Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Somebody gets injured and they have to shut down the plant for a day or longer. Then they see the real value of safety. We see now customers are getting more and more cautious about safety.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome to the Robot industry podcast. We're broadcasting today from the ADM Toronto show and my guests are Guillaume Lavoy and Andre Sabata from Pilts Canada. And so welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Welcome and thanks for having us here. My name is Andreas Sabota. I'm the general manager of Pilts Automation Safety Canada. I'm since seven years with the company pilts, over 30 years in the industry, always automation industry. I was working for companies like Siemens, Phoenix, contact Festo, et cetera.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Thank you for that. And Guillaume, can you maybe take a minute and introduce yourself?
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:56] Speaker C: My name is Guillaume Navois. I'm the product manager at Pills Canada. Just about one year with pills. I've worked in the industry for almost 20 years, worked with Andres in the past and other companies in the industry as well.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: That's great.
I wanted to have one of you tell our audience a little bit about pilts, the company. So Andre, will you take that question?
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Pilts focused on just 100% focused on safety. It's a family owned business out of Stuttgart, Germany called the middle stunt which with sales of CAd600 million worldwide we employ 2500 people. Most of the products come from Europe, from the main plant in Germany, then in France, Switzerland, and we also have a chinese plant and this actually manufactures mostly for the asian market. So most of the products you get here in Canada are from the plants in Europe. Pills is growing. The good thing with family owned business is that they don't look just into quarters of performance, but they think way ahead of time. Our business plans are five years out. That is very important for our customers as well. They also know that five years from now, ten years from now, we will still be there because a family owned business usually will not be sold to one of the big guys.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Thank you for that. And of course I know pilts forever from my life at ATS automation and putting in some of your safety relays and light curtains and a lot of those products. So Andreas, what's happening around safety in the factory and are you seeing some certain trends?
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Well first of all, when I came to pilts like seven years ago, as I mentioned, safety was not a huge topic. It was not on the priority, high priority list because companies don't see the advantage right away because it does not add value in the opinion of the companies. However, if somebody gets injured and they have to shut down the plan for a day or longer. Then they see the real value of safety. We see now customers are getting more and more cautious about safety. They attend trainings from us to get trained on safety. And we also see now a trend for more automation in safety for higher end products, safety PlCs, et cetera. Safe drives. Ontario actually is the forefront of safety. Then we have Quebec and in western Canada, it's almost nothing yet.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Some opportunities there for you in western Canada, for sure.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Let's talk about innovation in the safety industry. And Guillaume, what's some of your thoughts on that?
[00:03:40] Speaker C: What I've seen just in the industry in general is everyone is really looking forward to bringing in more data in their machines to be able to make smarter decisions. What we've seen in just a standard automation is iolink has really driven the data structure and the technology. What pills is working on, as well as many other companies, is to bring that same innovation of iolink safety to the safety world, so that we can have more data, more diagnostics, so everybody can make smarter decisions with their machines to understand what devices are slowing down the process, so that they can bring more throughput with the existing machines that they have.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Humans and robots are working closer than ever, and robots are becoming more mobile. What are you doing to keep people safe on the factory floor?
[00:04:34] Speaker C: Being a safety company, we have many devices that are creating safe zones around the robots. We do offer. First and foremost, I think something that makes spills different is we offer services to help people do the risk assessment of the machine, understand where the dangers are. It's not always apparent to somebody that's untrained what is dangerous and what is not on a machine. We're bringing in a lot of innovations for robotics, for AGVs, as an example, where we're going to be making it easier for people to use basic controllers with a guided vehicle. So in the past, you really needed a full Plc to run the safety of that machine. And now we're bringing in some innovations to be able to pull that data from your safety scanner, from your safety devices, from your encoders on the wheels, and bring that into a more cost effective safety controller. It's a little bit easier to program.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Are people spending more money and time on safety?
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Absolutely. As I mentioned, that especially in Ontario, they see the value of safety now, of safety devices, but also safety training. And we see this in the last seven years, we almost tripled our business at pills. I know that also other safety companies, other competitors are also growing so that's a good sign and also feel good if a competitor gets something from the money available, because that makes the landscape safer, that makes the factory safer. And that is our theme at pills, is we make Canada safer every day a little bit. And we have a trademark on that.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Nice. And so are you working with health and safety committees? Are you working with plant managers, applications, engineers? Who's your touch points?
[00:06:26] Speaker A: All of the above.
Some companies have specialized health and safety managers that we work with. Others we work on a plan floor with the engineers, sometimes with the maintenance guys. So it's a mixture and we try to see every angle. And the larger the company is, the more go to people we have.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Then, specifically, how do you work with your customers? Like, how do you work with automation integrators, for example, do you do a project basis?
[00:06:55] Speaker A: It's a mixture, actually. Some of the integrators, yes, they have projects. They come to us and ask us and specifically a about safety, because they know everything we do is safety. There's nothing else we do. We are the go to people for safety. We also work through our distribution partners with end users and also OEMs, and together with them, and they are well trained on safety. Together with them. We also address safety issues at existing customers and at new customers as well.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: So, Guillaume, I know Pilt's brand, certainly from the hardware side. And then, of course, you have software and you also have training. So can you tell our audience a little bit about how that all works?
