Lights Out: Technology and Automation Podcast by MakingChips

The trade show is the easy part. The hard part is the Monday after, when you've got a pile of brochures, an investment to justify, and a shop that still has to ship parts. How do you turn what you saw into decisions you can defend? We recorded this episode live at IMTS 2026, but it's really about what happens next. Walt Swenton of Eaton Aerospace returns for a second conversation, and Cam Schley of Slytek joins us to talk about the decisions behind smarter manufacturing investments. From a small shop to a company with multiple facilities, there's always competition for the budget. How do you decide what deserves the money—and whether another machine is actually what you need? We get into machine monitoring, tool management, and the challenges of turning shop-floor data into something useful. Collecting numbers is one thing. Knowing what they mean, getting operators on board, and using them to guide your next move is another. We also explore where AI and digital twins fit into the picture, along with the less glamorous work required to connect it all. If IMTS left you excited about the possibilities but unsure where to start, this conversation will give you plenty to think about before making your next investment. What's Covered in this Episode (1:33) Recorded live at IMTS 2026 with Walt Swenton and Cam Schley (2:35) What to look for first: spindles, changeovers, and workholding (4:11) Adaptive control and tool life based on actual usage, not part count (5:43) Hennig WorkFlow: compact pallet automation that holds up to 40 pallets for high-mix lights-out machining (6:33) Turning show-floor input from your team into a plan, and standardizing machine tools (7:58) Fall strat plan: planning three to five years out during rapid growth (11:20) Buy with room to grow: five axis, bigger spindles, probing (14:39) Factur: the go-to-market hierarchy, from referrals to trade shows (20:47) Where to invest next when the low-hanging fruit is gone (22:50) The data points behind a CapEx decision, and when machines age out (24:03) Capturing downtime reasons and the cycle start interlock (25:39) Getting operators on board, and why Toyota says 90% of problems get solved on the floor (26:56) Digital twins, OT infrastructure, Palantir, and CMMC compliance (28:46) Where AI is useful today: vision inspection and AI insights (31:35) Navu: AI chat for your website, trained on your own content (32:48) After the show: profit plan, ROI justification, and hard trade-offs (34:47) Why the ERP and monitoring system have to work together (36:30) The fear of buying the wrong technology (39:18) What Eric is hearing: buyers who make the trip are ready to buy (42:10) Takeaways: make the decision, use data, be bold, think big, win together Resources Mentioned Hennig WorkFlow Factur Navu IMTS Slytek Eaton Aerospace Connect with Walt Swenton and Cam Schley Connect with Walt on LinkedIn Connect with Cam on LinkedIn

AI can write your emails, summarize your shop's performance, and help you make your next big decision. But how do you know when it deserves your confidence—and when it just sounds convincing? On this episode of Lights Out, Nick and Eric sit down with AI ethicist Rebecca Bultsma to explore the questions that rarely make it into the sales pitch. When does automating communication put a customer relationship at risk? What happens when a shop leader starts making decisions based on AI-generated insights? And where's the line between getting help with your thinking and handing it over? Rebecca uses these tools every day, and her enthusiasm comes with some uncomfortable questions. What starts with AI in business gets personal when Nick brings up a question from his daughter: Is AI good or bad? It's a simple question that proves much harder to answer. What's Covered in this Episode (0:00) Meet Rebecca Bultsma, the AI ethicist (4:12) What AI ethics covers, from funny photos to sentience (5:21) Is AI good or bad? A hammer, money, and the super serum (7:43) Hennig WorkFlow: A compact automated pallet system  (8:34) Rebecca's mantra: Clarity creates agency (10:36) Authenticity in sales, AI-written emails, and customer pushback (12:42) Ethics is trade-offs: the Outback versus Rome tip test (16:11) AI as a thought partner, not ghostwriter: dictation and devil's advocate (20:18) Voice principles files and why newsletters still need a human (21:52) Why we created Hire MFG Leaders (and why you should use it) (22:21) Are we reverting to hieroglyphics? Literacy in the AI era (24:42) AI-made machine tool rankings and the loss of trust (26:40) Deepfake research agents, the $25M Zoom fraud, and trust but verify (30:12) The dog and wolf experiment: snow as a pattern (31:30) Navu gives buyers real-time answers on specs, materials, and lead times (32:42) AI insights in machine monitoring data (36:48) Automation bias and the radiologist study (37:43) A 3D printing debate and why you should demand sources (40:55) Kennametal helps machines cut faster and run longer (41:44) Does AI have a political agenda? (45:39) Putting your kids online in the age of deepfakes Resources Mentioned Hennig WorkFlow Navu Hire MFG Leaders Kennametal Connect with Rebecca Bultsma Rebecca Bultsma Website Rebecca Bultsma on LinkedIn Rebecca Bultsma on Substack

