Making Advanced Manufacturing Technology Approachable with Jason Ray [New Podcast]

[Click here to stream the podcast on Apple Podcasts]

[Click here to stream the podcast on Spotify]

Last year, the total output of U.S. manufacturing stood at over $2 trillion, making up about 11% of the total economic output in the country and placing us at third-largest in the world. However, the industry is facing the challenge of long-term decline; Other countries like China and the EU are still ahead, likely because of their rapid adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies.

Thomas Insights stands on the front line watching the industry’s focus change to adopting these new technologies, but like any other widespread change, the transition takes time.

According to this week’s Thomas Industry Update Podcast guest Jason Ray, CEO and co-founder of Paperless Parts, job shops are particularly reluctant to update a system that "already works.” Ray sat down with Thomas CEO and President Tony Uphoff to discuss the challenges industry is facing in adoption, and how his company has spent the last three years working with manufacturers to build a foundation for the seamless adoption of Industry 4.0 technology.

"It is tooth-and-nail every single day to help manufactures understand the value, and I think there are a lot of companies like [Thomas] that are helping move the market,” Ray explains. "If there is one single thing that our company could achieve in a lifetime, it would be to level the playing field. We want to give everybody that common playing field so that job shops can actually be competitive.”

Supporting Job Shops, For Free

In Ray’s conversations with more than 1,000 job shops every year, one of the most frequent questions he gets about the Paperless Parts platform centers around the cost of support for users. Many manufacturers have had negative experiences with the costs of software maintenance, which plays a huge role in their reluctance to adopt.

"I think this fear comes from how software has been served to job shops,” Ray said. "When job shops went and got an ERP system, there was a two-month onboarding process, and they walked away. But they think every time they need help they have to pay another $1,500 to get an application engineer out, or they have to pay.”

However, when Ray was designing Paperless Parts, he made sure he could promise one thing to his job shop clients: customer support would always be free. He says it has made a massive difference in changing the concept of software.

"The mission is to support job shop manufacturers [and to] help them be more successful. We don’t do that by charging you for support. My goal is that you should be able to talk to us through the platform, which our customers can today,” Ray explained. "We try to drive continuous feedback and innovation.”

Encouraging a Proactive Approach to Adoption

Ray’s best advice for manufacturers and job shops regarding adoption of Industry 4.0 technology is to take a proactive – not reactive – approach, and he advises business leaders not to "wait for the problem to be the catalyst for you going out and solving it.”

"I’ve started to learn what really separates the growth curve and where the plateau happens,” he explained. "The best advice that I can give to a shop owner is don’t wait for it to be a must-have. Don’t wait for there to be an ITAR breach for you to go start storing your files on a secure cloud or to do ITAR training. There is never going to be a good time to go and implement a change in your business.”

How to Begin Your Advanced Manufacturing Journey

For more advice from Jason Ray, CEO and co-founder of cloud software Paperless Parts, on where to start with driving your job shop into the future, listen to this week’s episode of the Thomas Industry Update Podcast, now available to stream on the following platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher