Manufacturing Matters

The Manufacturing Matters podcast aims to get to the heart of automation technology and how it plays into the growing manufacturing industry. Join us for insights and interviews discussing trends, innovations, and advanced automation technologies, such as robotics, machine vision, AI, and much more. Follow our social channels here: http://linktr.ee/m_mp

Manufacturing Matters is a technology podcast hosted by Tech B2B, with 154 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Tech B2B hosts Manufacturing Matters, a technology show with 154 episodes published.

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  Episode #153

  Episode 153 – Kyle Haworth, Founder, GuildHall

  Oct 2, 202645 minS4

  Most discussions about industrial automation and analytics concern operations with hundreds of employees. This episode of Manufacturing Matters explores a less traveled quarter: Small shops with maybe a dozen people on the floor, a founder who has run the place for decades, and a spring sales bump nobody has ever been able to explain. Our guest, Kyle Haworth, built his career building large-scale enterprise data systems before co-founding GuildHall to bring that same discipline to manufacturers under 30 employees and under $10 million in revenue. He notes that small shops often buy advanced technology before their processes are ready to absorb it, which is how some of them end up using a tenth of the ERP system they paid for. In this episode, TECH B2B Marketing’s Dan McCarthy and Aaron Hand also talk with Haworth about the readiness of small shops to handle artificial intelligence. Asking what AI enables is more productive than asking what AI replaces, Haworth argues. He shares a working example of using AI to connect siloed accounting, ERP, inventory, and quality systems to let owners ask plain-English questions and get a dashboard on the fly. Haworth’s closing advice for owners who assume they can’t afford outside help: Understand the problem and its inputs first. The tooling is now the cheap part of the solution, but it won’t do much good until owners first understand their processes. Support the show

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  Episode #152

  Episode 152 - Gerry Vannuffelen, CEO & Founder, Mantis Robotics

  Sep 18, 202623 minS4

  “You can have a high speed industrial robot, any type of robot really. And it doesn’t need fences, it doesn’t need safety devices. Everything is there. So it adjusts in real time to its environment.” A fence is usually the price of speed: put a high-speed industrial robot on a plant floor and you cage it off, or slow it down into a cobot and accept the productivity hit. Mantis Robotics founder and CEO Gerry Vannuffelen built the company to close that gap — fenceless robots that run at full industrial speed and adjust in real time to people working around them, reserving a hard stop for the rare moment someone actually reaches out and touches one. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, host Wynn Hardin sits down with Vannuffelen at Automate 2026 in Chicago to unpack how Mantis certifies its fenceless robots to the same ISO 10218 and ISO 13849 standards as traditional industrial robots — not through power-and-force limiting like a cobot, but through speed-and-separation monitoring that lets the robot see people and avoid them rather than collide or stop. The conversation covers the real-estate cost of a traditional automation project, why cobots often can’t match a person’s throughput, and how Mantis’s newest dual-arm robot splits the difference between a caged industrial arm and an expensive, slower humanoid — mountable on a pedestal, a cart, or an autonomous mobile robot. Vannuffelen also digs into Mantis Studio, the no-code deployment platform and real-time digital twin that — unlike most simulation tools — models the people working alongside the robot, not just the work cell. He makes the case for “physical AI” as the layer that closes the gap between AI’s sandbox reasoning and real-world manipulation, why a deterministic safety layer has to sit underneath any AI model that isn’t 100% reliable, and why he expects mobile manipulators — arms on wheels — to keep gaining ground on humanoids in warehouse and plant-floor settings. Support the show

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  Episode #151

  Episode 151 - Juan Aparicio of ReshapeX and Ajaiey Sharma of Novanta (ATI Industrial Automation)

