even be the same technologies with new names or it's the old technologies that are coexisting with new ones that are doing somewhat different things. But it's not really the technology that is the point here.

So what are the core principles that you think are especially salient for a smaller company then? 

Scott: Yeah, well they first have to start with, you know, there's six of them and by no means does anybody have to understand all six but in kind of order of importance you've got to first start with interoperability.

You know, if you're just working with data silos and paper and whiteboards and tribal knowledge and so forth, it's hard to move forward. And again, what I tell people is that what it's all about is becoming a data driven culture. That's it. At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make decisions quickly, solve problems systematically.

You're trying to be able to project outcomes accurately. I mean, those are just basic things about becoming data driven, but back to the principles, you've got to start with interoperability. You've got to then move to Information Transparency or Virtualization. You have to then move to Autonomous Decision Making, using technology to autonomize wherever you can.

And then there's things like Real Time Capability and Modularity. And again, these things are very well spelled out. This is just a Google query to pull up Wikipedia, you know. And the thing about those six principles are, that's what just leads to better operating efficiency. 

Trond: Yeah, but I mean, I, I was just reflecting that you list them off like that and let's say people even could find them easily and I'm not convinced that it's as easy as you say maybe.

You go on Wikipedia and you, you'll find those described under Industry 4.0. But then the other thing is, is understanding what they mean and, you know, interoperability. Well, that has many meanings, right? I mean, what, what does it really mean in this context? Because if you're very, very extreme, it would mean that every system communicates with every other system.

And that's clearly very difficult, right? In a current state. 

Scott: So there's a natural progression in the road map of what that means to become more interoperable and why you should become more interoperable. It means getting connected first, digitizing, right, getting off of your analog way of doing business, whether that's still paper or Excel. It's then converging your data, your ITOT convergence, which is at the heart of Industry 4.0. It's one thing to make sure all your data sources are digitized. It's another big hurdle to really converge them. And then there's the concept of contextualization. What I like to have people picture is a progression of their system architecture as they go through their history.

They start out as a tribal architecture with tribal knowledge. Then they kind of moved to an accidental architecture where people start bringing in point solutions to do things, which is more of an ad hoc. Pretty soon they end up in a siloed architecture, meaning that they've got various point systems that are not talking to each other.

So you've got humans re-keying in data or repeating data. And then what happened here is around the year 2000 with Y2K and Sarbanes Oxley and the Euro, a lot of small medium manufacturers like everybody else was told they need to get to a monolithic ERP system or MES or something like it. That was not necessarily good advice in hindsight looking back over the last 20 years.

Because really what most manufacturers have done is spent way too much time trying to get value out of a monolithic piece of software and so what they went was they went from a siloed architecture to a monolithic architecture where IT is king as opposed to just leapfrogging that into an open architecture where data is king.

And so I do try to get people to understand where they are in that evolution of their system architecture and it's not that one is right or wrong. But many manufacturers are straddling two or three progressions of their architecture and they're not being intentional about it. 

Trond: Well, they're not being intentional because, as you and I talked about earlier, they don't always have IT people internally either, right?

So these are outsourced capabilities, vendors, actually, in many cases, that have a vested interest in selling their systems. Which is fine, but it, you know, it does mean that they have a vested interest. So then they're taking care of their own interest. 

Scott: Yeah, I mean, you know, that's how you end up in a monolithic system, both in your front office and your shop floors when you've got vendor lock in with your ERP vendor in the front office and your, you know, your automation vendor, whether it's Siemens or Rockwell or somebody out on the shop floor.

And so that's where you end up with these monolithic systems. And when you try to tell people that there is a new opportunity with Industry 4. 0 to move to an open architecture system, not only is that a little bit hard for them to understand what that architecture looks like, and of course Tulip and tools like that would be part of the new solution.

But also, they couldn't bring themselves to get beyond the commitment they've made to their existing software to even contemplate abandoning it to move forward. 

Trond: It would sound very expensive to them, right? Because in most cases they would have made sunk cost investment in some system. Unless they're lucky enough that they're sitting there with just pen and paper, but that's not really the case.

Is it, you know, across Michigan, people have systems, it's just that they have systems that are not working for them. 

Scott: Yes. And they're often still stung by the pain it took to transition whatever they were at before that to what they have that they're living with now. And they can't imagine wanting to go through that pain to go through something else.

And so, it's almost like the third world country that skips traditional phone lines and just jumps to cell phones. The best small medium manufacturer I can work with is somebody who's in a siloed architecture and has not yet committed fully to an ERP or an MES. And they are ready to just leapfrog that into more of an open architecture of tools and a data set that's more unified that they can access differently.

