Globalization of an automation company

We’re excited to bring you our first-ever podcast series, Enabling Automation. This monthly podcast series will bring together industry leaders from across ATS Automation to discuss the latest industry trends, new innovations and more!

In our third episode of season 3, host Simon Drexler is joined by Maria Krasilowez to discuss Globalization of an automation company.

What we discuss:

• Evolution in automation
• What challenges should be taken into consideration when looking for a global partner
• Automation assessments
• Would you apply the same project management process globally?

Host: Simon Drexler, ATS Corporation (ATS Products Group)

Simon has been in the automation industry for approximately 15 years in a variety of roles, ranging from application engineering to business leadership, as well as serving several different industries and phases of the automation lifecycle.

Guest: Maria Krasilowez, ATS Corporation (CFT Group)

Maria is the Managing Director of CFT based in Parma, Italy, and has over 25 years of experience in the food and beverage sector, processing and packaging industry.

——Full Transcript of Enabling Automation: S3, E3——

SD: Welcome to the Enabling Automation Podcast. Today is episode three of our third season. We’re going to discuss the globalization of an automation company. I’m your host, Simon Drexler. I’ve been part of the automation industry for more than 17 years in various roles at both large and small companies. I’m passionate about applying technology to issues at existing companies looking to scale, and specifically automation for scaling manufacturing inside of growing businesses. Here at the Enabling Automation Podcast, we work to bring experts from across the ATS Corporation to discuss relevant topics to those using automation within their businesses to scale. And very excited to be joined today by Maria Krasilowez. Out of one of our companies located in Italy, to talk about globalization and some of the challenges that exist with a European based automation company to give us context on some of the things that we can look for when working with partners.

SD: Maria, can you give the listener base an introduction to yourself?

MK: Sure, Simon. Thank you. Hello, my name is Maria Krasilowez. I’m the managing director of CFT based in Parma, Italy, and I have over 25 years of experience in the food and beverage sector of processing and packaging industry. I’m really excited to be part of the evolution of automation and digitalization in this sector. It’s new, it’s growing, and it’s becoming an area where really most of our customers are starting to explore and look at some of the possible advantages that it can bring. So I’m really pleased to be here to talk to you today, Simon.

SD: Thanks for joining us, Maria. And you used an interesting word, evolution. And I think we are seeing that right now. Automation is picking up a lot of momentum. Automation is being used in different areas that it never has been before. There’s new technologies and digitization and artificial intelligence. I like the word evolution. And for the businesses here, a lot of the listener base, they’re trying to evolve. Their companies are trying to grow, they’re trying to scale as part of that. They’re trying to source an automation partner. Automation is difficult by nature, and you’re looking for experts. They might be in a different geography somewhere around the world. So from the perspective of an automation supplier located in Italy serving automation globally, what challenges should the listeners think about when looking at an international supplier for their technology?

MK: It’s an excellent question, Simon. There’s a few areas that come to mind right away. The first one is called presence or availability. In a global or international environment,  you can be based anywhere in the world, and that could include being in very different time zones. So the question first, I ask is, does the supplier have the capability to be present and available to support you? So first and obviously with remote connectivity, now that’s an easy one. But often I’ve seen our clients have internet problems. Depending on where you are in the world, you may not have stability to be able to supply remote capabilities easily or to provide remote support. So the question really becomes, can they also support you physically? Can somebody come and be there for you when you need them? When your systems are having problems?

MK: The secondary that comes to mind to me, Simon, is expertise. Do they understand automation and understand your business and your maybe cultural requirements that you need to work within? We often see that suppliers of automation solutions are expert on the automation side, but may not really understand the business side. And so there can be a disconnect there. So if you’re looking for somebody working internationally, can they come in and understand that business for you as well.

MK: And then the third area and it’s one that is often really overlooked is language. Do they speak your language? So in North America we’re used to speaking in English. And it’s fairly easy to communicate. In Europe we have a lot of different languages going on. And in some countries, we work with China, for example, we may not have Chinese language capability. So you really need to think about how are you going to communicate with the supplier and get their expertise into your company, where it can actually be understood by the people who have to implement it on your side.

SD: Yeah. And what I’ve seen is a common mistake is your frame of reference can be when you travel personally and you go maybe somewhere in Europe or somewhere to a tourist destination, and you can get by with English or, or different languages. It’s not understanding that when you get into the technical nature of discussion, that those that you’re working with want to speak in their native language.

MK: Absolutely Simon. And, you know, think about introducing a topic that they may not know anything about, right? So in our case, in the food and beverage sector, our clients know their equipment very, very well. But if you’re starting to talk about digitalization, automation, maybe concepts that are not so familiar to the people on the ground and you’re not speaking their language, it really can become a challenge, a real challenge.

