Careers in Focus

BH: Welcome back to Enabling Automation. I’m your host, Ben Hope. Today’s episode is a special one. We’re joined by someone whose career has shaped the direction of automation in Canada and beyond. Recently, Manufacturing Automation magazine honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, a recognition reserved for those who have not only contributed to the field but expanded it, challenged it, and inspired the people working within it. The article, called A Vision for Automation, explores his decade long influence on manufacturing, digital transformation, and tech leadership. Today, we’ll go deeper. The person behind the award, the insights that shaped his career and the lessons he believes will define the next era of innovation. It’s an honor to welcome our guest today, Steve Wardell. Hi, Steve. Thanks for joining us. How are you?

SW: Very good, Ben. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to having a chat.

BH: Excellent, excellent. Okay, well, let’s dig in. Let’s look at your journey and the award, and we’ll start there. When you first learned you were receiving a lifetime achievement award. What went through your mind?

SW: The first thing is, I said, wow, hopefully my lifetime’s not to the point where I can’t look forward still, which is, a lifetime achievement award kind of a looking back award. But I’ve been around a long time and, have had the opportunity to work in a great field. And I think really, all I’ve kind of done is done my job. And so if I’m going to get an award for doing my job, I’m happy to take it. To take it.

BH: Talk about the things you’ve accomplished. Yeah. Yeah. The article frames your career as a vision for automation. Do you feel that that kind of captures your journey?

SW: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a neat play on words because, I’m associated with, the vision group here at ATS and all things vision for the last 15 years.

BH: The visionaries.

SW: Yeah, yeah. The visionaries. The article does a good job at highlighting, my career and kind of the steps that that have gone through and the fact that I didn’t need to go to different companies to have multiple different career opportunities. ATS has been a fantastic place for that to happen. And, I feel like I’ve, even though I’ve been at one company, had many, many different careers throughout it.

BH: There’s lots to do, lots of different things to see and get access to.

SW: Yeah. And ATS, as you know, grown so much and changed so much over the years that, to, you know, work with those changes, work alongside them, be a part of them and go through what the changes bring. It’s kept it fresh. And, you know, you tell somebody you’ve been somewhere for 36 years, and they look at you with their eyes wide open and say, how did you do that? Well, ATS has allowed me to do it. Yeah.

BH: Your challenges it was exciting. You was never need to leave.

SW: You know, every day it’s still a challenge. And the fact that we make new, interesting automation solutions for our customers that are different every time. That challenge never changes or never, never grows stale because it’s different challenges all the time.

BH: Lots to learn, lots to kind of apply your knowledge and, yeah, keep you on your toes. Yeah.

SW: And not only that, being given the opportunity to continue to build out that knowledge and, and take it to the next level, we’re not just doing the same thing the same way. It’s, hey, if there’s a different way of going at something that’s going to be more efficient and more, more capable for our customers, let’s do it.

BH: Let’s do it.

SW:  So it’s, you know, the company allowing that to happen too. Innovative mindset and kind of going into different things.

BH: Looking back what were the critical turning points moments that changed the direction of your career in the industry?

SW: I guess a lot of that was the same critical turning points that ATS went through, because I kind of lived through them. A lot of them when I first started here. We were, well, a lot smaller than we are now. And it was started by Klaus originally, and, we were about ten years into the company founding at that point, but we were still just, you know, one building in Kitchener and, you know, focusing on, on automation. But to where we are now, the journey has been multiple and varied. You know, we’ve gone off in various different tangents, come back to some things, went into this industry, went into that industry seeing multiple different booms and busts with regards to certain types of work that we get into. You know, we lived through the internet bubble. We lived through the solar bubble. And the fact that it built up and came down same thing most recently with the electrical (battery) vehicle side of things. So, you know, we’ve kind of grown and adapted every one of those situations to led to saying, okay, well, this place that we can’t go anymore, what are we going to do now? And, you know, we’ve done a great job at adapting and continuing to grow.

BH: You can’t just sit still. You got to keep moving.

