Automate mini series: Wesley Garrett

Automate Series And 2027 Preview

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to our special minute series for Automate. This is Nikki, and I recorded some interviews with speakers from Automate 2026, because even though I was there, there's no way I could catch all the conference programming. So we wanted to bring some of the conversations from the floor and from the talks of the Automate Conference to you on Automation ladies. If you didn't get a chance to attend Automate 2026, or even if you did, you should be planning for Automate 2027 already. North America's largest robotics and automation trade show will take over Las Vegas next year from May 10th through the 13th. There will be over a thousand exhibitors that cover cutting edge innovations in AI, robotics, machine vision, and motion control. To get registered or make sure that you have it on your calendar, and especially if you're an exhibitor to make sure that you get food space, visit automateshow.com. All right, well, welcome to a special series of automation, ladies. This is our automate series, and it will be a part preview to automate, part post recap to automate, because as you may know, if you have been to Automate, um it is completely impossible to catch everything. Uh the floor is huge. It's in it's in Chicago this year, taking up like two of the calls completely, pretty much. Um I think it's bigger than ever. And then there's a bunch of talks. There's an entire conference attached to the Automate show that I have never had the chance to actually go to, uh, any of the conference talks. And then there's also the Automate Theater, which uh luckily I am kind of adjacent to this year uh with my booth. But there's sessions in there, there's conference talks, there's all kinds of stuff attached to Automate that I miss every year because uh, well, lately I've been an exhibitor, right? So then I'm stuck in my booth and people come visit me. I go see stuff, I do automate live interviews, so I get to hear a little bit about people what people are doing. But there's just like an infinite amount of content and cool stuff going on. And so we thought this year, why don't we try to get some info on some of the cool stuff that is being talked about at Automate that I know I'm not gonna be able to catch and the other ladies are not. Um, and then yeah, you, whether you are attending or not, hopefully this will be interesting, either can inspire you to go check out the full talks on the schedule from the people that we talk to, or if you don't get a chance to catch it, you'll have a little bit of an idea and uh maybe can reach out to them separately.

Fanuc’s Approach To Scalable Automation

SPEAKER_00 2:19

So our guest today uh is Wes from Fanic. Wes, thank you for joining us and welcome to Automatic Ladies.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Hey, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Absolutely. So I I'd say um I think this is actually the first of this series that we are recording. Um we had a couple of uh reschedules happen last week. And the reason I brought you on, um just for our audience to know, uh, not only is it because you have a pretty cool and I would say interesting but approachable topic uh that you're talking about at Automate. Um, but yeah, we met at the PMMI uh executive leadership conference a few weeks ago. You mentioned to me the topic of your talk. I thought, yes, I want to see that. And then of course I can't come see it. So here we are. So can you tell us what is it that you're gonna be talking about and why should people come see it?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

All right, so I'm gonna be talking about automation made simple. Scalable robotic solutions for food and beverage. Um people that know me, they know that I'm a packaging guy. I I specialize in in food and bev areas. Those are the accounts that I'm chasing after. And my goal is to help them understand uh all about the solutions that are readily available. Um so standard solutions that are extremely scalable, you know, some something that um a solution that is at a low cost, um, very quick delivery. They can put these things in and then one you know, pilot scale. So one of them, two of them works well. You know, they can they can grow them throughout their facility or across plants. And um, so a lot of people still don't know about these different solutions. And what's also really neat is we're gonna have a couple of main booths in in the main hall there. And obviously, our main one will have all of our uh standard yellow robots and whatnot going on in there, but then we'll have a a booth right next to it called our cobalt and go booth. Oh, okay. What that is is um cobalt and go. We actually have a website for it, but it's it's it's all the standard solutions wrapped around cobots. Um so for us they're called CRXs, and we're actually inviting partners in to demonstrate their standard solutions. So those solutions are readily available,

Standard Cobot Cells With Real Pricing

SPEAKER_01 4:30

and you can literally buy them right off the show floor, which is very new for us.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Oh, this is like IMTS where they ring the bell when somebody sells like a CNC machine or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