SD:  And just an opportunity for things to slow down or to talk past each other. In the understanding, Maria, those are a really good start to the discussion that we’re having today. Presence, expertise, language support for any one of those three, is there an example that’s top of mind from your career, where things have either gone very well or maybe not so well that the listeners could learn from?

MK:  Great question. I’ve seen very personally where customers have tried to put in automation solutions or digitalization solutions and, worked with a supplier very capable in automation and digitalization and complete failure in the process. And part of the problem was a combination of not understanding the specific nature of the business. Okay, so they had some specific needs in the food sector that were not very clear, okay, to the dynamics of the of the process. So for example, food tends to be very seasonal. You have a very, very short period of time to process whatever’s been growing in that season. It could be a matter of weeks from the first food arriving to be processed to the last piece of food going through the system, fruit or tomatoes, for example. And in that case, you’ve got to be really aware of the intense time pressure, associated with the process. So when you’re thinking about automation, there’s a timeliness to when it has to be up and running. There’s a timeliness to the production and the sensitivity to the need to stay up and running. I mean, there’s some really subtle and not so subtle considerations to take into account in that kind of a production environment, which could be very, very different from, lets say, an automotive, which is constant, constant same thing, production all the time for many, many weeks, all year long.

Right. And not the same time pressure. I’m not an expert in the food industry either. And so that’s a detail. The devil’s in the details, that as an automation expert, I would not think about that. You might have a growing season that’s two weeks long if the machine goes down in those two weeks, the impact is sizable.

MK: Enormous. Absolutely. And I think when you when you think about companies around the world and there’s a lot of things that are very similar, you know, let’s start with that. What’s the same when you’re when you’re working internationally in that sense. Right. Typically companies in our sector are looking for ways to reduce costs. They’re looking for ways to decrease their downtime and improve their throughput. And that’s kind of common. Right. Often we’ll find their processes are not very well defined. And they’re probably struggling with labor, labor availability. This seems to be kind of a common theme right now. Labor could be not enough labor or not enough capable labor. And finally, they might need more information to make better decisions. This is a trend I’m seeing a lot with, in discussing with our customers today. We realize in an age of information where you’re used to just googling and getting the answer when you look inside your own company and you realize, I just don’t really know what’s going on, I don’t have the data to make a good decision. And so these are all considerations that some of our customers everywhere in the world are thinking about. Then the difference is start, right? It may be let’s talk about labor for example. There are areas in the world where there’s a lot of labor availability, right. That’s not a problem for customers in Africa, for example. It’s not typically something that comes up. But what will come up is that they don’t have the capabilities to work with sophisticated equipment. And that becomes a real challenge for automation. And maybe not even maybe the place you’d start with automation, right? We tend to want to supply simpler solutions that are easy to operate in other parts of the world. A lot of parts of Europe, for example, labor has a problem finding the labor when you need it. In these very tight seasonal businesses, you need potentially a lot of labor in a very short time. That’s not always possible to find. There automation starts becoming really important, and automation can really help reduce that pressure and start allowing you to become a much more efficient producer. The problem, though, becomes the people who are there need to be capable to now run with more sophisticated equipment. So the differences become pretty interesting. You really have to be able to modify and be flexible with the solution being provided based on where in the world and what kind of business we’re dealing with.

SD: I’m so happy that we’re having this conversation because it offers a different perspective on some similar themes, where we often talk about the technology and the details of the technology. But now if we’re looking at the international problems or challenges that can be created, it’s a different view on organizational capability.

MK: Absolutely.

SD: Inside this podcast, we talk a lot about you can’t go from no automation to lights out automation. And it’s not because the technology might not exist. It’s because the organizational capability might not exist in all of the things that are around the technology. And so your example from a workforce in Africa is very apt to that, where you need to build the capability to be able to implement the technology that might solve your problem.

MK: Absolutely. And, you know, every situation really is different. I think one of the reasons we really recommend highly, to do an automation assessment before you dive in is exactly to understand how and where is the right place to apply automation. Okay. So for example, I’ve worked in, with one customer where they had a very bold program to automate. and there was, we spent a lot of time working with them, only to realize that, as you said, one, they weren’t really clear completely where they needed to automate. And two, they didn’t really have those capabilities internally in order to make the process of automation smooth. an external supplier can bring in a lot of that expertise and help you get there. But there’s it’s really a two way conversation, isn’t it, where you need to be able to get an understanding of where the business is under pressure. have people who can help understand the processes and how they work. And then fundamentally, the two sides coming together can give you a great solution. But if that other side isn’t ready and the processes aren’t there and the capabilities aren’t there, you know, you’re one of the tendencies. Don’t, you know, you can automate a really bad process and you’ll have a really bad process that works really quickly?

SD: Yeah, that comes up often, right.

