Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, I think you brought up another really good point about leaning on suppliers or distributors. That's the biggest way that we bring in new projects. We find partnerships that are win win situations. So like I had said earlier with some of the engineering companies, you know, we work with a mechanical engineering company, we work with an electrical company, and if any one of our companies sells a system, we're all winning.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Robot Podcast. Thank you for joining us and thank you for subscribing. My guest today is Aidan Portman, and Aiden is with Jax Automation in Western Canada.
But before we get to our episode, I wanted to let you know about a new podcast that I'm starting called Automation Matters. It's about the front end of the automation business, and whether you're a builder, an integrator, distributor, or robot oem, this is for you. So this new podcast is about sales, marketing, biz, dev, strategy, and much more. And I'm excited about that, but we'll talk more on that later. Aidan, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for having me here, Jim. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: I was just sleuthing you on LinkedIn just before we got to this conversation, and I wanted to kind of find out, like, who is Aidan Portman?
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
Where to start? I guess I'll start with maybe how I got into robotics as a starting point. So I, I went to university out in Ontario. I went to Queen's University. I studied engineering physics with a minor in mechanical engineering. You know, I'll be honest, I didn't join engineering school because I knew I wanted to be an engineer.
My dad was an engineer. You know, When I was 18, 19 years old, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. But, you know, going to school for engineering surely wouldn't be that bad of an idea. I ended up taking engineering physics because it was renowned for being a challenging course. And I thought, well, if I'm going to go to school, you know, I might as well challenge myself and learn as much as I can. I had a lab in my third year of university. It was a mechatronics lab. And we, we were programming these remote control cars.
You know, we put little cameras on the front of them and we were trying to get them to follow lines or, or respond to traffic light sign, things like that. And it was the first time ever where I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm, I'm so passionate about this. Like, I loved the, the lab. I loved the instructor. At that moment, I kind of Knew I was like, you know, this is something I'm genuinely passionate about.
So I, I moved all of my electives to like mechatronics and robotics based electives and I started looking for system integrators that I, that I could start a career for. Like I said, I started out in Ontario but I really love the mountains. I'm a die hard snowboarder. So when I, when I graduated school I moved out to Revelstoke BC and I just snowboard bombed for two winters and I completely fell in love with the area. And I was asking myself, you know, how do I live here and do robotics? And there was a company at the time out of, out of Salmon Arm. They were called Technology Brewing and I looked at their website, I met the owner and I thought this place is it, this is exactly where I want to work. I applied, I interviewed, I didn't get the job at the time.
I stayed in contact. I applied again about a year later, still didn't get the job.
At this point I'm basically harassing the owner.
And after two years he finally gave me a shot. So I started working within the system integrator world in Salmon Arm. This would have been at least five, six, seven years ago now.
That was kind of how everything started.
From there I've worked as an engineering manager for a group of lumber mills. From there I started my own company.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Aidan, tell us a little bit about Jack's Automation. Like what are you concentrating on? What kind of jobs you getting?
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
So, so we really come from a lumber, a lumber background. We've been, we've been working in different automation projects within the lumber industry for about six years and that's been really successful for us. We really like the lumber industry and we really push a lot of our products in the lumber industry. And those products range from Optimizer systems, so 3D scanning with AI.
But we also do robotic pick and place applications or custom servo motor based solutions.
So that's our background. But one of the things we're trying to achieve currently is what other industries can we break into.
Especially after going through what happened in Covid where the lumber market took a pretty long lull there and you know, it kind of made me think, well, you know, we don't want to be all in on, on lumber. We want to have some other industries that, that we're involved in.
So, so that's currently a focus of ours. Some of the industries we're looking in, looking into is robotic welding. So we've recently onboarded with. With Fronius Welding as an authorized integrator.
So. So that's a market that we're. That we're chasing in 2025.
And then another market that we actually have quite a bit of experience in and it's kind of a niche is the rubber mat industry.
So we've done a handful of robotic installs for rubber mat manufacturers. These are the rubber mats that you see in home gyms and gymnasiums and things like that. And actually, one really cool thing that happened recently is I was in Costco and I turned the corner and there was a pallet of our products that our robot had palletized.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: And so what other kind? Like when you're doing work in the lumber industry, because you're deep in. For those people who don't know where BC is, it's. It stands for British Columbia. It's on the west side of Canada.