SW: Yeah, yeah. No. If we if we said, well, you know, we’re going to stick with it, we’d be gone long ago.

BH: Yeah. Yeah. And that was one of the great things about Klaus Woerner. I think he was always looking for the best path. And he was okay to make a mistake as long as he learned from it and then kind of moved on.

SW: Oh yeah. I feel kind of honored that I was able to work under his tutelage, when I first started here. I learned what entrepreneurism was, you know, from Klaus, when anybody talks about an entrepreneur. Now, I still think of Klaus as the ultimate example. And just having set the stage with that, that continues to kind of be the basis of the underlying currents within ATS it’s bill was built into the culture for ATS. Yeah.

BH: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. Looking at the article. It highlights your views on where automation is headed. If you had to summarize that vision in your own words, what is it today?

SW: I think where it’s headed is kind of the same place that it was headed back when I started. I got into automation originally because I thought, this is a place that’s going to continue to grow. People are going to want to automate things. It’s just what we were automating then might be a little bit different than what we’re automating now. The automation 30 years ago has become kind of standard for everything, but we’re automating the next thing and we’ll continue to automate. I don’t ever see a time when people will look at things and say, you know what, I want machines to do less for me than what they do now. They’re always going to want that next thing. It’s going to be really interesting. You know what happens in the next five, ten years. And I think we’ll talk about that. But it’s just I didn’t see any kind of non growth path in the automation industry and in the computer side of things. I got into computers as well because it was going to be an area that was and will continue to advance, and we take the ride along with that advancement.

BH: Lead the technology. People need things and things are expensive to manufacture, and I think automation is what’s enabled us to have access to way more things and open up kind of a lot of opportunities in our lives. But without automation, if we had people still assembling all of those things as an example, we would never have the same accessibility, I don’t think.

SW: Yeah, yeah. For sure. And you know, we can go into discussions about how automation is replacing people from putting things together. Yeah, sure. At the same time, people don’t want to be necessarily doing that in the first place. So let’s get them into places where they want to be. And exactly. And, you know, automation allows the human race just in general to advance.

BH:  And to be creative. I think a human being needs to be creative, to be effective and doing repetitive tasks for human being is not the best.

SW: No, I I’ve been lucky to be part of the, the A3, the Association for the Automated industry. And as being part of that, you know, the one thing that it was kind of a tagline, it’s automation may replace people, but we’re replacing people doing dirty, dark and dangerous work. And people don’t want to do that in the first place. So let’s get them into places where they can.

BH: Yeah, yeah.

SW: Let the machines do it.

BH: Okay. The article mentions gaps between what’s possible and what’s implemented. What gaps do you see most clearly?

SW: I think the gaps are still driven by the, the cost and the willingness to be structured enough to take a risk. So getting into an automation mindset for a manufacturer  there, there is some risk that has to be taken to make the investment to, to put the automation into place, but also to trust that that automation is going to provide you with, with benefit that it was originally designed to. It’s easy because automation is difficult. It’s easy to look at automation and see only the risks associated with it. But placing yourself above those risks and taking that leap, you have to go through that before you can get to the point where you release that gap that was there in the first place. So, I still think the cost associated with it is coming down continually, which means that the automation that we can provide, you know, without even really trying that part is becoming almost like a commodity. And people don’t know it, but there’s a bunch of automation that’s going on that we don’t have to work really all that hard to. And the risk is gone. That will continue, will continue to build up those capabilities. Those risks will lower. But you’re not going to get there unless you take the risk in the first place. So I, I see that really as the as the gap between what can be done and what we can offer, where Manufacturing’s at right now, those who aren’t willing to take that risk because there is risk evolved. You got to get over that risk level.

BH: Yeah. It’s a necessity.

SW: Yeah, yeah. It’s also an indication that as manufacturers look to automation they can’t look at it also with these silver bullet type of mind frame that that’s going to give us everything and not realize that there will be some challenges associated with it. You know, if we talk about AI, I think we will a little bit later. That’s an area where there’s a lot of blue sky type of thinking as to what it can do for you. The actual reality between that and that blue sky is a lot of work and a lot of risk associated with it. So, we’ll see where it goes. But that’s really going to be an interesting thing.

