In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Smart Industry's Scott Achelpohl speaks with E Tech Group CEO Matt Wise about the evolving role of system integration in modern manufacturing. They explore how AI adoption is increasing the need for seamless connectivity between operational technology, equipment and production data. Wise also explains why manufacturers should move beyond project-by-project engagements and treat system integrators as long-term strategic partners who preserve institutional knowledge and support continuous improvement.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

Scott Achelpohl: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, this one brought to you by Smart Industry. I'm Scott Achelpohl, SI's head of content, and I'm joined today for this episode by Matt Wise who is CEO of Westchester, Ohio-based E Tech Group, which is one of the largest engineering and system integration firms in the US, specializing in industrial automation, control systems, and IT and OT solutions. 

E Tech Group is a CSIA Enterprise Certified firm with locations in eight countries across three continents. Matt's written for us a bunch, twice now, including a September entry on AI and why manufacturers are in need of long-term, OT strategic plans to turn today's AI opportunities into tomorrow's scalable applications. 

Today, for the purposes of this episode of Great Question, Matt's going to help us expand on an October contribution of his that focused on trends in system integration, which is a topic that we at Smart Industry don't really cover enough, but should since this is so very relevant to our core audience. He contends that manufacturers are moving beyond project-by-project SI work using vendors, and toward ongoing relationships with strategic partners that preserve knowledge, improve consistency, and support long-term modernization across facilities. It's going to be interesting hearing from Matt on the evolution of system integration, which is, as we mentioned, a core fascination of our Smart Industry audience because it's so integral in this AI-adopting economy that separate software applications, databases, and IT subsystems stay connected so they can work together as a single cohesive workflow. 

The difficulty, Matt said in his October 15th column, is solutions that work well in one plant can become challenging to scale when controls, networks, naming conventions, and data structures have developed differently across different locations. This when manufacturers crave advanced analytics, enterprise visibility, and AI applications that can extend beyond a single line or facility. So we'll hear more from this, from Matt, in a moment, but first a little about him and his career. He has over two decades of executive leadership experience, and since November 2020 has been at the helm of E Tech Group, which has grown to a company of 900 professionals and over 30 locations across the world, delivering automation solutions to industries like life sciences, food and beverage, and mission-critical infrastructure. So hello, Matt, impressive resume. Welcome to Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. 

Matt Wise: Thanks, Scott, great to be here. You mentioned some of the background on myself, I appreciate that, and it's fun to be in an industry that is growing so fast, so thrilled to be here.

SA: Welcome, Matt, thank you for that. I'd like to pivot now and talk about your piece last month, is it already November, it's kind of hard to believe, and the piece was on system integration. To do that, it's easiest for me just to kick off our Q&A, and I'll begin with the first question. Matt, I think at one point you wrote in your piece about AI creating a new urgency for manufacturers to focus on system integrations that work seamlessly. In this age of AI, what do organizations need to consider when it comes to system integration?

MW: It's an interesting challenge for us because if you think about AI, people are excited about it. People want to apply it all over wherever they can. And the first step to doing that is making sure your OT layer and all of the information can talk to one another. Unfortunately, most people just assume that is occurring, and it's not. If you walk onto a traditional shop floor today, we have what are called islands of automation. So a machine here is automated, a machine there is automated, and there's oftentimes a machine in between that is not. So you mentioned the word “seamless.” That's the key. All of the elements of the production line have to be networked together, and all of those need to be speaking the same language. Once you do that, then you can start leveraging the power of AI across your manufacturing floor.

SA: Matt, in your piece, you implored organizations to treat system integrator support as an operating strategy. Can you elaborate on that for everyone? I'd really like to know what that term entails.

MW: Sure. When you think about that problem I just articulated, which was you need this seamless integration, historically the way manufacturers used system integrators was they had an individual problem. Let's just, real-life example, I'm making a detergent, I buy a new mixer, then I call my system integrator and I say, please install the mixer. Or please change the batch recipe, whatever it might be. And they might use Integrator A one day and Integrator B the next day. What they weren't thinking about was, how do all these things connect together? And do I have a partner who is helping me optimize that, making sure that when I add a new element in, when I change a batch, I don't break something? 