So you are in wood country, so you must do a lot of.
So I'm kind of thinking about computerizing drives and saws and this kind of thing. And material handling.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Yes, that's. That's right. Again, our specialty is really on the robotics and vision side. And we, you know, we lean on strategic partners for things that are outside of our core competencies. So, for example, one of the ways that we've grown this business is by partnering with mechanical engineering companies. So we work closely with a company called Core Engineering out of Kamloops.
They help us with our mechanical designs, they help us build conveyors and things like that. And then in similar fashion, on the electrical side, we partner with a company called Spark Automation and Electrical outside of Salmon Arm. And they'll help us with some PLC programming if we don't have time for it, but they'll also help us with our electrical installs.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: One of the things that I found out about you is I found it from an announcement that you were doing some work in the packaging industry, which I assume is kind of an interesting area for you as well. And you won an award with cfin, which is Canadian Food Innovation Network. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Um, so. So food and beverage has been on our radar for a while. Um, and. And we've done projects in the food and beverage over the past six to seven years.
A lot. A lot of food production is in Vancouver.
So we were actually approached by a factory and they had a robot, an existing robot that. That didn't quite work. Um, and I don't know the. The backstory behind it, but this, this customer had a robot that wasn't working and they really wanted to try to.
So they called us up and asked if that was something we would be willing to look into and we said absolutely.
Since they had already kind of spent their whole budget on the project, they didn't have much more money that they wanted to put down.
So one of the ways that we came up with to enable this project to be a success is we leaned on CFIN to see if they would support this project and they did.
So it was really an example of the stars aligning. You know, I don't think this project would have turned into anything if it wasn't for cfin.
And you know, a really exciting takeaway is they've just ordered their fifth robot since, since that first kickoff. It's a high speed pick and place application within a food production facility using a SCARA robot.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Nice. And so right now you're kind of in your growth curves and you're looking for more work. Obviously you're looking for the kind of things that you've done before. Material handling, automation, high vision content.
And you and I had the chance to walk a shofar recently in. Was it Detroit or was it Chicago? I can't even remember.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: It was Automate.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Automate, yes. Well, and it was a great show. It was a great conversation. I know we had and we had some chances to meet some of the people I know and from the industry. But I think that that's a really important thing for startup companies to consider is like at what point do we do we, you know, absolutely go to shows, but then what time, what, at what point do we participate in trade shows? Right.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. And you know, having yourself as a, as a connection has been really valuable and trying to navigate that path. But you're absolutely right.
You know, trade shows are an amazing source to meet new people, meet new clients, meet new potential partners, meet new employees. You know, you have experts in the same field, all in the same area looking to talk about the same stuff. So, you know, I'm a huge fan of trade shows.
The thing that you're getting to is, you know, at what point do you, do you set up a booth and advertise your products versus you know, walking the floor and making introductions and, and I think that's something we're still figuring out. We, we are enrolled to do our first exhibition at a trade show this year. Actually it's not, not as big as Automate. It's right, it's the Dex Expo in, in Langley. So it's, it's local to where we live. And we've been to it for the past couple years walking it. And last year when I was walking the show, there was a couple other integrators, there was a, a bunch of the distributors that we know and have worked for and you know, we said yes, like this, this is a good, a good avenue for us to take as a business. So we're excited to get into that this year.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: One of the things that we're going to chat a little bit about is some of the things that you'd recommend me to recommend to companies that are like yourselves, like high growth and startup mode and, but very capable.
And so I was looking at this before I came on here and one of the first pieces of advice is to get to know everyone, right? Like oh my God, from suppliers to vendors to partners to applications engineers. Like all those people in your cohort in your area that you want to attract to come work for you. One of the things I'm always telling people is be careful how much work in the automotive industry you take on. It's a, it's a big challenge. They don't treat you very well from a financial perspective.
So those are the things that are crushing for robot integrators, especially in startup mode where cash is king as well as the jobs.
So to me it's looking for those things that you do really, really well and, and repeating them and you know, the other parts. Of course, I'm a marketer. I'm always like, hey, make sure you build a big website, make sure you blog, make sure you take lots of pictures and use testimonials and do all those things that are kind of good marketing for, for automation integrators and also to lean on your suppliers. And I can't remember if I said that already, but the suppliers are so good when they're looking for small jobs. One lot of problems in the automation industry.