Trond: Let's jump a little bit to more, uh, specific use cases because I guess that's, uh, three for you. You know, why should they care? I guess that's something we, we have sort of established here, but where should they start? What are the use cases? That's pretty interesting question, right? Because, again, there are some top down answers that traditionally would be given about what those use cases should be, and then there are more bottom up answers.

What's your answer? 

Scott: So, in my roadmapping process, I walk them through a couple online surveys to help them answer that question. The very first one has them first think about where in their business they're having trouble making decisions quickly. And that uses the concept of the ISA 95 model or the automation pyramid.

What I mean by that is, are they having trouble at the front office enterprise or at the shop floor and scheduling and dispatching or at the work cell? In other words, where is their pain the biggest with being inefficient? With their metrics or their performance or their ability to make decisions. 

Trond: And just to stop you there, is that a question that there's agreement on in these firms that you work with?

Is that something where a senior manager will say, yup, we have front office problem? Or is the answer different depending on your Gemba walk, like depending on who you talk to?

Scott: It's absolutely different. I can tell you almost empathically it wouldn't matter how big a business I go work with or what type of business they are.

So my tool uses a concept called Wisdom of Crowds from James Surwicky. He was the author of the book from about 20 years ago. He actually proved scientifically the idea that all of us are smarter than any of us. So, in my tool, whenever I ask a question, I ask it to people from different levels of the organization, different functions, different points in their career, and different genders.

Those are the four. And I can tell you that from company to company, the answer I'll get to any of my six questions will differ by those four. And what my tool does is my tool alerts them to where they have lack of alignment across one or more of those four demographics. And the value is not what any one person answered it, but in a conversation about why they have patterns and how they're answering.

Trond: So I'm curious a little bit on, on this journey. I know that you've written about this in one of your posts. So I saw this, that there are some new specific roles emerging when you do embark on this journey. It, it's not just the system changes. Right? It is, it is actually the, the job roles, the operational roles start to change.

What are some of those things that you were pointing to that some, I think there was an article that you were pointing people to read and I can list some of these roles, but production planners and quality engineers were two that kind of jumped out for me. And now these are pretty specific things. So I don't know how well that gels with being a quite small business.

And then line leaders, operators, and industrial engineers. I don't know how many industrial engineers any given small company would have. 

Scott: Yeah. 

Trond: But anyway, so what is the point then with these specific roles? Is that something that you then have to train specifically for, or are they types of roles that a organization will have to think about recruiting?

How, how does the people aspect come into play? Cause you said they're not in the closet. So yeah, they're, well, they're not there, but they have to be picked from somewhere or retrained from the inside, I guess. 

Scott: That's right. So, two ways to think of the answer to your question. One is that if you look for job postings on any posting board, Indeed or LinkedIn or anything, you will see these new labels emerging for what people are looking for in manufacturing.

Data ops people and so forth. These are definite trends that are happening. But to your point, that's moreso true in the big companies and maybe the mid market manufacturers. The problem with the small mediums is they're already wearing two or three hats and maybe they've outsourced IT. So Trond, the way I handle that is in the sixth survey that I administered the last one, it's about organizational competencies.

And I asked the audience to think about how competent they are across nine competencies. And those are broken up into people, process, and technology. So let me just take technology as an example. In technology, you have process automation, system integration, and business intelligence. A small company often does not have the competency in one or more of those.

So what they have to think about is do they want to invest in the competency through training or hiring, or do they want to outsource it? Do they need partners with system integrators and people like that? So the answer to most small mediums is they need a strategic partner, not necessarily build the competency internally, especially on the technical skill sets.

Trond: So then the question is, how do you pick that one? And they themselves, those partners then ideally have this broad interoperability mindset, because otherwise you are as far as before, right? You're just locking yourself in at a different layer. 

Scott: Yeah, if you're a small medium, the biggest risk you run is limited by the knowledge within your small organization.

And if you haven't hired anybody from a bigger organization or outside recently, it's very limited as to your understanding of what's, what the state of the art is or what even is possible out there. 

Trond: So in, in your vision of how the transformation process ideally happens. Are these kind of formal steps that the organization goes through?

I want to ask you about what do you see? What are the traditional go tos for a small and medium shop? You know, how do they find the knowledge? I mean, they look for people like you, uh, if they're lucky, right. And, and find someone who has thought about this deeply and, but has a mindset that goes to truly wanting them to change as opposed to just, you know, a harness of a new kind of mindset that just limits them.