And I say break something, not break something in terms of you're not making the product anymore, that's always been there. What I'm talking about is break something in the information layer that you need to optimize your facility. So as we get to these digitally enabled manufacturing floors on the path to lights-out manufacturing where there are very little or no humans on the manufacturing floor, it is essential that you don't break the information flow because as soon as you break the information flow, the AI can't interpret what's going on and can't run your facility. So that's why we see this shift changing where we want, and we believe manufacturers will treat system integrators as a partner at that table to enable that digital layer to stay consistent.

SA: In your story, you emphasize continuity of knowledge as a key benefit to repeated engagements with a partner system integrator. Why is institutional knowledge so important for a system integrator specifically, and why else is that continuity so important?

MW: Right, so it kind of builds on the last comment I made. If you think about your traditional manufacturing floor, there are thousands of pieces of equipment there, and each of them probably has code that is connected to earlier ones. Just as an example, if you have bottles going down an assembly line and a bottle falls off that line, what's supposed to occur? How does all that machinery and all those elements connect back to one another? That legacy of knowledge, of having the same people in the facility gathering information about that facility, is key because you may not know that machine number 53 on line 7 is counting on information from five steps up earlier in the process. Institutional knowledge would know that, and historically that was stored in the head of your automation engineer at the plant level. The difficulty is the plant has become more and more complicated, and having all of that knowledge in one person's head is difficult. So that's why you have a partner who can catalog it for you and keep an eye on it. 

And the second challenge for a lot of our plants is, as the systems have become more complicated, those plant managers are (1) challenged to understand all the technology, and(2) some of them are just aging out, they have been there for decades and they're retiring, and there isn't a good flow backfill for them. So if you have a good partner who can continue that knowledge on, then your downtime is very short. Something goes wrong in my example before at that last machine, you know it's connected to an earlier machine. Whereas if you don't have a continuous partner, when a problem occurs, you're down for a while everybody runs around troubleshooting where that problem came from. So the continuity of a good strategic partner at the SI level is essential.

SA: Matt, speaking of continuity, we have to mention that system integration successes can be transported from one plant to the next within an organization with the correct SI partner. You said manufacturers don't have to repeat the same four mistakes in your piece that another plant has already made. Tell the audience more about how an SI partner moving beyond a project-by-project system helps organizations with multiple facilities to operate.

MW: Yeah, great question, Scott. I mean, I just gave you an example in one facility, but that can happen all over. I'll use a client example. We have a client who has about 30 manufacturing facilities. They have similar processes that need to be executed in each one of these facilities. Historically, the way they managed all 30 of those facilities is an individual plant manager would make decisions at their plant level. And I'll go to the palletizer, for instance. Plant A, plant number 1, used a palletizer. Plant number 2 used a different palletizer. Over time, that manufacturer realized that's inefficient making all these other decisions, they're going to standardize that palletizer. So great, they get economies of scale, they buy one palletizer, they put it in. 

Well then, as that palletizer gets optimized in Plant 1, if they don't have a partner stretching over different plants, that information rarely gets shared. Why? Because generally what we see is these companies have isolated silos of information at each manufacturing facility. So if you have a partner who has integrated this device and then we have found a better solution, it's relatively easy for us to go then to all the other facilities they have and make that same upgrade. So what ends up happening is the overall company does better, but Plant 2 and Plant 3 are reaping the benefits of those enhancements made by the other plants, so it's a hugely powerful lever for good manufacturers to use. And that comes back to this whole using a system integrator as a strategic partner, using them as part of your operating plan. It helps an individual plant, it also helps the whole network of plants work optimally.

SA: Matt, great way to close it all out. And I can't thank you enough for joining us for this episode of Great Question and for adding on to the expertise about system integration trends and takeaways. Great follow-up today.

MW: My pleasure.