I don't know if we'll have a bell, but uh the solutions will be there. You'll be able to take the tires, demo them out, whatever you may want to do there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Oh, that's cool. I actually thought about this. I don't think we've implemented it this year because I've been less involved in my booth uh prep than I would have liked for automate this year, uh, considering I had to take a lot of time off last year. So I had wanted to because WinTech's HMIs are really reasonably priced. And like our sales price is the sales price, no matter where you buy them from, we sell through distribution. Um, don't sell direct, but like the pricing is just it's like an OEM price for everyone. And I think the idea, I think it's pretty rare in automation to be able to look at something and actually just ask like what's the price and get a price because so many things are so custom, right? And you usually like back when I was selling solutions and vision systems, the answer was always, well, it depends. Let me put together a bill of materials for you. Let's do a quote, let's figure this out, right? Like how many and what do you need and what's the application and and so on. So now that I work for a company where, like, yeah, I mean, there's a few options that you want to consider, but for the most part, our Cadillac HMI is so reasonably priced that I don't even need to know what you need. I could just price you the most expensive one and like you'll still be WoW. Like you just buy it with your credit card. Uh, like if you have a P card or or like we don't sell, I think our most expensive HMI now is around $2,500. And that's because we came out with a 21.5 inch advanced capacitive touch. Uh but when I started, there was like nothing over $2,000. And from what I understand, most engineers' spending limits on like project, you know, test budgets and things like that. It's like you can slide that in without even needing to request a PO. And so I was like, we should just sell them at the booth, not for the sake of making a lot of sales necessarily, but to make the point that you know what, this isn't something that you need months of proof of concept and quotes and all these different things. Like you can just buy it and try it out. Um, and so to hear that kind of concept of our like robotic cells, uh cobot cells, obviously, but um, I think the partner, and and I know that you guys have kind of been strengthening that side for the last like what year or so to have this partner ecosystem with the with the cobots where you can have standard engineered solutions for for different types of applications, just being able to get a ballpark or even a price and just say, you know what, I may need to customize this, of course, with like end-of-arm tooling and there's some different things, but for the most part, it's like, hey, you have this standard thing and and there's a price, that it is pretty unique, right? I feel like in the in the past, it's always been a heavily, heavily engineered thing. Um, are you seeing that? Like, are people is that lowering the barrier to people wanting to give it a shot?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Yes, absolutely. Um, so you know, most people are they're used to having to, you know, go through this whole quote thing. And more and more of my customers are coming to me that they just want something that's there that's ready, but they they also want to be able to tweak it a little bit. And so some of these solutions can be a little bit too standard. Um because you know, sometimes you know, there's the price, this is what you get. And unfortunately, then you know, if it if it's not gonna work for them, then now we're gonna go into a custom solution, and then now the price that goes through the roof, right? But um some of these guys are getting better with that, and so that they they might have think about a palletizer, they might have three or four tools that are kind of pre-canned. Okay, you pick one, right? And so, you know, or maybe you need two or three of them, but they're pre-canned. So it's not like okay, there's this one tool, and if it's not a one size fits all, now it's a custom solution. No, there's so many different tool providers that they can just do that, right? And um so it can they can be more uh flexible than you than they've ever been before uh with with the way they're set up and more pip more people they're they're so more much more advantageous. We're we're we're looking at uh prices for these solutions between in the 100 to 200k range, and probably a lot of them are you know at the lower end of that. Yeah. And so, you know, you talked about you know your lower budgets be able to go out and just you know to buy a thing for their lab. When when things are more like a system-wise, most of these customers have that money in there where they can just buy that without having to go to maybe VPs or you know, executive level um back to corporate level of of engineering to be able to get that approved. So they can slide these in. Some other neat things about these because they are a standard solution. Some of the uh builders of them, some of the OEMs, will actually do like a 90-day in-house product.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

So okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Yeah, they will ship it to your shop. Otherwise, they may say, okay, send me a uh a palette of your product, we'll run it off at their place. But they they some of them actually have shipped them to the customer and let them run them for many days. You like it, you buy it, you don't, like ship it back. It's a standard solution. It's they can it can be resold somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Yeah, the other thing obviously is that they might have some of these in stock ready to go because it is a standard thing that they build. So the lead app is probably a lot better.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Way better. And so, yeah, on average, like four to six weeks, maybe. Um, if they don't have one like readily, you know, read ready to go right off the shelf. I mean, these ones that they're gonna see at the show, some of those they'll literally ship them from the show floor to the customer site. I mean, how exciting is that?

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah, so I I was like I said, uh that one of the things that caught me at IMTS, and somebody did tell me that it it may or may not be real. Like some of these, it's not like they walk on the floor and decide on the on the spot to go buy something, right? But it may be a multi, you know, month engagement that on the show floor culminates in them like signing the papers and buying the machine. But I've been next to like Okuma or these big like CNC machining center uh booths, and like I mean, they must spend a lot of money shipping all that equipment there, first of all. Uh and then, but they have a little bell that they ring when somebody like buys a machine. And it just it to me was something that was different and special about IMTS compared to any of the industrial automation trade shows that I'd been to before, which was always just like, oh, look at our technology, and then like you know, we'll do a we'll follow up and do a demo, and you know, maybe you have an application kind of thing. Um, just the idea, like, hey, there's something you can actually buy. Uh very, very cool. And I hope to see more of that at these shows, or just I I think I've also seen um somebody kind of it's just always shocks me and surprises me when somebody puts like pricing in their booth. Like I've seen like this system starts at this price, or like between this and this, and you're just like, whoa, I actually have some idea before I have to go through a whole big hullabaloo of like asking for and quoting and pricing, and like sometimes they won't even tell you anything unless you're qualified to know. And I think for manufacturers in particular, it can feel like it's hard to know what's out there and and how to have points of comparison because like honestly, who has time to really engage multiple vendors in an engineering exercise and get their pricing? Um, there's there's definitely also like a I don't know, a trade-off of that time. That time costs money, and engaging a bunch of people into engineering a bunch of systems, like in the end of the day, you're only gonna buy one, like that's a whole lot of waste of time going around. I think yeah, it's really useful to kind of at least even if you don't get a down to the dollar price, like to have a ballpark to know what you're working with. Um, I found that most people do appreciate that quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Absolutely. And we get the same thing in our booth. People want, you know, how much does this cost? And I think what sometimes they can get confused by they'll you know, they look at, you know, we sell the robot, we sell the robot on the controller, teach Ben. We sell that just that piece, right? You need a tool, you need a riser, you need uh safe, you need engineering, all these other things. And it's not a system, right? So they what they really want to know is you know, what would this system cost? And what's cool about this show this year with the Cobot and Go is you know, what they see is they can actually get a pretty good price right there, you know. That that I'm sure that those vendors that we'll have in our booth, they'll have a number right for it. And I'm sure it'll be a show special, you know. And and you mentioned, you know, like some of the different show pricing. Yeah, I I think that's become a bit of a trend, you know. So Pac Expo East this year, I saw that on a few of the standard solutions out there. Um, maybe maybe it's to your point, you know, just to eliminate some of those barriers of somebody actually walking up and saying, you know, how much would this cost? Or having, you know, trying to start that conversation, like, well, there's the price. So is the price in the ballpark? Now do you want to have that conversation about you know what can for that price, what does that machine do for you?

SPEAKER_00 13:24

You know, because I know I've wasted a whole lot of my time and other people's times because the salesperson I'm talking to have ultimately wasted their time once they finally tell me the price. And I'm like, yeah, that's nowhere near my ballpark. Like, I'm never gonna work. So, like, why did we go through all of this?

The Cost Of Hidden Prices

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Um, I have a I I'm gonna do my thing. I have a story. Uh one of my last jobs, I worked for a software company and and I wanted it to be like self-service, right? Like come on the site, be able to see what we have, walk through the product, maybe get a uh, you know, kind of like the product-led growth model was really popular like a decade ago. And then Slack kind of started this thing where, like, instead of selling enterprise software, you just let individual users use it for free. And then at a certain point, so like a freemium model, right? At a certain point, you want to subscribe to get more features or or more capacity, or maybe an enterprise license, right? And so they went the opposite direction. Let's start with once we have like 10 people at a company, then we may approach them about an enterprise license. But that became kind of popular, particularly with software. So I was looking into okay, how how do we design that user workflow to really support somebody that's kind of evaluating the platform on their own? I contacted a number of product-led growth software companies. And what they do is like they they help you see how users are walking, like using your site, how to engineer it to where it works well for them to like use it, get trained up, and then want to buy more. But the funny thing was, most of these companies were not product led in the sense that like I couldn't try them and I couldn't even get pricing without running through. And the worst, the worst uh example I have is I had to have three different calls, two with SDRs, or maybe one with an SDR, and then with an account executive. And then it wasn't on the third or fourth call that they gave me any pricing. And they like needed to give me a demo first. First, they did a discovery call, and then they did another one, and then they did a demo, and then finally they told me the ballpark at the price. And I think somewhere in between that, they sent me a physical book that their founder had written about product-led growth. And then in the end, they were like, it was so far out of my ballpark that I was like, why did we just all do this? Like, I wasted so much of your money because you paid for like three people's four hours and shipping me a book, and it's like nowhere near my budget at all. Um and yeah, in in particular, I just thought that it was uh funny because the the thing that they were actually selling was supposed to support like self-serve selling, which obviously robot usage, robot. I would say probably for a manufacturer newer to using robots, even cobots, should probably not just buy something standard off the shelf without really having like a good enough consultation with someone, even if it is available to just see the price and buy it. Um but it's it's good to be able to enter the process wherever you're at. So if you have bought, let's say you've tried three different cobalt palletizers before, now you just kind of have a point of comparison. Maybe you know that you need a particular feature that you didn't get in the past, or there's something you like or you don't like, then you can kind of walk into that conversation knowing what you're looking for, what your comparison is between what you've used and not used. Um how would you say that like a brand new user to robotics should approach this kind of uh conversation with the with your partners looking at these standard solutions?