MK: So and I mean, that’s incredibly true. A lot of companies don’t think about that need. And maybe they do think about it but don’t have the capabilities to actually improve that process. So there’s a lot of you know, when you’re getting into automation, it can be very multi-dimensional in terms of how you want to tackle it. And to me, and especially in the food industry, it can become something that really, requires a lot of flexibility. As an example, we might think about food. This is somebody something we all know about, right. So it’s easy to imagine some suppliers think about the big brands, you know, out there in the world. I’m not going to name any of them. But these are huge multinational companies. They’re very sophisticated. You know, they may have a lot of processes in place or not, but, you know, they work in a certain way and they have certain expectations and  their production may be very, very, large and really needing a lot of automation. Two you can get a very small organic food supplier. You can think of some of your favorite names that may be a very small, relatively small producer, but growing and needing to be able to keep up with this increase in demand. But we’re talking about very different level of requirement, both for automation, for information and so on. So we still see a lot of companies still working with manually taking data down by hand on flip charts or little pieces of paper. and that is clearly one way to get information, but it’s very difficult to work with information collected in that manner. Or think about at the end of your line where you’re packing your cans or your boxes of food into cartons to be shipped out. That process in many, many companies is still very labor intensive. People picking up cans and putting them in boxes. Right? Right. And you think about the automation opportunities to speed that up. They start kicking in when the production gets to a certain level. So think about this expanding company that has been working with hand packing is growing and growing, and demand is increasing. That starts becoming a bottleneck for them.

SD:  Those are great examples. Maria, thank you very much for sharing that background. It’s again, it’s that different perspective a different geography, a different industry than we normally speak about. Maria, you’ve driven a lot of transformation at CFT over the course of time that we’ve known you, and you’re adapting to new markets. You’re navigating those cultural differences. Is there something that’s top of mind where you’ve had to drive an improvement or a change in approach at CFT in order to globalize your automation company?

MK: Great question. We have indeed. we’ve worked on a number of areas in the last couple of years, but I’ll give you an example. We’re sort of one of the first ones we started working on for us was the area of project management. We do some equipment installations that are massive. They’re very big, they’re complicated, and we could be shipping them to China or South America from Italy, working with multiple suppliers so they can become quite complex. And three years ago, even we understood that our project management approach was not very well defined. And so we implemented we started with a very simple problem solving, looking at, you know, what is the problem, what is happening, and trying to identify using very simple tools like five why to to get at the root cause of where, where are the fundamental problems. We mapped out a number of critical areas in a very high level process, let’s say, around which we wanted to explore a little bit of, improvement opportunities. And that was a starting point, which allowed us to break down the problem into a number of different areas. So, for example, we didn’t have a consistent process. So we created a Kaizen, and we worked through developing a new process for our project management with structured toll gates and, timelines and so on and tools to support it. we put in a new organization, with people trained just to do project management, where previously we had a lot of people doing multiple tasks. Right. Maybe they were a designer plus a project manager, and so I think that’s an a, a relevant example. Two years later, we have an organization in place. We have a system in place, we have a process in place, and all our projects are following through at the exact same process every time. And the outcomes are really starting to show now. Our projects can go up to two years in length, even more so, the new project projects we started this with two years ago are now starting to come through the process fully, and you can see that there’s a lot less problems, we’re much more consistent coming out on time, better cost control and better satisfaction to our customers is what we’re really aiming for. What’s interesting for me about that one is, you know, it’s a fundamental question about almost anything you do, including automation. So how well is an automation project actually managed right? Is it managed in the same way? And I think this is a reflection for us. We’ve been typically looking at equipment projects and now as we’re stepping into looking at automation projects and digitalization projects, I’m absolutely positive that the improvements we’ve made in project management can be 100% applied also to the digital and automation projects we’re working on.

SD: That’s very interesting, and it gives insight to our listener base on how these projects are approached from the other side. And I think that’s really valuable for those listening, because when you’re approaching a partner or you’re working through this technology implementation, these are lessons that can be broadly applied. And large companies that are already working around the world are going through them as well. So Maria, we’re talking about globalization and the globalization of an automation company. Would you apply the same project management process in all geographies around the world? Is that something that’s common?

MK: Absolutely. Thinking that the process of the project is run by us. Right. The project management of the project is run by us. The interface and what you find on the other side may not be the same. Our process doesn’t change. and I think what’s, what’s interesting there is matching the project team to the situation. And in CFT, we have a fantastic group, of commercial and project management, people who speak multiple languages. And it’s pretty impressive watching someone switch between 3 or 4 different languages. But that becomes, again, I mentioned it earlier, becomes one of the criteria, you know, who am I going to put on this project? Can they speak the language of the customer, and are they able to then manage through? Do they do they know that customer is their relationship there? And I think this is another one that, that’s really important when you talk about some differences internationally, in some of our markets the relationship is extremely important. You know, there’s a very high value placed on the trust and bond between the supplier, the people. Right. The people who between the ownership of the are the decision makers in the company and the people that they’re working with on the supplier side. And so, you know, I think that consideration for us is really important when we’re applying and putting the project team together and often minimal starting point is language. But I think there’s more than language. It’s about relationship. It’s about time that they’ve spent together. It’s about the relationship of our businesses together over time as well.

