Speaker 0 00:00:00 And for me, that passion always been product development. And when I was a teenager, I literally had all the CAD software that exists at that time installed on my computer. All of this obviously emerged from just a deep rooted passion for product development and industrial technology. I like to say there's nothing more, uh, manual than industrial automation.
Speaker 2 00:00:28 Hello everyone, and welcome to the Robot Industry Podcast. My name is Jim Beretta, and I'm your host. Thanks for subscribing and thanks for being with us today. It's my pleasure today to have AAN from Venture here with us on the podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:41 Welcome, Jim. It's a pleasure to be with you and all your audience. Hey,
Speaker 2 00:00:45 Can you, uh, share a little bit about yourself and how you got venture started? And I'm gonna get you to talk a little bit about venture for some people out there who may not have heard of you.
Speaker 0 00:00:54 Of course. In short, Vincent, our mission is to democratize industrial automation. And we're doing this with a Lego like platform where people can design in the cloud industrial equipment and robot sales, and eventually, uh, you know, automate them, order them and deploy them, uh, on their factory floor with SA software assistance throughout. And that was a big mission we started back in 2016. And like any big mission, you need a lot of passion to bring them through fruition. Um, and for me, that passion always been product development. I think around when I was a teenager, maybe around 16 or 17 years old, I literally had all the CAD software that exists at that time, installed on my computer, not sure if you remember, like ideas and mechanical desktop in the early version of SolidWorks and of pro engineers. Basically I was a power user in all of them.
Speaker 0 00:01:47 And, um, engineering was such of a passion and product development was such of a passion that I ended up in a small engineering firm, a system integrator, basically designing, uh, robot cells and automated equipment myself, I think at the time I was probably around 18, 19 years old serving, um, bean based in Montreal, the automotive and, uh, aerospace industries. And that's how I got familiar with the traditional workflow that I, that I like to call to design those equipment. And that's how I got first 10 exposure to the very problem we're trying to solve. But back then, when I was a young and heger engineers trying to come up with a, let's say a machine from one of my client, I would probably start my journey by going on an industrial distributor website, pray for the treaty model to be online. Sometime they were, sometime they weren't.
Speaker 0 00:02:35 I was downloading the part I could find for everything else. I was designing them from scratch. And then you end up with all those components perhaps in SolidWorks, and you realize that all the manufacturers of those component, whether it's a motor, a sensors safety system, A P L C, they all use standard, but different one. So as the eager engineers, you end up designing a lot of custom parts, custom frame, custom bracket, custom wire harnesses to get all that system to work. So, um, very rapidly you understand that you're in the middle of a project that takes multiple, multiple months and, uh, by the time you can actually assemble that machine tested and deploy an effort at your client. And, uh, one day, funny story, I was in Florence with my, uh, you know, uh, visiting Florence at the time, and, uh, it just clicked in my head, what if everything else was Lego? What if all the Lego parts were in the cloud so I can order them and get them next day? It would literally change a workflow or traditional workflow I've done myself hundreds of times and we can make that significantly fast. So that was the thesis that was in 2014 at the time. And, um, all of this obviously, uh, emerged from just a deep rooted passion for product development and industrial technology
Speaker 2 00:03:49 And prevention offers a d I y approach, a do-it-yourself approach to automation that's never been seen before in the industry. And what are some of those insights on venture's unique approach?
Speaker 0 00:04:01 Yeah, so it started with the, I guess the, the, the, the point of view that most manufacturing sites in Canada and in the United States aren't automated today, right? Only the high throughput manufacturers are, and the reason they aren't is mostly because it's too costly to do so with today's technology. Think about the cost that I had as a young engineers navigating those project. You know, there's a lot of man hours in a industrial automation project. I like to say there's nothing more, uh, manual than industrial automation because putting those systems together just takes a lot of time. Um, and, uh, I guess the learning we had is if we're able to make that workflow so simple, right, this ideation of a machine designed programming and deploy a machine, very, very simple, then we can empower the manufacturers to do it by themself. And that really literally remove a lot of costs and empower so many more manufacturers to automate in a profitable way, even if they're not high throughput, perhaps they're iix.