But what are the options they have? What are the options on the table to learn about these new things? 

Scott: So I think the important thing for any organization, especially small mediums, is to find a trusted advisor. And it's easy to say, well, yeah, of course, go find a trusted advisor, but who is that trusted advisor?

Too many firms look to their existing vendors and they may be good trusted advisors, but they may not be good trusted advisors. Their CPA, uh, maybe they have a consultant, maybe they do peer comparisons to another company that they work a lot with. But I guess my point is, is that the very first place to start for an owner or leader of a small medium manufacturer is decide what kind of a trusted advisor do I need and where are they?

Because you're very unlikely to have the knowledge or ability internally to make this transition yourself or develop your own roadmap. You are going to need a third party person to walk you through it. You know, so if you're a small medium organization that the MEP network around the country in the U.S., they're, they're often a good place to start. Every state has an MEP affiliate. A lot of small medium manufacturers will belong to a manufacturing association, either a regional association because of where they live, or maybe an industry association like the NTMA or PMA or something like that. Those are also good places to hear about what's happening and how the state of the art is changing.

Trond: Yeah, just quickly, MEP stands for manufacturing extension partnership, and it's an official designation. It means they have, uh, state funding and federal funding to do training efforts right across manufacturing firms. 

Scott: That's right. And the good thing about the MEPs is they've been around a long time and, and you know, you really have to make sure that you're addressing people in process before you address technology.

And many of the MEP affiliates are really good with Lean and Six Sigma in process. What you never want to do is invest in technology to automate waste. So what I like about the MEPs is they're very aware of Industry 4.0 and understand how to apply it, but they're also very good about, um, making sure the organizations are lean as they're going into technology adoption.

Trond: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to make this a big question about MEPs, but isn't it also challenging to find advisors for these national organizations? In some states, I could just imagine that Industry 4.0, at least in the first few years, those mentors that felt very comfortable about Industry 4.0 would surely be in short supply compared to a lean practitioner, which is a framework that's been around for much longer.

That's just making that observation. 

Scott: Yeah, that's right. And I think even at the federal level here in the United States, NIST and the organizations that fund the MEPs and people like them have realized that we have to have more technology expertise out there in those organizations and other organizations. Here in the state of Michigan, for example, where I am, the state of Michigan will offer 25, 000 in matching funds for a small medium to implement a new technology.

And they have to go through an assessment by the MEP or somebody else to make sure they've been properly educated. But that's really nice. You know, they don't have a money chest, so a half off coupon book is a good motivation to get started. 

Trond: Sure. Let's jump a little to the future. And not necessarily, you know, a hundred years into the future, but...

If you look at how this has happened, you know, the, the big policy discussion is usually, and I'm sure the discussion among, you know, leaders locally in a, you know, in, in smaller firms is, you know, things are changing, but training and workforce re-education and maybe hiring new talent, there's so many challenges.

And then you obviously, you're, you're feeling out competed by the rest of the world, uh, at times. What do you see as the development here? What is generally going to happen over the next few years? And let's take Michigan as an example, for example, how long will the transition to a true sort of Industry 4.0 environment take in your state? 

Scott: Yeah, we were talking, Trond, about Industry 5.0 and 6.0 and I, yeah, I'd laugh because I think you'd be hard pressed to say that there isn't a common definition of Industry 4.0, let alone once I hear people start talking about 5.0 and 6.0. But anyways. I would say most of the clients I deal with in my area are somewhere between Industry 2.0 and 3.0 with pieces of 4. 0 sprinkled in. You know, they're still trying to get digitized and connected. And that's a good thing. I mean, there's no shame in being where you are. But I think the idea that companies are going to be 80% digitized and connected and working their way towards a digital driven culture is going to take a couple decades, at least.

Trond: And we've talked a little bit about use cases in an abstract way, but some of the things that I know you have been, uh, involved with is, uh, things like scheduling and then, you know, obviously connected worker-type platforms, and then, you know, the more perhaps obvious thing, you know, more picking robots and things like that, because they're just very easy to identify, but on the other hand, that one of the first use cases that you and I have talked a little bit about is, you know, digital work instructions, just getting from pen and paper to something digital that in some fashion is shareable. So I guess this goes both to the modular and to the digital and to the interoperable ideally. Right. So it's some amount of technology where you can share and where it's repeatable. 

Scott: Right. I don't know if you're familiar with the five M's of manufacturing Trond, but man, machine, materials, methods, and metrics.