Automation integrators can't do small jobs very well because they've grown too big. They have to do million dollar projects. So look south of million dollar projects to, to get that work.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's really, really valuable insight and I agree with that. One of, one of my goals for 2025 is to really increase our network and get to know as many people as possible.
It's, it's a bit of a new thing for me. I'm an engineer by heart.
You know, I started out in my career tunneled in front of a computer screen for 40 hours a week. Obviously that's changed over over the past handful of years and I've taken on management roles since then. But it's something that I've gotten into over the years and now that I've been doing it a few years, I can fully, fully appreciate how valuable it is.
And I think you brought up another really good point about leaning on suppliers or distributors. That's the biggest way that we bring in new projects. We find partnerships that are win win situations. So like I had said earlier with some of the engineering companies, you know, we work with a mechanical engineering company, we work with an electrical company, and if any one of our companies sells a system, we're all winning. And then in similar fashion with our distributors, you know, we, we support their products, we know how to use their products and distributors have, have sales teams larger than ours. So if we can tap into that, that's, that's a really cheap way for us to, to, to push sales.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. I, you're exactly right that they have this 20 sales reps around the region or whatever it is and they know all the projects and they want to sell their product, of course, and that, and you're the perfect partner. I think when looking at these smaller type projects and bigger projects, like can you tell me how big a project you've done that's maybe bigger than your thought you could do?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So in general, being kind of a small, lean, mean engineering team, we do currently focus on your small to medium size producers or manufacturers.
In our experience, the big name companies, Ford or gm, it's pretty difficult for a startup integrator to get in the door.
I find companies that large really appreciate, you know, 25 plus years of experience because that gives them confidence that in 10 years that company is still going to be there and be able to support that system. So that's, that's one challenge that we've come into by, by looking at some of these bigger companies. But to get back to your question, the sweet spot for our projects, plus or minus, is usually within the half million to a million dollar range.
And I think that's working out well for us today.
Of course, as we scale, we'll need to be looking into taking on bigger projects. But right now it feels like we've found a place where we can thrive.
There's bigger integrators around us that sure they're getting some of the bigger projects, but we're getting a lot of the projects that they're not getting or not bidding on.
So you know, I think it's so important to keep a pulse on your Competitors, too. You know, who else is bidding on these projects?
Who's this customer talking to?
And knowing that lets you come up with a sales strategy that mitigates some of those risks that you might run into.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think that that's a smart, smart way to, to, to grow the business. I was going to ask, what kind of next for Jax, do you think you'll be hiring more applications engineers? Is it programmers? Like what. What do you see in your short term, long term?
[00:16:37] Speaker A: So we've recently just brought on two new. Two new hires, two new engineers. Both of them are working primarily within the software space. One thing I will mention, though, especially being kind of a smaller integration team, is there's a lot of value in people that are able to wear a lot of hats.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: You know, just because you're a wizard and in software, which, to be clear, is very valuable. You know, it's, it's really valuable when they can wire some of the stuff in themselves, you know, maybe even print a bracket that they can put into a 3D CAD software to facilitate, you know, their, their software project that they're working on.
So we are a software team. We definitely look for people with experience and software, whether that be machine vision, PLC programming, or robotic programming. But another thing we look for is people that are capable of wearing a lot of hats. And in my experience, the people that check those boxes are the people that are passionate about automation.
You know, they're, they have little Arduinos or Raspberry PIs at home. This is what they're doing outside of work. They're choosing to do this with their own free time.
And, and those are the people that, that we love bringing on board. Because, you know, I think you can train a lot of stuff, but, but training, attitude and aptitude is, is tough.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: When you're talking to your customers, what's kind of on their minds?
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Well, it depends on the customer.
You know, we hear every day someone says, I want to automate this process. I want to automate this process.
But one thing we're finding is a lot of the times what the customer thinks they want and what they might want a lot more might be different things.
So one of the roles I think that is really critical to play as an integrator is you're kind of an automation consultant as well.
You know, you're working with these manufacturing facilities that know their production line inside and out. You know, they, they might have started when they were 16 years old sweeping the floors. They worked up to A trades position, managerial position, and now they're running the show.