  Sep 4, 202644 minS4

  “It’s really a needle in a mountain of needles and you just want to find one.” For most manufacturers, the hard part of AI isn’t the model — it’s the knowledge locked in the heads of veteran engineers. In this special Automate 2026 episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with ReshapeX’s co-founder and CEO Juan Aparicio and Novanta’s Ajaiey Sharma (ATI Industrial Automation) for a candid case study of how the two companies turned decades of tribal knowledge into a working AI agent. Novanta’s ATI tool changers can be configured millions of ways — the team pegs a single product line at roughly 7 million combinations — and pinpointing the one right configuration used to take days of back-and-forth with application engineers. Sharma and Aparicio walk through how they codified that expertise into an “agentic application engineer” that returns the right answer in minutes, why they set out to be the 5% of enterprise AI projects that succeed rather than the 95% that fail, and the build-versus-buy calculus that led Novanta to partner with ReshapeX. The conversation digs into the unglamorous work behind a reliable agent: gamified, week-over-week testing with real customer queries, a human-in-the-loop feedback loop that moves the system from probabilistic to deterministic, a knowledge graph that reasons on relationships instead of semantics to reach 99.99% precision, and continuous evals to guard against model drift. They close with a playbook for other manufacturers — define the real problem, secure executive cover, get your solution fit right, and treat it like a high-risk project — plus why codifying knowledge before it walks out the door may be the most important thing an established company can do. Support the show

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  Episode #150

  Episode 150 - Dale Hopkinson, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Services, Thales

  Aug 21, 202641 minS4

  “The value is moving from the metal to the code.” As manufacturers add AI and software to their products, the old one-time hardware sale is running out of runway when it comes to improving AI models for manufacturing. For Thales’s Dale Hopkinson, the real opportunity — and the real risk — sits in how that software and AI actually get monetized: not as a bolted-on price tag, but as a flexible, recurring business built to change as fast as the technology does. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin sits down with Hopkinson, Senior Product Manager for Cloud Services at Thales, to unpack why software is decoupling from hardware, what that means for OEMs retasking and repackaging existing equipment, and why Bain projects AI, software, and data will add roughly $70 billion to the market within five years. The conversation covers the organizational groundwork companies need before they can monetize AI — P&L ownership, dedicated staff, and roadmaps that survive personnel changes — plus the shift from subscription tiers to usage-based and hybrid pricing, the operational lift of managing renewals, entitlements, and channel relationships, and why protecting AI models and training data on the edge is now a board-level conversation. https://www.manufacturing-matters.com https://www.techb2b.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/manufacturing-matters/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/manufacturing_matterspodcast/ #manufacturing #automation #manufacturingmatters #techb2b Support the show

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  Episode #149

  Episode 149 – Ed Garstkiewicz, Senior Business Development Manager, Emerging Markets, HARTING

  Aug 7, 202632 minS4

  “The more we can do with it, then the more likely the humanoids are going to take off and be adopted.” Connectors rarely get top billing. Nobody designs a device around a connector — yet these humble components increasingly determine whether a smart factory, an edge deployment, or a humanoid robot works. As manufacturers push more data, more power, and more intelligence through the same shrinking footprint, the demands on interconnect technology are evolving as fast as the systems they serve. For this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Aaron Hand sits down with Ed Garstkiewicz, HARTING’s Senior Business Development Manager for Emerging Markets, at Automate 2026 in Chicago to talk about the fast-changing world of industrial connectivity. They dig into smart connectors that add sensors, status indicators, and intelligence right at the connection point; the constant balancing act between miniaturization and ruggedization; and why connectors may be one of the keys to making humanoid robots lighter, more efficient, and easier to repair. “A humanoid robot is the perfect example for the need for smart connectivity,” Garstikiewicz notes. “The wiring and connectors make up 5 to 10% of the weight of a humanoid. So if we can add functionality to the connector and reduce the need for other systems, we’re lowering the weight and improving the efficiency of the humanoid robot.” This could be a deciding factor in how quickly humanoids get adopted. If you’ve never given much thought to what’s at the end of the cable, this conversation makes the case that the connector is quietly becoming one of the smartest components on the factory floor. Support the show

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