"Don't be afraid of innovation. Translate the lofty concepts around (not only) innovation into human language, apply them to your own company and move forward. Either do it yourself or find someone to do it for you. No charlatans, but recommended capabilities."
Jakub Beneš is the manager of the Brain 4 Industry Digital Innovation HUB for the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has worked for many years in Czech industry, for example at Beneš and Lát since 1996. There he was present at all innovations introduced by the company, both technological, process and digital. He had a hand in all of them and thus got to implement ERP, APS, MES and others. This has given him a great foundation for his current position, where he is passing on the experience he has gained to other businesses and entrepreneurs. His hobbies include restoring vintage cars and cleaning motorcycle heads, which he has gradually led his sons to do as well.
Brain4Industry is a consortium of companies and academic institutes that was established in 2019 to set up and deepen the collaboration between industry and academia. It currently has 20 collaborators and is still expanding. B4I's core mission is to offer companies knowledge sharing, training, expert education and assistance with new technologies in the fields of digitization, computing, optimization and additive technologies.
That's why I asked James mainly the following questions:
🔸 What is the interest in the digitalization and automation industry?
🔸 What is the output of a digital maturity test or digital audit?
🔸 Are we willing to innovate?
🔸 How about Industry 4.0 even with legacy machinery?
🔸 What are the trends not only in Czech engineering?
BONUS
What is digital maturity test and digital audit (Czech only)
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Martin Hurych
Hello,
I'm Martin Hurych, and this, this is Zagžeh. The ignition is the beginning of acceleration and acceleration is something you need to move from a place. By finding this episode, you've taken the most important step for your acceleration, which is the first step. In Ignition, we share experiences from B2B business, from sales, from innovation, from working with people, and from other areas of corporate life. Today, we'll be accelerating with Jakub Benes.
Hello, Jakub.
Jakub Beneš
Hello, Martin. Thank you for inviting me.
Martin Hurych
You're welcome. James, your title is one of the longest I've had the pleasure of reading here, so I'd better read it. Manager of the digital innovation hub, Brain4Industry at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics. Does it fit?
Jakub Beneš
It fits exactly.
Martin Hurych
Super, Brain4Industry... Does our industry need brains?
Jakub Beneš
I think every business needs a brain. I'm terribly sorry, but it can't and won't work without it, it's a bigger and bigger asset in business.
Martin Hurych
Great, so we're going to dedicate today to thinking about the industry, before we do, tell us about yourself and a few words about Brain4Industry.
Introducing
Jakub Beneš
Well, my history started in the '90s. I have been associated with the engineering company Beneš a Lát since 1993. I've been working for this company since 1996 on a permanent basis. My grandfather was one of those or was the one who founded this company in the 1930s, so we had an emotional connection to it as a family. I went through the business really from the shop floor to ultimately being a director of one of those manufacturing plants, and I'm a member of the board of directors of Benes and Lat. I've dedicated 25 years of my life to engineering and this field. Today I wonder or I thought two or three years ago if I would do something different again. 25 years in one industry is really a long time. And it's not that I don't enjoy it, but it loses that magic of learning new things. You've experienced a lot of things and when you've experienced them too many times and they start to repeat themselves really, really often, you lose that motivation to tackle them every day. So I was approached by one of my colleagues from academia if I wanted to start a project with them called Brain4Industry, which is actually a new thing today. You named it, the Digital Innovation Hub, where these institutions are springing up all over the Czech Republic and all over Europe. Their primary goal is to focus on knowledge sharing in some of the areas related to digitalisation for industry, agriculture, food. It doesn't really matter which field we name and ours, which was created in 2019, is called Brain4Industry and its members are the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Thermomechanics, Cardam, which is an R&D center here in Dolní Břežany, the Břežany Star cluster, which is about encouraging companies in the region to settle there, to have that pro-innovation mindset and to connect with that unicipal. And of course, the next member is the Czech Innovation Centre, which has innovation at its core.
Martin Hurych
The result or the main idea why you create for the Czech industry. How can I imagine what Brain4Industry can do for me as a small engineering business owner?