Speaker 0 00:05:05 So that idea came around, as I said, around 2014. And today, obviously we're, I think at the forefront of being able to serve directly manufacturers that maybe have one or two engineers that are not necessarily control expert or they're necessarily like robot expert, but just know enough about how manufacturing process work. And if you give them the right tools, tools that are easy enough, they can do beautiful thing by themself, right? So it creates what I call do it yourself automation. And today that's our primary businesses are those, um, you know, manufacturing professional, again, that are not control expert all the time, but can do beautiful thing, uh, by themself. So
Speaker 2 00:05:49 Building a cloud-based manufacturing automation platform must come with some unique challenges. So what are some of the major obstacles that you faced during ventures development and and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 0 00:06:02 There's, there's so many of them, but if you rewind back when we started venture in 2016, we were wondering would people actually accept to design outside of SolidWorks or Katia? Will people even accept to assemble their machine by themself? Because if one of those thing is a, is a false, there's no business model, there's no business to build, right? So we, those were very much what I call those leap of fate hypothesis or leap of fate assumption that if or not proven true, we can all go back home and go do something else. So obviously the level of risk was very high back then in 2016. Those has been proven since then. But I think the, the most challenging part is we operate what we call very integrated tech stack. We absorb a tremendous amount of complexity to expose simplicity to the end user. You know, um, apple has shown the world that if you combine hardware and software together as one, you can create those very simple user, you know, user workflows where everybody now can enjoy democratized music.
Speaker 0 00:07:07 If you remember, uh, Jim in the probably early 2000, if you wanted to listen to digital music, you had to go on Napster and lime wires and all those platform. And back then my own parents could not consume digital music. They were still buying CDs because of iTune and the iPod. Obviously they were able, but to get to that level, it took a company that had the gut to take both hardware and software to make them work as one. And that's what we're doing with venture, right? We have both the hardware and the software to create those user flow that are so simple where a non-expert that still has pattern recognition about manufacturing process can be successful. So to get there is, uh, is actually quite hard. There's what I call the test of reality. Everything works always well in the cloud. You bring it to the shop floor and there's a lot of things to consider, right?
Speaker 0 00:07:56 The robot will not be positioned exactly two foot away from the cncs. The tool will wear over time. And when you want to do machine tend with some level of autonomy, you'll have to consider that, right? Like, there may be an operator that's gonna hit the machine with their forklift and needs to be reinitiated remotely. There's a lot of consideration to be done. So I think that's probably, uh, a lot of the challenge we had to live, um, over the years, right? Part validation, transposing the digital world into the physical world, um, is a, is a never ending, um, uh, uh, challenges and frontiers. We just need to be very focused on enabling the use case one after the other.
Speaker 2 00:08:33 And Chen, I'm, I've been following you for, uh, as long as you've started, I think, and, and we talked a lot about machine builders and such, but one of the things that I found fascinating about, uh, venture was the, the interface when you built up, uh, a tool, you could actually see it in motion. So he spent a lot of time and a lot of energy and, and a lot of, probably a lot of money, uh, getting that, uh, configuration engine up and running.
Speaker 0 00:08:57 Yeah. Um, you know, mentioned today, and, and you touched on it, one of our primary product is machine builder. Think of this as a, um, uh, a CAD software where the only intent is to create automated equipment and robot cells. And in that software we injected close to 2000 Lego part industrial Lego part obviously. So robot arm conveyor structure control system sensors, and all the parts that are available in this environment are compatible with one another, right? It's a single architecture across all the building block. In fact, you need one's crew size and one tool to assemble your entire machine. And because of we, we have the geometric data and the metadata of every Lego parts, we can do a beautiful amount of software automation that would never be possible in the traditional CAD software. So I'll give you some example. As you add parts to one another to create a structure of your machine, we'll give you realtime pricing, uh, as you add the robot and so on.