BH: Yeah, I, I agree, I think people have always, in my experience with automation, stayed away from the idea of a black box, because when the black box stops working, you’ve no idea how to get it going again. And I think people like to have transparency into what’s happening inside the machine. And having AI, for example, just design a machine and program the machine. I think a lot of people would be like, what happens when it goes down?

SW: Exactly.

BH: What did the article get right about your philosophy? And is there anything you would add or clarify?

SW: The part about my philosophy that I think got right was you have to kind of look at things from what you’ve experienced, not only the good but the bad as well. Kind of highlighted the fact that your growth and learning journey is going to be based upon the failures and the setbacks that you’ve, that you’ve worked through, and that experience is as strong or stronger than any kind of new experience that you get in. And it just goes right the first time. You gain a lot more from, from your failures than you do from your successes.

BH: It’s almost disquieting when something works the first time, you’re like, oh, yeah, yeah.

SW: And if you can get to a point where everything you’re doing the first time is going right, then

you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. You’re not going into a place where you’re going to, you know, set yourself up for growth into new areas. I know, I think back to one of my, my early bosses who kind of settle, a lot of the stage or maybe, Steve Bottoms. He used to like to say to us, we’re taking that job because we’ve never done it before. We’re likely going to fail. But if we don’t do this, we’re never going to get anywhere. And we would take these failing jobs, but we would be committed to them with our customer. That and we would, you know, work with them initially and say, you know, this is going to be a challenge. We’re likely going to fail that this through this. But this is how it’s going to go. We’ll get you get you to it in the end because we want to learn and we want you to learn and we’re committed to that.

BH: And I find in my experience, the greatest kind of moments you get to successes where you win and they’re good in the moment. But it’s the failure where you learn something that sticks with you

and when you remember years later, the success was yeah, yeah, but remember that time we learned this or we learned that, like, that was mind blowing when I learned that and then it changed everything going forward. But you would never have done that without trying, without being open to failure. Yeah.

SW: And taking that step in the first place, you can you can get real risk averse and get comfortable

with what you’re doing. And, and that’s going to get you along in a certain area for, for, for a good long time. But it’s, it’s not necessarily going to allow you to essentially deal with the, the challenges that are going to come your way because you have no choice. And I’m talking about what we were talking earlier where, you know, a whole industry goes away and then you’ve got to pivot into something else. What are you going to do then?

BH: Yeah. On pivots, let’s move on to talking a little bit about technology, data and AI, which we just touched on over your career. How has the role of data changed in manufacturing?

SW: The data has been I’ll say something that in the beginning of my career we didn’t have a lot to work with. It was a lot more, I’ll call it hard, less data driven in what we were doing and just more hard physical in how we were doing things. But all along, at that point, we we were always building on our capability of collecting data, getting more data about what we do and how we do it. Using that data to a to a certain extent, to the point where I feel we’ve mastered what we can do in the data collection side of things. We’re able to get a lot of information, not just about the machines that we build, but the how the machines are building and the product that we’re building and everything associated with them. What I still think we’re in the infancy of is how we take that data and do something constructive with it. We can analyze the hell out of it and find out that, you know, this is what the data looks like. This is giving us some information, but it’s applying that information for the good back into the machine or back into the next machine.

BH: How do you act on that?

SW: I still feel like we’ve got a long way to go to take the power of the data that we’re already collecting and really get some gains out of it, so we can look more and more into collecting more and more data. I don’t think that’s our problem anymore. I think our problem is, is taking that and really doing something with it that’s a benefit that hadn’t been planned. A lot of what we’re doing with the data now and, and the analysis that we’re getting from that is more or less verifying what we would have done anyway, I think it’s the data driving us into something that we maybe not have done. And we look back and we say, hey, you know, we were going to go down this path, but the data drove us down here and look, the data was right or the way we manage that data. I still think there’s huge potential for taking what we already have and using it more effectively.