Most automation conversations stop at the cell. This one keeps going, through a fab shop, a machine shop, a Department of Defense contract, and eventually a coal mine. Michael McHale runs PSA Systems, an automation integrator in Pennsylvania that also fabricates, machines, and delivers turnkey projects in house. He bought the business in 2016 with four employees and about $900,000 in revenue. Today it's 100 people, 65 engineers, and over $30 million, split across five verticals that all feed each other. That structure is the whole point of this episode. When PSA chases something that looks like a distraction, like reclaiming and selling coal, it works because they already own every capability that business would otherwise have to outsource. We also get into the part almost nobody wants to talk about, which is time. Mike runs on a five year plan and makes capital commitments for 2029 and 2030. He bought an $800,000 five axis mill that was closer to a million by the time it was wired and sitting on concrete, and he committed to it six or seven months before he had work to put in it. He's six figures into an IBM Watson rollout that he openly says won't show real value for another three to five years. His point is to stop treating technology like a series of purchases and start treating it like a position on where the business is going. There's a practical thread for smaller shops too. Mike doesn't think a 15 or 20 person shop needs an enterprise AI rollout, and he says so. But if you're holding controlled information or working in regulated industries, he walks through why the guardrails matter, what goes wrong when drawings end up in a public model, and why the CMMC picture is so confusing right now. Then it gets personal. Broke, rich, double broke, way richer than the first time. We asked how you stay level headed on that ride, and his answer came back to people instead of EBITDA. Can your employees buy a house? Can they send their kids to college? That's the scorecard. What's Covered in this Episode (0:00) Broke, rich, double broke: the roller coaster of running an industrial business (0:41) Meet Michael McHale of PSA Systems, and what's driving automation demand in 2026 (0:41) Where the robots take our jobs argument breaks down, and why skilled headcount grows (0:41) Running an automation integrator and a machine shop under one roof, and the retirements pushing work to both (7:48) The capital arms race: a million dollars into a five axis mill before it makes a dollar (8:56) Hennig (10:08) Retrofitting the machines you already have instead of waiting on new iron (10:27) Tolerance and quality demands are separating who can serve which customers (11:35) Chasing EBITDA now versus building for 2030, and running on a five year plan (13:54) Automation assessments: pricing one project versus walking the whole plant (14:31) Why the US C-suite wants a two year ROI, and how Europe and Japan think about it (17:26) Navu (18:42) What actually triggered the IBM Watson rollout, starting with project management (20:52) From a static agent to an active one, and moving documentation into Jira (24:52) A six figure AI bet that pays off in 36 to 60 months, not 12 (26:26) Hire MFG Leaders (27:54) DIY AI with Claude or Grok versus an enterprise rollout with guardrails (27:54) Why a DoD contractor holding customer IP can't put drawings in a public model (31:38) CMMC confusion, the pause, and what smaller regulated shops have to weigh (32:51) From four employees and $900K in 2016 to 100 employees and over $30 million (35:16) Why PSA built verticals when most integrators still haven't (38:33) Buying a coal mine, and why it fits a vertically integrated industrial (40:06) CLA (43:28) Hitting the accelerator at the bottom of the dip instead of coasting (46:20) The real scorecard: can your people buy a home and send their kids to college Resources Mentioned PSA Systems Hennig WorkFlow Navu Hire MFG Leaders CLA IBM watson Fastems Slytek Connect with Michael McHale Michael McHale on LinkedIn PSA Systems on LinkedIn PSA Systems

When Uriel Eisen needed more capacity in his 325-square-foot shop, his first instinct was to buy a robot. But the machine wasn't the real bottleneck. Production kept getting derailed by missing material, forgotten orders, and inexpensive supplies that nobody noticed until they were gone. Uriel's path from designing spacesuits to manufacturing CNC-machined hardware eventually led him deep into Kanban, lean manufacturing, and continuous improvement. What began with index cards and a Sharpie ultimately became Arda—a system built to connect what happens on the shop floor with the people responsible for keeping it supplied. In this episode, we explore why some of the best automation projects look surprisingly low-tech, how small interruptions quietly consume far more capacity than most shops realize, and why a process that depends on discipline may actually be designed to fail. Before you invest in another machine or shave a few seconds from a cycle, take a closer look at what's already stopping the work. The fastest return in your shop may be hiding inside an empty bin. What's Covered in this Episode (0:00) The fastest ROI automation project on your floor has nothing to do with robots (1:03) Meet Uriel Eisen of Arda and Austere Manufacturing (4:18) Designing spacesuits for NASA, and why patterning fabric is like flat wrapping sheet metal (5:28) Why we love SMW Autoblok for workholding (6:12) How Uriel started designing for NASA (9:09) Meeting at the Machining Summit and the talk on inventory management (9:55) From sketching buckles to buying a CNC router, a Tormach, and a Speedio (11:47) Running out of aluminum and the three cent plastic bag that stopped a shipment (12:50) Toyota Production System, Paul Akers, and running all of it from a 325 square foot barn (13:15) Kanban doubled throughput, then doubled it again, with no extra space or people (13:57) What a bad week looked like when "let me know if we're running low" was the system (16:09) The flip side: overordering ties up cash and hides the real problem (17:27) The customer who scrapped five million dollars of obsolete cardboard boxes (18:05) Take your shop to the next level with DN Solutions (19:16) Overproduction and implementing SMED to cut setup time (20:59) Kanban cards piling up on the desk and how that frustration turned into Arda (24:08) Five minutes of training, five dollars of supplies, and 20 percent of floor time back (26:02) Reliability beats cycle time, and systemization beats your best firefighter (29:15) Shadow board inertia, color coding, and why the right way has to also be the easiest way (35:50) Build your pipeline and engineer your growth with Factur (36:55) Paper cards in 2026, the sexy robot problem, and why the world already converged on pull (42:11) How to start on Monday (and what to do before you ever call Arda) (44:27) Give your people an hour a day to improve their own work and watch throughput double (48:50) The takeaway: automation doesn't always look like a robot arm Resources Mentioned Arda Cards Arda Free Kanban Card Generator Austere Manufacturing SMW Autoblok DN Solutions Factur Hennig IMTS Connect with Uriel Eisen Connect with Uriel on LinkedIn Incremental: The Continuous Improvement podcast Arda on Instagram Austere Manufacturing on Instagram Arda on LinkedIn