Speaker 0 00:09:54 We can give you realtime, uh, bill of material realtime amount of fasteners so you don't have to manage this. We can even recommend you the next best part, perhaps you've added a, a universal robot cobot or authentic cobot in there, and you want to have the right gripper. You wanna make sure you select the one that is compatible with the, you know, we can start to automate all those tasks. So the act of designing those machine is just simpler and fast, right? A lot of client now that have adopted venture over the years start to conduct their own speed improvement study. And what we're realize is we're able to shrink the human components of design roughly by three to five time, right? Versus using the, what I call the traditional approach with the traditional CAD software that has not been geared exclusively for industrial automation. So this, this ecosystem now of, of, uh, online design with those modular parts, those plug and play components was something that wasn't proven at all in 2016 when we started today. I think now a lot of people are embracing that way of doing things because it's just so much faster versus the traditional world.
Speaker 2 00:10:58 Yes. And you must be accumulating a lot of data because of course you see what everybody's thinking of in an automation system. So I I, we should get another podcast one one time and talk about that. 'cause I think the data part of, uh, building automation is a really cool, cool part.
Speaker 0 00:11:14 Absolutely. And it, and it, and I think clients are benefiting like the, um, uh, the little feature where recommend you. The next best part is obviously based on, you know, learning from our own dataset over and over again. I think right now, uh, with 16,000 machine in the field and hundreds of thousands of design that were created on the platform, we have a, a tremendous amount of opportunities to, uh, you know, bring insight to, to our clients, make their life easier. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface here. I've
Speaker 2 00:11:42 Mentioned pub published a do it yourself automation report a few weeks ago, and we're recording this in, in August in 23. Can you share some insights on the level of adoption of do it yourself across
Speaker 0 00:11:52 Manufacturers? Yes. This was a, um, you know, one of my, uh, a special project that was in my mind for a few years, and I'm so happy the team we finally, uh, published that report. But let me start by saying invention is a, is a perfect environment to understand, uh, people's behavior and industry behavior across all of our client. Everybody use the same Lego part, everybody use the same software, so it neutralized, neutralized a lot of noise that you would normally get in those studies. And, uh, we are industry agnostic. We serve discreet, uh, T 25 roughly discrete manufacturing industries. So the quality of learning of, of a comparability is actually quite high. It removes a lot of bias and noise and data. So the first thing we found is of all the client, right, that, that uses venture and, and know we're, we're lucky these day, we serve thousands and thousands of manufacturers around, um, 75% of those are small and medium businesses that would not have had the means to automate otherwise, right?
Speaker 0 00:12:51 So this is a pure market expansion play, and it helps manufacturers obviously staying competitive as a result of being able to adapt, add, adopt industrial automation. Now, of those clients, what we've learned is almost 50% of the work is entirely self-serve. This is also massive because that means we're able, in those thousands of clients, 75% of which are small, medium businesses, 50% of the work now is done by manufacturing professional that we're not expert, and then today can actually start developing that skill set and obviously help all the manufacturers in the western world uplift their, their, uh, their, uh, competitivity. So this is, this is a great, great learning. Now, if I go to some, you know, uh, more details here, one of the learning we've made is who's going fast and who's slow, right? Because we can compare across industries. So we can look at how much does it take time for somebody to conduct an industrial automation project from the ideation, perhaps when you start your design and the moment it's deployed in your factory, we can measure those things.
Speaker 0 00:13:56 And what explained the, the differences between, let's say, aerospace and consumer electronics, right? So we start to look at the data and think one thing that start to become visible is product lifecycle has a lot to play here. If you take, um, you know, uh, um, electronic contract manufacturers that runs very short-term contract, perhaps batches that have three, four months or productions or so, those people value time. They value time quite a bit because their product lifecycle is so short. So if they can put in place the manufacturing system in just a few weeks as opposed to several months, right? When we've used the, the process that I've used myself as a young integrator, this means, uh, that correlate to a lot of value for them, right? I can deploy this in just a few weeks, and therefore I extended perhaps my product lifecycle by a month or so, and you realize that those clients will go as up to three times faster than if I take, for example, an aerospace manufacturers where, uh, product lifecycle, an aircraft shelf life is 25 year. The sense of urgency in those industry is very different, right? Perhaps the engineers working on the aircraft today will probably have retired by the time the aircraft sometime is, is launched. So those things start to come alive when you start to compare across industries. I think the big learning here is do it yourself. Automation is, is here to stay. As the technology is getting more and more simple, like platform like venture that are exclusively focused on empowering small needs and businesses to automate by themself, we'll see that movement take more space.