[00:07:42] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, the majority of our software really are directly linked to the hardware.
It's software that will enable configuring using the hardware.
What we're seeing, though, is in Europe, the new machinery standard requires secure software so that the security of the machine is only as good as whoever last touched it. We're working closely with that in the future to bring in more security on the plant floor, more control of who accesses the machine, and a history of who has access to the machine so that the hardware is inherently safer.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I think it's so important that you're bringing knowledge from, say, Europe to say, hey, here are the european standards. We're going to communicate with our customers to make sure that they're up to date and machine integrators and such, because someone has to do this. Important.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
In everything that happens in Europe, it touches the world globally, whether it's because it's an OEM that's selling a machine in Europe or it's that particular standard will be inherited by the local standards. So many of the local canadian standards are based on european standards originally. So whatever is happening in Europe is directly related to us.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Andreas, how about training for the industry? How does that work at Pilts Canada?
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Guillaume already mentioned we have a service department that does risk assessments and also offers training. And the training is called CMSE, certified machinery safety expert. And it's a cooperation between pills and TUV north in Germany. So this is a four days course, and this is our high end course. We offer other courses, but this four days course ends with an exam supervised by the TUV person. And it's very interesting. In Ontario, it counts towards the training hours that every engineer has to take in a year. I think it's 32. And we offered like this training would give them 28 hours. So it's a win win situation that the person gets very confident in regards to safety. He gets a license, and he also is spreading out the idea of safety within the plant. It's an eye opener for a lot of people who never have done that. And pills offers this in certain areas in hotels. But we also offer that if enough people are there, if enough customers are at one site, we go on site to customers and offer this training and conduct this training there. And this is just one of several trainings. We do training, especially on functional safety. One reason you mentioned that before, we talked about standards.
As Guillaume mentioned, most of the standards that we have here in Canada are the european standards, ISO or IEC standards as well. And Canada just makes out a CSA 22, two of it. But it's basically a collection of all the worldwide standards and very important actually, across the world. PIlLs employees are members of ISO standardization committees like myself. I'm working in two groups. One of them is just dealing with risk assessment, ISO one 2100 we just finished, and the other was functional safety. ISO 13 eight four nine was just finished and published in April this year. And this is PILS's working globally on safety standards with these committees, and that includes our competition and includes people from industry and government and CSA, et cetera.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: So I have a question. It's great when we are building new machines, but every once in a while we have to deal with machine retrofits. And what's that look like for pilts?
[00:11:59] Speaker C: I mean, the retrofit will look a lot like a new machine in many cases. It will depend on if the user of the machine has an engineering staff on site. Does that user have safety expertise? So if it's a customer that, for example, took our CMSC course, they have a good understanding of the safety standards that are required for that particular machine, and then they'll have a good idea where they need to go. But then sometimes it's a smaller user that don't have an engineering staff or they don't have the expertise, and then that's where either pills engineering will do some consulting to help them determine what needs to be done. So, as an example, doing a risk assessment, but it can also be a safe design, but it can also be one of our integrators that come in will do either just an installation or a full service where they'll do the risk assessment, do an installation and design, and bring the machine back to current standards.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Andreas, I know that there's always a challenge to talk a little bit about use cases, but can you give us an idea of how it might work with a use case in the industry?
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Great example is one canadian AGV manufacturer who also exports their AGV to Europe. And in Europe, you need something that's called CE marking. And there's only very few companies who offer that service to help them to get the CE mark on their AGVs. And in this case, it was something brand new because there was no existing AGV standard for mass production and shipping to Europe. So together with our service head office in Ireland, we created a procedure that helps this customer to apply the CE marking and ship products to Europe. And they are very, very happy with the service. And it was something that basically was created here in Canada and now will be part of the safety world.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Nice. Congratulations. It's kind of exciting to do all these first. And of course, AGVs are something that we're all interested in to be very safe. So did we forget anything in our conversation today, Jelen?
[00:14:09] Speaker A: I don't think so.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Nice. And how can people get in touch with you?
[00:14:13] Speaker A: The easiest way is, of course, go on our website, WW pills CA or, and send us an email info at Pilts ca. That's the easiest way. And of course, on our website, there's also the contact information.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: And so, Andreas, when you're not keeping people safe, and do you have any hobbies or anything you like to do?
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Yes, I play golf in the summer and in the winter, indoor golf.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: So you're pretty tied to that?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: And Guillaume, what are some of your hobies and.
[00:14:50] Speaker C: Oh, well, of course my family keeps me very busy because I have some young children, but photography is my go to hobby, which it's easy to bring photography with the family, so I do that. And of course, I like to go outdoors and spend some time in the weather.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much for joining me today in this edition of the Robot Industry podcast. And we wish you good luck for the rest of the show, and we will hopefully talk soon.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: All right, thank you.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: I'd like to thank and acknowledge our partner, a three the association for Advancing Automation. They're the leading trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast, you can find me Jim Barretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Today's podcast was produced by customer Attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to thank our team, Chris Gray for music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, and my business partner, Janet.