How New Robot Users Should Evaluate

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah, so I think they they need to understand what they're trying to do on the day-to-day basis. How many different SKUs are you running? How fast are they running? And um what are some of the other metrics that they they need to be able to hit? What are the what are their KPIs so that when they get to the show floor and they find these solutions, they can then go and say, here's all my specs, what I'm trying to do. Some some guys they don't actually understand that, right? I want something that's gonna palletize, and then they see this in a shiny object and it's oh that's uh that's great that it'll palize. Well, it's $125,000. It's amazing. You have to get down into the nitty-gritty of what can what can it actually do? Can it can it uh can it handle their payload, can it handle their speed, all that sort of thing. Um and then how does it function? Right. So the the biggest struggle that is still happening today, and it's gonna continue to get worse, is you know, is labor, it's keeping labor, it's it's having and then training, right? So they need to be able to put something on their floor that anybody can just walk up to this thing and run it. And maybe not only run it, but tweak it, you know, modify it. Um so maybe maybe the SQ, maybe you're gonna do SQU today. Um maybe the box size changed a little bit. Sometimes you get some, you know, your target supplier messes up a little bit and they're a little bit off. How do they adapt to that? And can they easily do that? You know, I was out with a customer a few weeks ago and you know they had bought one and they he says, you know, I won't put anything in the shop that I can't run myself. So, you know, how do they expect somebody else to run it if they can't run it? And here's an opportunity, right? With you're at these shows and they've got these solutions right in front of you, you can walk up to these HMIs and you can play with them, you can set up loads, you can literally kick the tires on them to see if that's something that will work for you. And you know, obviously you want to get even more intimate, you know, maybe you schedule uh an appointment to go out to their facility or maybe try to get something brought out to your shop to to take that, you know, demo test, trial run in your shop. Because, you know, this is something that people are buying these things in you know, traditional automations, people are looking for it to last 20 years. You know, you're gonna live with this thing for 20 years. You want it to be something that is gonna be reliable and work for you well and easy to take care of. And so it's it shouldn't be taken lightly on those on those considerations. And in in reality, we would take it, we're talking about cobalt palletizers here. There's over 20 of these on the easily. And so, how do you pick one? And you know, one of the best ways there is go test it out yourself, see if it works for you.

Comparing Palletizers By Usability And Safety

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Do you feel like the programming experience? Because obviously, with you guys, all of all of your partner solutions have a fanic cobalt as sure. The correct so then the difference is gonna be kind of how is it engineered? What are maybe the end of ARM tooling, like how is it put together? And then really kind of the HMI, the the running it experience is a big part of that.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

What is the user interface experience? You know, and so we have we have our own advertising software that some of our partners use, and then others have have built their own. And some people use maybe like a third-party software that's out there that they can buy and and adapt to their product as well. So which which one is you know, do they do they like best? And all this stuff comes sometimes the price is you know could be fluctuated here and there, but at the end of the day, the price isn't always you know that that different. It's it's you know how how it comes down to actual functionality. What is it even, you know, how does it um how portable is it? Some of these are on wheels, some of them are meant in fork truck, uh, some of them are meant to be uh tilted down, um, all those types of things. You gotta think about how you want to use it, yeah, where you want to put it, and then a lot of them are coming with area scanners to add additional safety capabilities. Um and so it's you know it's a good thing to take a look at that, those aspects as well and understand how they did their risk assessment and all all that kind of stuff shook out for them. There's there's there's a lot of right, and I actually one day uh sat down and uh kind of created a list. Um everybody who had one and and then I created like a grid of all these different metrics for them, right? How do I compare these side by side? So I I created my own grid to compare them side by side. Uh I've got customers come to me and they say, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 21:36

And um so I love to give uh my opinion and or you know my recommendations, and I'm not gonna do that here, but uh yeah, that's and that's another avenue to to look there. But yeah, I'm an engineer and when I look at these things, I I look at you know, which one would I buy and why would I buy it? And that's how I base my recommendations.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Okay. So are all the solutions that gonna talk about in your uh talk available to see in that cobalt and go booth?