BH: Getting a bigger picture of the current status and acting on it. Okay. So AI is obviously the major theme right now. Where do you see genuine value and where is it still overhyped?

SW: Well, it’s really it’s still very hyped up because when you open your, your, your news feeds in the morning, I bet you it’s hard to find, in 1 or 2 articles into it where you’re not seeing AI into it,  and that’s the hype cycle part of it. That’s the next generation stuff. The, the nice thing about AI is that there is a lot of AI in play that is very functional, very useful, and becoming part of our norm. In our tool sets that we’re using in the products that we’re wearing and bringing to the floor. But we don’t refer to it as AI anymore. I think once you stop referring to whatever it is you’re building or using, you stop referring to it as AI. That’s when it becomes useful. Because it’s been accepted. It gets more specific too. Yeah, it’s application specific. It’s a tool here. I’ve always believed that AI is just another tool. It’s a very powerful tool, but it’s a very undefined tool. And it’s when you take that however you’ve deployed it, whatever applications you put it to and built it into something that people will take and accept without thinking about it as AI, then that’s where the power of it is, and we’re seeing tons of that everywhere, hopefully, because I’m just kind of I’m kind of tired of it, but hopefully in the next ten years or so, we’re not talking about AI anymore. We’re talking about all the stuff that it’s doing under the hood, and you’re not worried about how it’s being done. It’s just, hey, this is this cool and capable tool for me that you know, I can’t live without right now. So I think once we stop talking about it as AI and it’s deployed in something that that isn’t AI known for, that’s when it’s real power is really manifested. And so all of the, the AI companies out there right now that all they’re talking about is AI, they’re going to become companies that are successful when you don’t refer to them as AI companies anymore.

BH: Interesting. It’s similar to the idea of industry 4.0. And like ten years ago, even 15 years ago when everyone was talking about industry 4.0, but it was when it really started getting specific. You want to digitalize this or you want to improve your digital twin or you want to do this, you want to do that When you started seeing the kind of progress and now almost nobody talks about industry 4.0 anymore, right?

SW: Yeah, I do I do think AI is going to have a longer, life cycle on that because things are moving so far and an AI doesn’t have a defined boundary. It’ll always be the next thing that you’re working on. So we’re going to get to a level of AI that where everybody ten years ago says that’s far past what I thought the AI was. So what are we working on next? Well, that’s the next level of AI. So that that’s what you’re going to be referring to. His AI and all the stuff that’s the result of it in the, you know, rearview mirror is going to be the stuff that humans really grab on to, because that’s what’s come out of it.

BH: Yeah. For a company starting their modernization journey, what’s the smartest first step?

SW: The first step is to accept the fact that you don’t know it all. When it comes to the automation side of things, or looking into your modernization journey, whether it includes automation or whether it includes whatever it is that you’re looking at modernizing, there’s a lot of smart people out there, and you can get a lot of information in a very quick time about a certain subject. But to consider yourselves experts in every field that’s necessary to get your to go down your modernization journey, I think that’s detrimental. That’s cause, Yeah, yeah, you get kind of a complacent feeling that I’ll take care of it and you just don’t know well enough as there’s somebody else out there that knows more and there’s somebody else out there knowing more, wanting and willing to help you down your journey. Be open to saying, you know, I’m not exactly sure what which way I’m going here is the right way and work with those subject matter experts so that you’re asking the right questions. You’re taking the right turns and you’re doing it in a manner in which you’re taking advantage of somebody who’s not just somebody, but, you know, companies and whatnot that have put all of their art and effort into becoming experts on. And I like the fact that there’s always something new to learn, and there’s always somebody out there that’s willing to teach you.

Go through it with you. Yeah, yeah. And so take advantage of those people and be humble in what your capabilities are until the those capabilities are built up and so.

BH: Allows you to evaluate technologies because one thing that is frustrating is when someone says things like, we’ve tried automation didn’t work for us. Like, well, look, you look like a company that could really benefit from what we tried, it didn’t work. Yeah. It’s just because you didn’t have the right people looking at how to apply it and you failed, spent a lot of money, and now you have a bad taste in your mouth and the whole experience was kind of off putting. But you’re the one that’s been left behind because you’re not doing things properly. Moving on to people, culture and change. So you’ve led organizations through major transitions. What have you learned about change management?