Speaker 2 00:15:32 Uh, et automation's been traditionally more leveraged by larger corporations. And so how do you see do-it-yourself automation disrupting this landscape?
Speaker 0 00:15:42 Yeah, I think it's not, to me so much is a disruption, but more of an expansion. Um, we're lucky we work with large, large throughput manufacturers today, uh, but our, our, as I I said earlier, bulk of our, of our clients are small medium manufacturers that would not be able to automate with today's technology because it's too manual to integrate and deploy and turn forward to costly. So I don't, I don't think our intent here is to disrupt any players. I think it's to really serve a portion of the market that was clearly underserved. And, uh, we can do that with a business model that is very different, where one, where people can serve self-serve a little bit more than than today. Uh, the analogy I like to use, uh, for those of us that are familiar with the c r m space or, you know, uh, uh, customer relationship management spaces is HubSpot. I think HubSpot has shown the world that, um, if you're gearing the product to small museum manufacturers and you make the product simple enough, you can self adopt. You don't need perhaps, uh, you know, a Salesforce integrators to come to your, uh, you know, uh, uh, sales team and define the sales process for you and spend weeks and weeks customizing and adopting the software for you, right? Those example I've shown to be successful with small, medium businesses, and we're replicating that in our, in our market here of, of, uh, industrial automation.
Speaker 2 00:17:05 And I think that, uh, with machine builders and robot integrators, there's just not enough of them. So like, your timing is impeccable because there's so many of them getting bought up and they're disappearing. So having do it yourself is certainly a really good timing for you for the market.
Speaker 0 00:17:20 Yeah. Uh, being a system integrator, I can, you know, we're lucky we work with several of them that adopt venture for their, for their own benefit. And it's a, it's a, it's a very difficult profession. First of all, there's a shortage of, of good qualified system integrator in the market, um, which prevents smaller manufacturers to, to automate. But it's also very hard from a system integrator perspective to have a, a business that is consistently healthy because we take a lot of risk when, as a system integrator is to dev, deploy, deploy those solution. And I was one myself and one project outta three. Sometimes you end up losing money as opposed to make money because you, you've bidded a little bit too low. You took it a bit more, too much risk. And the solution to that is the same. Industrial automation needs to be more productized, need to be simplified, so people just take the right amount of risk and the right amount of profit. So collectively we can continue to automate, uh, manufacture facilities here in the United States and Canada.
Speaker 2 00:18:13 Thank you for that. Chen, do you have, um, maybe like a do-it-yourself success story that you'd like to share with our audience?
Speaker 0 00:18:19 Yeah, we have, um, luckily for us, we have a, we have a few obviously, but I'll talk about two, uh, that are, um, a very meaningful to us because they, they gave us a lot of confidence that we were on the right track in the earlier years of venture. Um, one of them is actually, uh, uh, you know, large, uh, outdoor power equipment manufacturers. And, um, they ended up hiring this, uh, one former system integrators to put in place, what I call their advanced manufacturing team. They're a team to navigate one or two, uh, uh, uh, one or multiple factory to drive the automation roadmap. And this team works by proof of concept, right? They're on a big mission right now to retool some brown side facilities, um, for upcoming regulation. And they have new products coming and they need to deploy a welding cell.