Jakub Beneš
We have chosen a specialization in which we have been working for a long time. And it's from optimization through computational tasks, simulation, violent additive manufacturing, so popular nowadays for example 3D printing from any material you can think of. And by coming from or part of us coming from industry, we focus a lot on sensing and mesoscale systems. So we measure in companies their performance, their condition and we prepare that data or we teach companies to prepare that data to make decisions based on. Our last area is related to that, and that's digitalization, so we would like to, and I think that's why we have the capabilities to share knowledge with companies in those areas and teach them how to do things in those areas themselves. Our goal is not primarily to be a pure business company that will sell a service, but our goal, our mission is to teach those companies how to approach the problem and how to solve it on their own, so actually education in that area.
Digitisation and automation of industry
Martin Hurych
One thing that interests me very much about this. I notice that on the supply side, digitalization, automation, robotization in the industry is something that resonates a lot. A lot of people from start-ups to you, academia, are trying to address that. What is the situation on the demand side?
Jakub Beneš
If I take it very globally, I think that big companies have understood that they have developed extensive strategic plans for a long time, so they have incorporated digitalization into their strategic plans. The very sensible concept of Industry 4.0, companies that can translate this concept into their industry have embedded in their strategy steps that will lead to achieving, let's say, an increase in the level of digitisation in Industry 4.0. Medium-sized companies are being forced by these large partners to advance in this digitisation too, but for small and medium-sized companies, to whom we want to dedicate a large part of our service portfolio, this is a very unimaginable concept today. They are nice lofty notions but they don't make sense to them yet and we have one of those projects that we are working on, which is digital audits. We have 2 types, one I call the digital maturity test, which is just for small and medium sized businesses and can help them identify the barriers that are preventing them from taking off. And then there are digital audits, that test is within maybe two days of time that we have to spend with the company to examine it and then make suggestions. For that digital audit we're talking on the order of months 1-5 depending on the size of the company. I think if I count by 100 people, a company of 100 people, for example, will take a whole month. It's not a whole month of work, but it's incremental steps that we have to take during that month to set up some kind of road map of where that company should go. Both of those ways actually work by interviewing key people in that company. The basic requirement is that the owner or the CEO has to want to. The person who really holds the primary decision-making power on where that company is going to go. And the ideal situation is when that company has at least a partially worked out strategy, so one of those first questions is always: where do you want to be in 3, 5, 10 years? And what do you want the company to look like? You make your idea and we will help you to find either the blocking steps that are preventing you from realizing it now, or we will also prepare the road map with you to get to that state so that it doesn't hurt.
Martin Hurych
What if the answer to the question is: Where do you want to be in...?
"Jacob, I don't know." What, then?
Jakub Beneš
I think we can even help with those very targeted questions to get that owner to think properly about the direction of the business and be able to answer that question, but until we have that answer, we can't proceed. But I don't think the business has an easy life either and moving forward, if you don't know where you're going, it's awfully hard to find the steps to go and even though most people, I think most people, say I don't know, I think they have those ideas in their head, they just need to articulate them. Ideally write them down somewhere, put them on the wall and have them in front of your eyes every day when you're doing something, so we can help with that as well.
Digital Maturity Test. Digital audit
Martin Hurych
So if I'm one of the more enlightened ones and I know or want to find out where. You're gonna graft on me, either a digital maturity test or a digital audit. What specifically will that output look like, because the audit gives a lot of people in my social bubble hives. Let's be specific. What am I going to get my hands on?
Jakub Beneš
It's true, the word audit is a bit of a misnomer, but we don't have a simple English translation, so we say analysis. Which is probably even worse. What our output to you will be is actually a summary of the activities you need to do to move in the direction you want to go. So for that digital maturity test, you'll have a list of recommendations for what to do to stop stalling your progress. Then if you progress to that digital audit, you'll get a whole road map that tells you which steps to take, how long they'll take, and what you'll need in terms of people and resources to do that, so that you can achieve your goal. The other thing we have in common is that we always try to translate every single step into some sort of savings. Either a financial savings, I'm going to speed up some production, I'm going to need to have technology, I'm going to need less material, I'm going to need something, or on the other hand, we try to find that format where that profit is going to come in that will then tie to that step. Our kind of motto is that we would like to share in the success of those companies. That is to say, this first step, when we graduate, we would then like to fund those other projects, either just from the savings or from the profit that they have made, so that those companies don't feel that they have to spend meaningless money and stuff something into consultants. I still have a colleague who says nicely advisers, we don't like it either, but we're not advisers. We're not really I don't want to say coaches, but we're trying to help these people look at things through the right lens, guide them to be able to make their own decisions and ideally fund the whole thing from some share of that success.
Are we willing to innovate?