And that's been around for a long time. If you're, if you're working on those five things from a lean standpoint, you're making progress. The same five are the attributes of running any manufacturing operations. And so you're always trying to improve the information flows across those five. And when it comes to man, Industry 4.0 is not about replacing man, it's augmenting man and making man better. And so I would say at least 60% of the small mediums I deal with in Michigan, digital work instructions are in the top two to three use cases that they already know about. They're just not quite clear on all the alternatives and how to migrate.

Many of them are on paper. Many of them are on no instructions. A lot of them are on PowerPoint. That's very hard to update and it's not contextual in any way. So, you know, the two biggest use cases I see over and over and over are digital work instructions and automated inspection. And both have to do with using the people you have better.

Trond: Yeah, tell me a little more about augmentation. Obviously we are here are on the Augmented podcast. So it's a word that I hear a lot. It's not necessarily an easy word, but I guess there, there is something there that's to me, at least different from automation, because we're, we're not just talking about, like you said, replacing one with, with the other.

Replacing people with machines or people with automation or people processes with automated processes, we're talking about combining the two in, in, in some new way. Now this is of course, partly why people start talking about Industry 5.0 because they, they sort of say, hey, let's leave all this baggage behind all these technologies and let's immediately move to a whole different discussion where, where it's more value driven.

But, but your, your point is, is sort of different. You're like Industry 4.0 done well was always about this. But I feel like it's kind of got lost somewhere, so I don't know if we need a new concept, but we certainly need a new process. 

Scott: Yeah. So the way I think about that, and I would explain it to a company is think about how you're going to use technology to make your process more efficient and think about it as a continuum.

You can use technology to alarm you when something is out of a set of specs. You can use it to advise you. You could use it to assist you to automate, to augment, and to autonomize. I mean, that's, that's kind of the continuum, maybe not necessarily in that order, but the one that you're really doesn't get enough attention is, is augment.

I think people get so infatuated with automation and autonomization. And both are important. They both have a role to play. But there is so much opportunity to augment the people you have, to do more with the people you have, and to make their jobs safer and more satisfying and help with retention. 

Trond: Yeah, but Scott, some of those things that have to do with augmentation, you know, they have devices and hardware connected to them. So it's not, they're not disconnected concepts, but I guess I want you to just explain a little bit how that whole thing works, is it that we get so fascinated with something that seems so easy to understand, you know, you have like a new machine, so you think, okay, that is the point once you have the machine, you have solved it or you have a wearable or you have some sort of advanced device and now you think you've solved the problem. But yeah, so I just want, want you to talk about what, what augmentation really means in these organizations, because these are not organizations with massive resources. So if they were to buy robots or some autonomous technology, that would be a very big deal.

Scott: Yeah. 

Trond: Is step one, not to go for these shiny objects then for you, or, or is step one, just choose very carefully which shiny objects to kind of optimize to and spec to? 

Scott: Yeah, it's a big question. So if you just take augmentation as a technology as a minute and say, what are all the different use cases or even the different solution providers that are out there, there could be the goggles and headset symbols people think about.

But we work with a company called Squint AI out of California. Squint just found a way to take the basic features in your iPhone and create your own annotated content for almost any kind of a job operation, I mean, that's augmentation and they're not that unique. There's a lot of solutions like them, but I guess my point was is that I do think it is like everything else.

Everybody has their own image of what augmentation is and they have made it overly technical and complex. Augmentation is just making the human more efficient. 

Trond: Perfect, well, on that note, I, I want to let you go. This was fascinating. I hope we can stay in touch and cover more ground next time, but this has been a fascinating discussion for me uh, certainly. Thank you so much for sharing your, your insights, Scott. 

Scott: Great. Thanks, Trond. Thanks for inviting me. As you can see, I like talking about this. 

Trond: Yeah, this is goodness. Thanks a lot. 

You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was the Industry 4.0 journey, and our guest was Scott Phillips, founder of i4Score. In this conversation, we talked about a journey towards a data driven culture, benchmarking owned by the organization itself. 

My takeaway is that Industry 4.0 is indeed a journey, and there is a lot to potentially care about, a lot of places to start.

And a lot of options that not always will lead firms to scale in a healthy manner. As long as the roadmap is owned by the organization itself, at least, the mistakes, which undoubtedly will be made, will be real lessons, not externally imposed. First, among the challenges is to avoid, to transform only to discover that you are yet again locked into solutions that you cannot fully make use of.

Challenging. 

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at AugmentedPodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player and rate us with 5 stars. And if you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 96, The People Side of Lean with Jeffrey Leiker. 

Augmented, industrial conversations that matter.