So they're very smart and capable people that know the in and outs of their, of their business. But sometimes what is missing is how automation and robotics can really add value to their operations.
So I think that's part of our approach is when we meet new customers, we don't say, yeah, that's a great idea, here's your price, let's do this.
We make sure that what we're proposing is actually a value add.
We've heard of stories before and also have some experience with this where you get a project and everyone's happy, you sign the piece of paper and it's, it's a celebration, it's a go. But, but what happens is you, you do the project and you might even get the project to work. But at the end of the project, the customer might realize, oh gosh, you know this, I still need the same amount of labor and, and maybe my throughput's not that higher.
And if you get yourself into a situation like that, I think you lose the audience.
Whereas if you take a different approach and you, you really put their needs first, you try to understand their automation can help. And if you, you add value like that, I find you're in the door.
So, so that's a little bit, I guess, about, about our approach when we, when we come across new, new customers that are, that are looking to automate.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Are you having the AI conversation at all or are you just kind of edging in on that?
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I think AI has got to be the buzzword of, of 2025. Maybe cobots was the buzzword of 2024.
Yes, is the short answer. And one thing I will say, so we developed lumber optimizers. We've been doing this for a long time. Our lumber optimizers have used AI before ChatGPT came out.
We absolutely have AI talent in house. We use a lot of AI with our machine vision systems.
The really interesting thing I think is, is I is seeing some of the trends in the technology that's coming available.
So, you know, take companies like Cognex and Keyence and lots of others as well, and they're pushing these AI on these cameras with onboard processing to do AI detection.
And the idea is you can plug these cameras in, you can save images, you can label them, you can train your AI model and you can deploy it.
And to do all of this, you haven't written a single line of code.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: So it's one thing that's really interesting I think, because obviously we have that talent in house.
So how do we find a value add that we're not going to get smothered by off the shelf products.
Off the shelf products are becoming better and better and better and the price to enter in terms of technical skills required is getting lower and lower.
And you see this across the board. It's not just the smart cameras that I had mentioned, but it's, it's major players like robotic, you know, off the shelf palletizing work cell vectus. You have off the shelf welding work cells.
So you know, when I joined this industry I thought, yeah, let's, let's do simple cobot palletizing. But you know, we've actually really changed our plan because, you know, there's off the shelf solutions for that. So I think one of the really important things about integrators is finding your place in the industry because your place probably isn't going to be reinventing what someone has done off the shelf. I mean, that's not totally true. I mean, obviously there's going to be competitors and if you get enough project velocity, you can make it work.
But as an integrator like us that specialize in custom automation, we're kind of straying away from that. We think we need a certain level of complexity and customization that the client needs an integrator, otherwise they don't.
We're seeing it across the board. Like we, we've commissioned a few robotic palletizers. It's not our main line of work, but you know, we're happy to do it. And a lot of the time what will happen afterwards is we'll train their maintenance staff on the system and they'll say, you know, this is so simple, I can do this myself. And, and they're right. They, they can.
So, so I guess that's a little bit of my tangent on, on some of the industry trends that we really try to keep a close eye on and, and make sure that, you know, we're not going to fall into a trap of making a, making a bad mistake.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: And tell me a little bit more about the wood industry from your perspective. What are some of their challenges?
They have its throughput, it's uptime, it's reducing downtime. What else?
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so the obvious one that I, that I think is across the board here is labor shortages. It's, it's hard for people to find labor and it's hard for people to find labor at all levels.
Operator positions are hard to fill, especially in some of these remote Towns. So we're in British Columbia and there's lumber mills everywhere, but a lot of the places are small towns, so it's hard to find people that want to work.
So that's a major challenge that is coming up. And it's not just lumber that we're hearing that in, it's across the board.
So that's an interesting observation. People are having labor problems. Surely that's gotta be good for automation.
There's, there's a lot more related to lumber that comes to mind, especially in regards to BC lumber. You know, the lumber market has gone through a little bit of turmoil recently with the future prices of lumber. And even in the news, you know, we're reading about new lumber mills announcing curtailments across the board. We're hearing about Canadian lumber mills shutting down and, and new lumber mills opening up in the United States.
So you know, to me I'm asking, well, why is that? What's going on here? And you know, I've spoken to experts about this. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but the general answer that we get is there's been a little bit of a mismanagement of our, of our forests in bc. We've overlogged and you know, we're kind of battling that mistake that was made.