Martin Hurych
You basically came from the underbelly of the companies you are now supposed to help. So what's the mood in the underbelly, the underbrush. What's the mood for innovation, because I think it's similar there to the service offering for innovation? Are we willing to innovate?
Jakub Beneš
I think the willingness is there. There's that translation missing again. It's going to be related to the thing that we've already said, which is, "If I don't have a vision of where the company needs to be, it's hard for me to innovate, to get there I always need to set that goal. It also depends on the size of the company, but most of the time in these smaller companies there are no people to take care of it, so I've also struggled a lot of times with the fact that we've come up with a great thing to implement and then somebody had to be appointed in that company who first of all has some decision-making powers to be able to implement it and secondly they have to dedicate time to it. And in these smaller companies, it's usually a person who works 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day and gets another task, so there's this block of actually not wanting to take on another task and being tied down to another 2, 4 hours a day that they're going to have to dedicate for the duration of that project to that implementation, and that's holding back that development. I wouldn't say there's a reluctance to innovate in companies. I've had some conversations with people that we translate Industry 4.0 as automation, robotization, but I don't think that's what it's going towards at all. These are things from years40 ago and things that you would normally, we say, buy in a shop today. If I want to, and I say that the investment makes sense to me, I'll robotize the workplace with a supplier that already exists in the market. The insight that comes today is more about how I work with the information that the person, whether it's the production department or the person who's working on a task, is able to give me about the progress of that activity. So you're looking at the performance of those individual units and making decisions based on that as to what's going to happen next. And this is where I would say a lot of companies end up at the stage where they get data collection. I mean, they have a huge amount of data today that they don't evaluate at all. At best, companies use this style the moment a claim comes in, I'll dig back 3 months in the data to find why it happened. It doesn't always work. An even better case is that I'm working with a month old data so that I'm able to respond with some activity during the following month. And the ideal case is when you have it available online and can make decisions based on what you're going to do in an hour, tomorrow, and so on. So that's our goal, to teach companies how to work with that information. In my experience, we're able to connect machines that don't really have any digital potential, so my simple example would be a 50-year-old drill, a column drill, Russian-made, where you connect that three-phase motor to monitor and you set up boundaries where you monitor that machine in an on/off format, in a run-at-idle format, and in a shot format. Each part of that job has a certain electrical input and based on that switching, you're able to track when that machine is running. So it's not about having to have the latest robot, great screens, and the latest machine on the market. I'm able to work with what I have as well, but I need to know how and what the data is telling me and how to set the start.
Martin Hurych
I can hear... "This is going to be very expensive, Jacob, it's not worth it." "We're too small for that. "
Jakub Beneš
We also struggled with this prejudice very often. The price of connecting the machine is nowadays in the order of thousands of crowns. That's not a big investment anymore. Then, of course, you need to invest in some sort of evaluation system, but we are talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of crowns, not millions, not billions. It depends on how large a network we are going to build, how much information we want to collect and at what speed, but for that basic scanning, those units, tens of thousands of crowns at most, will be enough to track that workplace, and I know from my own experience that just plugging in that tracking with effective parameter settings increased the production of that machine by 20%. So anyone who knows the production can calculate, with a 20% increase in the output of that machine, how much money it is making them and whether the investment is worth it.
Martin Hurych
It almost makes me want to nag that no machine will be more powerful by fitting a sensor. So what is it, then, how do the employees who stand by the machines react to it?
Jakub Beneš
It's a matter of, I would say, corporate culture. Of course, every person who is there has the feeling that when we start talking about automation and digitalisation that we are trying to replace them. We started the idea, back in the industrial days, with the idea that we were pulling these people into the solution, we were presenting it to them as such, and we eventually implemented it as such, that we were trying to reduce the proportion of their hard work. Giving them that information and a chance to earn more. For us, we shared that profit with the people who were working on the machines, and because they still had the same machine that they were working on all the time and they were doing the same production, but just by increasing the efficiency, we actually added some amount of wages. They grumbled, they didn't like the fact that there was this overview of whether the machine was working or not, but I don't want to be nasty, what are we going to kid ourselves, if I'm on the job I'm getting my wages, everybody can read the labour code and there's how I'm supposed to work and how I'm supposed to treat it. So if I'm at work for 8 hours, I'm not saying we all work 8 hours, 480 minutes of time, but it makes a difference if I work 240 minutes or 360 minutes. I'm actually able to translate it to those people like that, yes you're going to have to work a little bit more, but you're also going to make a higher wage. That's what most people I know in the industry hear.