Eric opens this episode describing a dream he had. A shop with no standalone machines. Three hundred and nine pallets moving 1,600 times a day. A central tool system holding 5,500 tools, five Fanuc robots shuttling up to 800 of them daily, and not a single crash. The punchline is that it wasn't a dream. He'd just walked through it. That shop is Norbert Kempf CNC-Technik in St. Ingbert, Germany, a 100-person contract machine shop that runs simple to highly complex parts in batches of one to 500. We caught up with owner and managing director Stefan Kempf on his own floor, along with Risto Niemi of Fastems, who has spent 28 years helping shops rethink how they grow, and Yanick Müller of swissMODULAR, who thinks about work holding the way most people think about religion. The number that stops you is this one: Setup time inside the machine is zero. Every tool arrives staged, every pallet is built offline, and the price a customer pays is the same whether they order ten pieces or a thousand. Utilization sits above 90 percent every single day, across 23 four-axis horizontals split between two buildings and joined by a bridge with a robot running tools across it. Any machine can run any part, so there is no bottleneck to schedule around. What makes this more than a hardware story is how Stefan got there. He spent three years preparing the business before the first flexible manufacturing system arrived, standardizing machine brands, tool interfaces, and pallets into what he calls a monoculture of machines. Then he built a bonus system that pays the whole company on utilization and measures it every shift, so a bad night is just a bad night and tomorrow is a fresh chance. If you've added machines and watched your utilization fall, this is the conversation to sit with. Stefan, Risto, and Yanick each leave you with one tactic you can act on, and none of them require a new building. What's Covered in this Episode (0:00) Eric's dream: a shop with no standalone machines, 309 pallets, and not one crash (0:58) Inside Norbert Kempf CNC-Technik in St. Ingbert, Germany, and its CNC 4.0 concept (6:48) Risto Niemi of Fastems on 28 years of helping shops rethink how they grow (8:53) Stefan Kempf on taking over his father's 1970 turning shop and building what stands today (10:21) Yanick Müller of swissMODULAR on selling a philosophy, not just a vise (12:02) 1990 to 1999: one machining center becomes ten, and utilization goes the wrong way (13:18) Monoculture of machines: standardizing brands, tool interfaces, and pallets (13:54) Why Kempf builds its own machine pallets and now sells them worldwide (15:25) MakingChips, DN Solutions, and Kennametal are giving away a fully tooled SVM 4100 (16:09) The frustration that started it: walking in to the same errors every single day (18:00) Risto on why buying another machine is the easy answer and usually the wrong one (19:24) Yanick on using the full envelope you already paid for (20:58 A decade-long vision and three years of preparation before the first FMS (23:19) Inside the CTS: five Fanuc robots, 23 horizontals, tools staged before the cycle calls (24:41) The IMTS Industrial AI Conference, September 16 in the South Building (25:29) Zero setup time inside the machine, and what that does to a quote (27:37) How good business relationships help makes everyone stronger (29:42) The bridge between two buildings and the robot that runs tools across it (32:27) Tiny parts, big parts, 100 on a tombstone, and why every machine runs every job (35:00) One operator for two machines, one troubleshooter for all 23 (36:07) Navu adds AI chat to your website, trained on your own content (37:19) Multi-skilled people, the Swiss apprentice system, and unmanned nights (41:03) A bonus system tied to utilization and measured every shift (46:07) One tactic each: tool management, spindle up time, and never stop learning Resources Mentioned Norbert Kempf CNC-Technik GmbH Fastems swissMODULAR MakingChips Machine Giveaway IMTS Navu Hennig Connect with Stefan Kempf, Risto Niemi, and Yanick Müller Norbert Kempf CNC-Technik GmbH Fastems swissMODULAR