SD: Coming back to the three that you started with, because we’ve touched on language. I think you’ve done a great job of highlighting expertise. How does CFT look about or look at presence in that way, where you’re putting together a project team, you’re looking at these large pieces of automation. How do you make sure that you cover that for your customer base?

MK: That’s a really tricky one. You know, every I would say every supplier struggles with that.

SD: I think so. Somehow.

MK: For CFT, especially since we’ve joined the ATS group, it’s become a lot easier to manage. So we have the benefit of this larger organization with resources all over the world between our ATS Global Service, for example, or partner sister companies within the ATS group having a presence in local markets. So what are the things we think about when we’re working through a project or, or even bidding on a project with the customers? What resources are available locally? in order to support our customers on the ground. And so what’s really nice today is we can, you know, move between these various organizations. We don’t have to have our own, let’s say, market company or presence locally. We can tap into the people that are already there, and we work through training them on our equipment or, or technologies so that they can be available and ready when the customer needs them. So that’s one of the ways that we have been it really a huge opportunity for us, being part of the ATS group, is that we can do that. In some situations, we have to hire people in because you need people on the ground. I mean, the timezone differences can be eight nine hours and or more. And so if you’ve got a problem, it can be a problem. The timezone difference, it becomes a challenge. You know you’re sleeping while your customer is awake and vice versa. So, another thing that we’re working with the ATS group on work right now is a 24/7 availability of service and a service center, which we’re hoping will be up and running shortly to help support customers. They can call in wherever, and we’re able to tap in whenever we need to the people who are in the right time zones. So it’s not an easy solution. And I’m, and I think that, you know, a lot of companies really have to think through how to do that. And I guess from the CFT side, what we try to focus on is how can we have the right solution, flexible enough for the situation that we have in hand. And sometimes you need to send people from the main company. So a lot of our, let’s say, very deep expertise sits in Parma. And fortunately, we have some great people who are willing to get on a plane and go wherever they need to go.

SD: I understand that, and from those that are listening, when you’re looking at how you make your own project successful, I think Maria just touched on the need for at least a local network. that network could take many forms, but to be able to have that presence in a variety of different ways, but making sure that it’s there is a key to your success.

MK: Absolutely. And I think that getting back to something I said earlier, we take it a bit for granted. But, you know, remote connectivity is also a huge enabler. And of course, Covid, accelerated that process because we all needed to learn to work in a different way. So there was something good that came out of that was our capabilities and being able to service remotely without traveling. And that certainly speeds things up a lot.

SD: Absolutely. I was going to ask you if you’ve seen a transformation in any one of the three pillars based on the technology, and I think that’s one, and probably the one that is primary is the ability to service remotely, which was absolutely accelerated by the crisis that we went through.

MK: I mean, that’s a huge one. I think the other thing that that probably well, at least in CFT, we’re working a lot now. And I’ll give you an example of a project, what we call our digital tomato project, which is helping our tomato processing customers obtain information in their very specific kind of processing environment to maintain production and maintain, really, the throughput that they need in the very short period of time they have to process tomatoes. And what does that mean? That means really applying a new kind of expertise. This is, you know, understanding of the business and the automation. So we’ve been bringing together those two sectors using support of some of our sister companies in ATS who are experts on an analysis and assessment of where automation should be done, and coupling that with our expertise in the evaporation and other techniques on processing tomato, we’re able to pinpoint exactly where we can put in sensors and connectivity into, the HMI interface or central databases, which will allow a customer to say, I see this potential problem coming along my lines. Something has changed. I need to adjust something or fix something or maintain or change. Whether it’s even just a gasket, it’s time to do that. And if I do that now, I can optimize, minimize my downtime and optimize my production. So that’s really changing now, the way we’re looking at working with our customers. We are working with a couple of customers right now, on designing the solution for them. And, I think this is going to be a really exciting area for us going forward. And the benefits could be really enormous for customers.

SD: That’s fantastic Maria. Maria, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your background, sharing your expertise and perspective on what it’s like for a company outside of North America to grow and globalize your automation. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your expertise with myself and with the listener base.

MK: It’s been my pleasure, Simon. Thank you for inviting me today.

SD: To those that are listening, thank you, as always for joining us. We’ll be back next time in a month. for episode four, which is Why Should Vision Systems Be Included In Your Automation Project? And Steve Wardell will join us for that. Thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to talking again next time.