Speaker 0 00:19:07 And they did one proof of concept. They did the whole analysis of going down the, um, you know, uh, integrator route or productized route versus using venture in the whole platform. They realize that for them it means 40% saving three times faster from ideation to deployment. And they've confirmed that to a first proof of concept. And now they've deployed, uh, I think we're at around 15 or so robot cell that they've deployed in a self-serve fashion in that factory. And they would've done that with a fraction of the capital it would've cost them versus the traditional approach. This was a large client, and obviously they had mean to put in place this first person to, to drove the roadmap. But this, this client really helped us to show that even in larger corporation, they're able to do a lot of the work by themself. Now, I'm gonna use a much smaller client.
Speaker 0 00:19:56 It's a small businesses that serve a big retailer with m decoration product, and they're manufacturing their m their, their own m decoration product, um, uh, you know, um, uh, dry flowers and flower decoration that they've been drying. And they do frames and decoration with this. And there was one guy in there, he's a, you know, mechanical technician, um, not a control expert, and decided to automate all material movement. A lot of the working station, the assembly is still manual, but didn't want to have to move the batch from one station to the next. And for him, that was the business case. If I can remove all the movement in the factory, that means I can save a humongous amount of hours and obviously go over labor shortages a little bit better than what they were facing today. So the implementing fairly sophisticated conveyor logic with overhead conveyors across all that factory, you know, it's not highly complex. The product is easy to move, but it's a great success story. And the users was able to deploy by himself again, with, you know, code free programming, standard conveyors working on the venture control system, and now at least they have the material flow across the factories is automated. Not a big client, but again, you needed one guy who's not an expert, wanted to develop or start the automation roadmap there and achieve great success.
Speaker 2 00:21:13 Et. Jen, do you have a, uh, the, thank you for that. That's, those are a couple of great stories. Um, do you have any kind of, uh, trends on, like, you, you, you do a lot of work with collaborative robots, uh, you do probably work a lot of work with assembly and material handling and welding. Are there anything that's coming up on your radar time and time again?
Speaker 0 00:21:32 So there's the, the four, there's four trends I think that are, um, if you look at most people in the space that are trying to push the frontier just live, they will all emphasize one or more of those teams. So I'll name the four, and obviously we're very involved into those ourself. The first one is obviously automation will just continue to be much simpler. I think, you know, I, I think the years where we're gonna accept pigtail wire and custom cabinets are, are counted, and more and more we just want plug and play products, uh, uh, that you don't need an electrician to deploy. So automation will stay, will become friendlier. Um, the next thing is just more productization overall. We see productization happening at a two level, at the component level. Safety, for example, is becoming more and more modular. So you don't have custom programming, custom wiring to do every single time, but also application are becoming more productized, you know, case packing, uh, case erecting, palletizing.
Speaker 0 00:22:30 There's more and more productized offering in those space. And I think we're just, as an industry just scratching the surface, productization at the components and, and application level will, will continue. I think something that's a bit harder to crack though is, um, really what I call moving from the cloud to the factory and making sure there's, um, that workflow works well every single time. That means that when you deploy, you can configure the hardware at the same time. You can load your automation program, you can recalibrate for your program between the virtual world that is perfect in the real world, and there's various approach to, to bridge that, that workflow. But I think that's gonna be a very, very important team. Um, and for this, this workflow to create a lot of value, you wanna make sure that your digital twin and your simulation is fully accurate, right?
Speaker 0 00:23:23 If we get to a, and that's my last, I guess, team or trend. If you get to the perfect digital twin, the perfect simulation, and then you have the confidence that you can download or, you know, transpose that perfect simulation to the factory floor, then you can make automation really, really easy. So it's gonna be, uh, multiple, you know, problems to be cracked, but, but continue to make automation easier, continue to productize the component and the application, you know, enable the cloud to factory flow deployment and obviously make simulation and digital twin as accurate as they can be so it can translate, translate in real life. Um, and you know, if you listening to what's going on in the industries, people will start to have flavors start, start to have flavor or word for this. Some will call that virtual commissioning. We're calling that, you know, uh, uh, we call that, um, in our, in our, in our world, we have a product called Machine Cloud that start to do some of those capabilities, but I think there's gonna be a big, big, big frontiers. And for a consumer electronics products, we already expect that. We'd already expect that when you plug your Sonos speakers, it's connect to your wifi and they pair themself, you know, but we're not there yet in terms of having the expectation for industrial automation technology, but I'm truly convinced this is exactly where the market is going. Thank
Speaker 2 00:24:37 You for that. And can you share any other exciting, uh, upcoming features or development that venture users can look forward to?