SW: First off, because we’re in a kind of high tech industry, there is always going to be change when going through change management, it’s about expecting the amount of change that that’s coming. Say you’re putting in a new ERP system or say, you know, you’re adding automation into a place where you had manual automation or manual operators doing things at first. The steps between one to the other is a change that’s going to have to be managed. Set yourself up so that there is a lot of steps, not just one. I’ve gone from this ERP system to this ERP system. It’s going to be any time any kind of new technologies is introduced, even though it’s sold as, you know, being ready to go, ready to go, perfect technology. You know, this is this is going to, you know, give you everything since sliced bread. It’s not going you have not only the technology to worry about, but you have the people that who use the technology and their adoption of it. Yeah. That part of the change is as much associated with that technology as the technology itself. And that change, recognition that people go through, a journey at different phases. Some are adopters, some are slow to adopt, but you’re going to have to deal with all of them. And as a result, you just got to set your expectations that it’s not going to be, you know, 100% out of the box ready to go, even if it is the people that are using it are still going to struggle. You know, potentially.

BH: How can companies bridge tension between OT (Operational Technology) and IT (Information Technology) or between engineering and operations?

SW: Different companies handle it, different ways. I was at a company just earlier this week. We do have a consortium where we, we, we share amongst various different companies in the region how each other are helping with their processes, building on continuous improvement. And we go to each other’s, places to kind of learn from each other and, and, and provide feedback. And one of the things just this week I found really interesting at a, at a smaller company that we were visiting was their ties between their supply chain management group and their Assembly operations group. And it was very closely tied together from an organization standpoint. And as a result, a lot of their synergies in that respect kind of came into play as being, I think, a little more efficient than what we do here, because our supply chain groups and our operations groups are maybe not as well tied together as, as they were. Different company, different sizes, lots of different factors that go into it. But in this case, like IT OT discussion or even, you know, everybody working as a group towards the same goal. I think that’s really where sometimes it falls down. Is that the ultimate goal for the individual groups isn’t always the same. And if that ultimate goal isn’t always the same, they’re always they’re not necessarily going to jump onto the same bandwagon as they would if they were working towards the same goal. So I think somehow tying the same goal structure for all of the the groups involved in in the process, this case, other than the IT side of things and the OT side of things, if they’re working towards the same goals are all they’re all going to be driven by the same necessity to try and succeed in that area. And I think that’s where a lot of a lot of companies, like even ourselves, can improve in in how we set our direction and our goals and our mindsets towards

where we’re going. In the end, you know, we all want to keep our customers happy and produce for them the best, you know, the best product going with when it comes down to the automation that we provide. But on a day to day basis, we’re not always thinking that or judged along that same way. And so I think the goal alignment is, is critical for making that happen.

BH: Yeah. Somebody said I was talking to someone the other day and the analogy they used was a hockey team. And the bigger the organization gets you, you lose track of the what are we trying to do? Trying to win the game. But if you’re a defenseman, you’re just trying to stop the puck from getting in the net. If you’re a forward, you just trying to score a goal. But the defenseman is also contributing to the offense, and so is the forwards contributing to the defense. But if their goal is to win the game, it’s different than just stopping the puck from getting in the net or getting the puck into the net.

SW: Exactly. So I love that. Yeah, and all those guys on that hockey team, they’re only happy when they win. When they win the game. Yeah, they’re not happy that because they had a nice play.  And you know I stopped that guy coming down on his breakaway. They’re happy when they win the game. They’re sad when they lose the game. Yeah. They celebrate as a team. Yeah. That’s yeah critical component of it. Yeah. Because that’s the high level goal that they’re all working towards. Yeah a good analogy.

BH: What advice do you have for young engineers and leaders entering the field today? Back to our theme. Kind of a from the discussion today.

SW: You got to embrace failure. As, as a stepping stone working towards success. You’re never going to get it right 100% of the time.