Where are we with Industry 4.0?
Martin Hurych
All the things we talk about are talked about for a relatively long time. Especially about Industry 4.0, where we're currently on a journey from Maria Theresa to Industry 4.0 and probably apart from Automotive, which is obviously the most developed part of engineering. What does it look like in the rest of it from your experience?
Jakub Beneš
You're right Automotive and its suppliers are doing very well, the pressure there was enormous years ago. As for the rest of us, there are some first movers among us who have already done it, have digitized and are running the company based on predictive information. But I would say that most of the industry is in that assembly plant state, and if we're going to talk about that assembly plant, there's a difference between a high-end assembly plant that uses robotic workstations. Most of the operations controlled by camera systems, etc. All the outputs are collected and the plan is changed based on the prediction of the output at the end or some, say, error event that happens in the course and in the meantime, when there are 20-30 workers running around the line, fixing errors, looking for material, if they find some, they try to run the machine, they don't have a balanced inter-stock between those different workstations, etc. I would say that we are in the middle of the road, and I see Industry 4.0 in such a way that I am monitoring the whole production in data, I am able to react to the fluctuations, but that is why I have to prepare the most basic thing, which is to have the processes mapped out, to know what goes where, why it goes there, where, who and when is supposed to be involved in what, and I would say that we have underestimated a lot in the Czech Republic. We try to grab most things on the basis of cost reduction, but in the format of buy the cheapest machine, buy the cheapest worker to do the job. Save on material, buy it a little bit worse. Those are such standard views where I'd rather save money than make the production itself more efficient in any way. I mean, even on the machine that I have, I'm able to increase the efficiency by a very simple intervention, many times by half. By increasing the wage of that person at the increased output, I can certainly achieve, at a 10, 15% increase in wage, an increase of maybe 30% of that output and so on. We're looking at it from the wrong side, and in addition, the starter is usually the customer's request for a discount. So we react retrospectively, we grumble that the customer came back for a discount. Where do I get it, what do I actually do, instead of preparing all year for this situation to arise. We all know that every time that customer comes in for a discount and we don't pay attention to it that year. Unfortunately, we do give that discount, and it's usually on margin. The next year, we're off again because we've already given that discount, we're not devoting that time to it again, so we're wasting an awful lot of time on the fact that we're squandering that opportunity to find that savings efficiently so that it doesn't cost us too much money, or so that it comes back to us. The investments that we are talking about, whether they are simple technical investments, whether they are in payroll, whether they are in process flows, they have a payback period of a few months. I don't think any of the investments that have been made in this way I have seen a longer payback than 6-9 months.
Martin Hurych
That's great, that's one of the fastest returns ever for a business.
Jakub Beneš
Of course, this is determined by the state of the imperfection, so the higher the imperfection, the faster the return and the higher the profit. In a fully automated operation it is of course harder to find those investments, but we have a huge potential in that.
Trends in Czech engineering
Martin Hurych
We are here at Zážeh to ignite those who care and want to progressively build their company to what they will be doing in 3, 5 years. What are the current trends in Czech engineering? Where are we moving and what should we start preparing for? Maybe not only Czech, what is happening in the world and what should we prepare for?