Speaker 0 00:24:45 There's a few, right? We venture, we describe ourself as a manufacturing automation platform, and to date, we have been built around four pillar, the design pillar with machine builder, the automate pillar with machine logic where you can program code free the ordering pillar where people can order, and there's a one-stop shop online and, and the deployment pillar, as I just talked about with, you know, software assistant, like machine cloud and so on. But, um, there's more to be done, for example. Um, you know, there's a lot of support and assistance that can be provided once the machine is deployed. Uh, I think for us this year we've released remote support. Think about that as a telemedicine, but for machine where you can click and have access to a doctor or a, you know, an automation technician or engineers within a second to help you, we never know if, uh, an operator might, you know, touch a button in the night shift and need assistance, maybe even in an accident, and the forklift hit the palletizer, you need to restart the whole thing overnight.
Speaker 0 00:25:42 So those things are an example of providing support, but there's, there's so much more that can be done once the machine is deployed to really make the life of running a shop floor easier. And I think that's where you'll, you'll hear more about us in the, in the coming weeks. Um, every year we have a, an event called Demo Day. Uh, this year is in October, October 5th. That's where we talk all about the, uh, latest products that are coming up on the venture platform. And obviously we'll be sharing more on that front of how we help our users once the machine is deployed.
Speaker 2 00:26:15 10. Is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience today?
Speaker 0 00:26:19 I think, you know, if you're a small medium manufacturers today in the world that we're living with labor shortages, um, supply chain disruption, uh, the current macroeconomic position between various countries, I think it's very important for every manufacturer to have an automation roadmap, right? If you haven't yet started to your own reflection around when is the first robot, what are the business cases or the automation use cases that will create value for me, it's really time to get started. You know, and what we advise our client all the time is once you've, you know, you've worked with us or as somebody else to find those businesses, start with a small win, right? Because if the first project is not a win or not a success, the ability for management to further invest will be greatly diminished. And, and that would be a sad story because our manufacturers here need to automate, um, the, the, the, the market and the trend that we're living now, um, are such that I don't see a world where tomorrow we're not more automated than today. And I think manufacturers need to start to be serious about this and start small, have a success so they can chew bigger next time.
Speaker 2 00:27:26 Hey, Achen, thanks for coming onto the, uh, podcast. And what can people do? What, what do you, um, if they wanna learn more,
Speaker 0 00:27:33 Best way to get started is simply go on invention.com or invention.io, and on this website you have access to all of our design tool entirely for free. It's very easy to go with Machine Builder and perhaps start to play with the cobot in the virtual world, start to program it. And if you need help at any point in time, there's a great button called design assistance. And if you click here, you'll be connected with a real human, not a robot to help you out and share the knowledge. Uh, we've been exposed to so many use cases over the years that there's always someone invention that can help you, uh, crack, uh, a certain manufacturing problems. And again, this is, um, entirely free to use
Speaker 2 00:28:12 Jen, thanks very much again for coming on, and, uh, we, uh, hopefully I'll catch up with you at the next trade show or so.
Speaker 0 00:28:18 Thanks, Jim. It was a pleasure to connect again and then talk about automation.
Speaker 2 00:28:23 Our sponsor for this episode is Erhardt Automation Systems. Erhardt 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 custom automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you. You can send them an email at
[email protected]. And Earhart is spelled E H R H A R D T. I'd like to acknowledge a three, the Association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. You can visit
[email protected] to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the Robot Industry Podcast, you can find me, Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Be safe out there. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Traction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to recognize Chris Gray for the music. Jeffrey Bremner for audio production by business partner Janet and our sponsor, Earhart Automation Systems.