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Unfortunately not. Um one of them will be in there. Um you know so I I'm gonna talk about you know cobalt palletizers and a couple other cobotic things but it's standard solutions. So some of them just use standard industrial robots.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

So you know our yellow robots uh you know as as like a modular palletizer, modular case packers, and some some picking as well some of the different solutions based around there and then uh kind of highlight a few different of the options that are available. And then I do have a slide showing the number of partners that you know all their kind of logos will be up there showing and tons of options right and that's that that's a main focus point there's you know there's not just one guy with these uh there's there's just a lot of options out there and and some people have different um offices for choosing right and maybe you're a new automation user and and you want somebody that's close by some some of my customers want somebody that's two hours down the road.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah and having multiple um partners like that and offer those and that makes it more possible to get them close by um and other people you know they're they're looking for best in class in that case they don't really care so much where it comes from they just want the best on the market some people it's price point some people it's you know they want to deal with uh inner with with a close culture match to them so there's there's lots of different bits and pieces of you know why they choose the partner with who they need but um I think a lot of them are found in shows uh you know a lot of the we find uh more of our successful uh people selling these solutions are at these shows and I think that you know a lot of their customers come from there um it's easier to be found I think um I'm sure there's there's interweb but it's there there's so much out there right how do you how do you find how do you land on the one that you did right and I think a big part of it is kind of like the fact that you show up at these shows shows that you have especially if you've been coming for a while right you have some longevity you're willing to invest in getting in front of your customers you're willing to get your product out there like that um and then I think just for I don't know if this is for everyone or for engineers in particular but just getting your hands on it. Because like I'll say in the living in the world of HMIs like I sell HMIs or my company we make HMIs we have a good website that has great pictures of them but like we're never going to be able to see how how you know how fast you can click on it or how it feels like when you click on it over the over the internet. Like you're gonna need to actually see it in front of you. And in these sorts of systems too there's there's enough to them that just seeing the specs um or even a video like it gets you somewhere but getting getting to actually see it and and hear it in person. And then also depending on how mechanically inclined you are or like how much experience you have with automation I know for me part of it is like just the feeling of what I hear and see when I hear the system operating because different people design things different ways. And uh I've I've known enough engineers in my lifetime now that would call themselves some sort of machine whisperers. Like they just have an innate sense of what they like and don't like about a machine when they hear it or see it operate. Like they can almost talk to it in a way um I don't know about like if if the owner of a manufacturing facility that isn't the person that's like with the automation all day would would consider that sort of stuff as well. But it's it's funny how how much goes into these types of decisions that isn't just the the nuts and bolts of the engineering right or the pricing. So that's a great point to bring up um very much depends on where you are what you consider important um to you and your operation why you would want to select a certain partner.

Wrap Up And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 25:51

So with that I think that is uh roughly time we're we're making these episodes quite a bit shorter than our normal uh normal series and maybe uh maybe one day we'll have you back on Wes to tell us all about your story your career why you're with Manic why you care so much about robots and cobots and uh food and beverage. Well thank you Wes I appreciate your time I look forward to seeing you at Automate I will make sure to stop by the booth at some point. I definitely want to see those new demos see the AI. I'm gonna be doing some interviews with NVIDIA folks uh I'm actually writing an article for uh OEM magazine on some of the AI uh stuff and you know sort of the the future of the software defined automation and what that means. So I'll definitely come and see what you guys are doing there. Uh and I would love to talk to anybody also that visits the booth. If you come see Wes, come see me. Tell me what you're thinking. And yeah, let's we're gonna have some fun at Automate. So hopefully if you're listening to this, if you're gonna be there, come see us. If not, hopefully this was worthwhile. I guess final thing if you're not coming to Automate and you want to reach out to Wes, you want to get maybe can you give people like a rundown of your presentation if they're interested or they can get directed to somebody at Fannec to talk to how should people connect with you following this if they listen and they are not going to be able to come see your talk or find you at Automate?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Yeah for sure. So you can reach out to me a lot of people reach out to me on LinkedIn. So you can find me at Wesley Garrett on LinkedIn with Fannec and then also my email Wesley.garrett so w e-sle dot g arfanecamerica dot com.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

All right and I can personally attest that Wesley Garrett is a is a fun guy to hang out with. So you should give him a follow uh connect with him if you're into robots. All right thank you guys see you later bye thanks thank you for listening to Automation Ladies if you like our content and you want to stay in touch please connect with us on LinkedIn, follow the show page, subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can send us a message or a copy on our website automationladies.io. We look forward to getting to know you