Jakub Beneš
Here, I would like to exceptionally thank the covid, which has opened the eyes of the companies a bit. There is a long-term shortage of workers on the Czech market and COVID has made this situation even worse. Many companies had no one to carry out production with and it forced them to think about how to simplify, optimise and automate production. It's a start, I think it's a question of the next 3, 4, 5 years. If we really try to automate and robotize that production, of course, it's related to retraining the workers to a different style of work and they will not be the hand today that puts together a semi-finished product somewhere to pull out a product in half an hour. They're going to be the ones standing around those lines, operating them, servicing them, doing that backup for them, and at the same time they're going to have to learn some simple things to program. I would say that there will be that change in the ratio of robotic work, a change in the approach to people and their knowledge potential. I don't think it's a secret to say that when we were optimizing in the foundry, that technical optimization never made us lay off a single person. Most of the time, we've trained that person so that they continue to be a valid member and it makes sense to us. You can expand, but it was never related to layoffs. I'll cram 50 robots into a company and I don't need any more people, we've never done it that way and it can be done. Then in terms of preparing for the next period, I think it's extremely important to go hand in hand with the technical part, the update, in terms of the digitalisation. That is to say, to start painting the processes, I mean now in the style of a process map, to link key points, to measure performance on them and to start learning how to manage the production with precise numbers. The other thing that was incredibly magical for me was when we really had that information online in engineering. I had TV in production, in the office, on my cell phone, on my tablet, anywhere you could see what was going on. The next update was escalation processes, where actually either the machines themselves were saying something, or the operator on them was able to escalate a lot of these things just by pushing a button or sending some information. You automatically call the right service centre, the maintenance guy who has the phone in his hand, he gets a text message, something is happening on the machine, he can respond, if he doesn't respond in 15 minutes, the information goes to the line boss. If he doesn't respond either, the information goes to the plant manager, and so on, but this can only be implemented with a very decent level of process measurement. My vision is that in 5, 7 years Czech companies could be at the level where we have mastered these processes. We will really know what we do, why we do it, how we do it. For me, the biggest shift was when we were able to connect these numbers with the economy and we knew what else each step brings in the economic view of the company, so where we are overflowing costs, where we are able to realize more profit. What is it going to cost us to have downtime on this and that equipment, and so on. We've been able to shorten that information delivery from the original three months or so down to the order of a week, and that time format was sort of a three-year evolution over which we've been implementing that.
When enquiries come in today, not only is quality and price obviously the driving element, that was x years ago, but they are actually starting to ask what kind of environmental savings you will give us. That is, reduction in energy costs, material consumption, then recycling of waste. It can be looking at the emissions that are emitted. Mostly those players today, which are mostly car companies, they will already ask us for the CO2 footprint of our product so that they can factor it into those final figures and work with those numbers. According to the latest information, this is now the way that subsidy projects and banking houses are going about it, where they make investment in any new equipment conditional on improving its environmental performance. Reducing energy costs or material needs then conditions the granting of credit for additional production equipment. Otherwise, the standard method that I'm sure most people know or have heard of is Return on Investment, so I would use that for any investment that I make. There's nothing easier and I find out very quickly if I'm able to afford the new machine, when it will pay for itself and if it makes sense. Not every company is able to replace 100% of their machinery, so I work with what I have, get the most out of it and by strategizing that further development, having that vision for those 3-5 years, I'm able to say which machine I need now, which one in 3 years and calculate how I'm going to do it financially to get there.
Martin Hurych
Plus, thanks to the optimization on those new machines, I'm already starting to make money now.
Jakub Beneš
That's right.
Martin Hurych
In Zazh, we end with a recommendation, advice, fuck-up, whatever to cut the listeners and viewers short. From what we've discussed here together today, what would be some advice in closing for those who don't want to be dragged through the market and want to proactively go somewhere with their company and innovate.
Jakub Beneš
I think the first thing is not to be afraid of innovation. The bottom line is, let's translate those concepts into some human language with people who understand it, let's apply them to my business so that I can imagine what those lofty concepts that we've talked about here today mean to me, and as in any kind of business, it's always about chemistry. So I'm either going to learn it myself or I'm going to find someone who is able to help me with it. I think that's the quicker route, but the chemistry has to be there, I have to find a person who can walk me through the basics, teach me. Which we'd love to do.
Martin Hurych
So no charlatans, but proven capacities.
Jakub Beneš
That's right. It's always worked, I think it will work for a long time, that a person on referral who has already helped someone is much more effective than looking for someone else, but let everyone decide for themselves how they like it.
Martin Hurych
It's true. If we decide to proceed with you, where can we find you?
Jakub Beneš
So we are actually 5 independent organisations working together as a consortium. The core will eventually be based in Dolní Břežany, but for now we are based at the Institute of Physics in Prague. Be sure to visit our website www.brain4industry.cz for contacts to all of us and we look forward to working with Czech industry on its development.
Martin Hurych
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you, thanks a lot, Jakub.
Jakub Beneš
Thank you very much, Martin, thank you.
Martin Hurych
That was Jakub Beneš from Brain4Industry. If we've just sparked you to innovate your own manufacturing plant, we've done a good job. Stay tuned for more episodes, either on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, and check out my website www.martinhurych.com where we have a little surprise starting this new year of 2022, we have a written attachment for every Ignition, so make sure you don't miss it. All I can do is cross my fingers and wish you success, thanks.
(shortened, edited, automatically translated by DeepL)