The cost of trees is, is high and the quality of trees is, is low.
And part of that is because that there's just not enough supply of harvestable trees currently. And, and you see it just driving around as well. You know, I'm used to seeing logging trucks with, with trees that are, you can hardly hug, but, but now sometimes you see them and you think, gosh, like, can you even get a two by four out of that? Or, or is that tree just going straight to the chipper? And seeing stuff like that, you know, actually makes me a little bit sad.
And then the other part about this conversation that comes to mind is stumpage fees. So in order for lumber mills to produce, they have to pay stumpage fees to account for the forests that have been taken down. And from an environmental perspective, I'm fully on board with that, especially taking into account that we're currently battling mismanagement of the forests. That's made it crystal clear how important it is to do this right.
But when you compare that to lumber mills in the United States that are operating with less taxes, less stumpage fees, it's hard for Canadian companies to compete on the global stage.
So that's some of the stuff that comes to mind when I think of the lumber industry.
What, what we're thinking about, what we're hearing from, from clients.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Aidan, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. Is there anything that we've forgotten to talk about?
[00:27:08] Speaker A: So one of the. Just reading through my notes here a little bit. So you had asked about some of the system integrate difficulties with system integrators, and a couple. One of the things I wanted to talk about was when we meet customers, they're always expecting like two to three years roi. And to me, that's actually really limiting the type of technology that they can afford. And a lot of the time, if the customer was willing to pay a little bit more money or willing to entertain a longer roi, they'd be getting a significantly better system. But one of the issues that we're having is people want a two year roi, three maximum.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Aidan, one of the challenges with automation integrator in your location is you have to educate your clients a lot. Is that true?
[00:27:57] Speaker A: So like I said earlier, one of the ways that we really approach our new customers is to try to act as automation consultants. You know, we want to understand their problems and we want to come up with solutions for those problems. We don't want to go there with a solution and force it on them.
And a lot of the time we're training them on what robots can do, what, what limitations are there, what are they good at?
You know, collaborative robots have become a very talked about item that I think are quite misunderstood. You know, there's absolutely a space for collaborative robots, but there's absolutely a space for industrial robots as well.
So explaining that to customers is something we often come into.
The other thing that we really have to help customers sometimes with is their ROI calculations. There's a lot of things at play when it comes to roi. It's not just as simple as, okay, what's the price of the system, how much labor is being replaced and calculating an roi.
There's things like, how much more throughput are we getting?
That's a huge factor in a lot of these ROI calculations. How about, what is the downtime on the production line? Are you running more?
That's also a value add for the ROI calculations and you know, kind of linking it to some of the challenges we're hearing from customers is labor shortages. Right.
So another thing that I'm finding we're talking about more often is, you know, what's your labor force reliability? You know, how, how bad is it if people don't show? Um, and it's becoming more common than you think. And you know, I'm always scratching my head about this because I was raised that you show up to work on time and you leave on time, but.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Absolutely, I'm with you on that, Aidan.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: So, so that's some of the things that, that we've found that we have to, to teach and that's what we do. We're experts in automation. We're happy to, to provide insight into, into these kind of projects and form relationships with people that, that want to automate.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. I think there's a lot of engineers that are no longer in the plants. A lot of people that need to be educated on automation, on how it can work, what those expectations are. And like you say, the roi, the two year roa, just in a lot of times in smaller plants, smaller automation systems just isn't there.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Aidan, thanks for coming on the podcast today. I certainly appreciate it. And how can people get a hold of you?
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Well, the best way is to either go on our website, reach out to us on LinkedIn, you'll find my contact information on there, email, phone, you know, we're a friendly, friendly people. If there's anything anyone wants to talk to us about, don't hesitate to reach out.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: And what's your website?
[00:30:55] Speaker A: It's J a k s jaxautomation.com Jax is spelled J A K S.
Our.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Sponsor for this episode is Earhart Automation Systems. Earhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing and project management, delivering world class automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you. They're at infoarheartautomation.com and Earhart spelled EHR H A R D T. I'd like to acknowledge A3 the Association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And today's podcast was produced by Customer Attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner Janet and our sponsor, Earhart Automation Systems.
