Kent Powell of Amatrol on CTE, Smart Manufacturing, and Training the Workforce "One Life at a Time"
Manufacturing Happy Hour
Recorded outside Louisville in late 2023, this episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour features Kent Powell of Amatrol, a company that builds both training equipment and curriculum for career and technical education (CTE). The conversation keeps returning to one question: how do you close the skilled-worker gap that manufacturers have complained about for decades? Powell's answer is that the underlying problem hasn't changed in forty years. What changes is the technology workers need to learn. Training works best when it combines what people need to know with what they need to do, and when it builds new skills on top of the fundamentals instead of replacing them.
Setting the Scene: The Brown Hotel
The show opens by asking where the conversation would take place over a drink. Powell picks the lobby bar at the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville. He calls it a historic place and the best spot in town for a Manhattan. It is also home to the hot brown, a dish he describes as famous in Louisville. During Derby week, he says, everyone sells a hot brown, but for the original you have to go to the Brown. The host settles it: hot browns and rye at the Brown Hotel.
How Amatrol Started
Powell explains that Amatrol was founded by Don Perkins and his wife, Roberta. Perkins had worked in aerospace and wanted to move back home to be closer to family, but the area had few aerospace jobs. Powell describes him as very smart and passionate about automation, which at the time meant electricity, pneumatics, and hydraulics. So Perkins went into custom machine building and served local companies, including bottling and aluminum extrusion operations.
Perkins also wanted to give back to his community, and along the way he found he liked teaching. According to Powell, the combination of machine-building knowledge and teaching people how to run the machines is where Perkins "really thrived," and the business grew from there. That origin explains why education sits at the center of the company.
Powell's Own Path: A Full Circle
Powell's route to Amatrol was indirect. After school in Louisville, Powell took a job at the Allen-Bradley Company. Powell remembers the first meeting with the boss there, who said it was the best company Powell would ever work for, privately held and never going to be sold. By the end of that year, Rockwell Automation had bought Allen-Bradley.
Powell stayed with Rockwell Automation for 17 years, moving around the country into roles with more responsibility. Powell eventually returned to Louisville for personal reasons, left Rockwell, and signed a five-year contract to work for an old friend. When that contract ended, Powell joined Amatrol, which had been Powell's very first customer at Allen-Bradley. At the time of recording, Powell had been with the company for about 18 years.
Explaining CTE in Thirty Seconds
The host asks how Powell would explain Amatrol to a stranger at a crowded Derby-week bar. Powell says the first step would be asking whether the person even knows what CTE is. Powell calls career and technical education the backbone of technical education and manufacturing in the United States.
Powell's framing is historical. The U.S. was once the manufacturing headquarters of the world, then production diversified and moved offshore, and then events like the pandemic pushed companies to reshore. In Powell's view, if the country doesn't take seriously the job of teaching people the skilled trades, it loses its position in the world. Powell describes Amatrol's role as helping the U.S. remain a world leader in manufacturing.
"Need to Know" and "Need to Do"
The host points out that Amatrol does two things most companies keep separate: it writes curriculum and it builds equipment. Powell answers with the two phrases in the host's question, "what do you need to know" and "what do you need to do."
The process, as Powell describes it, starts with the skills. The company first defines what a person needs to be able to do in a job. Then subject matter experts and technical writers build the content that teaches what the person needs to know to do that job. Powell says Amatrol is the only company Powell is aware of that combines the two in a single training environment, and it tries to deliver that across many technologies, industries, and learning settings.
The Skills Manufacturers Actually Ask For
Asked what people most need to know and do in late 2023, Powell starts with workplace basics rather than technology. Manufacturers Powell talks with say they need workers who show up on time, who understand safety (which Powell calls paramount), who do the right thing, and who know how to raise concerns through the chain of command. Some people learn this in the military, some in school, some at home. Powell's point is that it has to carry over into the plant for a worker to be effective, and Amatrol can teach some of it.
Beyond that, Powell lists foundational abilities: communicating, taking criticism, following an order, interpreting what someone has told you and acting on it reasonably, and following written or oral instructions. Then come the basic technical skills: using a tape measure, dial calipers, and electrical test equipment. Powell calls these foundational skills "so critical" to success in manufacturing.
Teamwork as Part of the Curriculum
The host wonders whether trainees expect this "101" material or are surprised by it. Powell says it depends on where they are in their learning. A high school student might never have been on a team. In a high school career exploration course, Amatrol uses project-based learning: groups of students interpret and identify a problem, then build a solution that may involve math, an electrical component, a programmable component, or design. For a student who has never played baseball or field hockey, Powell says, "this is their team," which mirrors a manufacturing environment.
Powell ties this back to reshoring. A company making silicon chips probably handles only part of the process before shipping product elsewhere for assembly and testing. Amatrol itself works this way: its suppliers, including Rockwell Automation, provide equipment and also help with inventory management and introduce the company to new technology. In Powell's view, a high school team solving a problem and a manufacturer working with its suppliers are both examples of the same teamwork.
Who Amatrol Serves, and the Problem That Hasn't Changed
Most of Amatrol's customers are in education: high schools, career centers, community and technical colleges, and many universities. Part of the business works directly with industrial clients. Powell says the big problem right now is the skilled workforce.
Powell tells a story about Don Perkins. Forty years ago, Perkins made a habit of asking industrial clients what kept them up at night and what prevented them from growing and improving productivity. The answer was that they didn't have enough skilled workers. Powell says clients give the same answer today. What has changed is the content. Back then, skilled workers needed to understand relay logic, air logic, mechanical systems, and electrical inspection. Today they need programmable logic controllers and PLC programming, robotics and autonomous robotics, cybersecurity, and network communication, much of which didn't exist forty years ago. It is still a technical workforce, Powell says, and there still aren't enough of those workers.
How Training Is Sequenced
The host mentions training systems seen on the shop floor, such as smart sensors and utility-scale wind equipment, and asks how Amatrol decides what to teach next. Powell uses electrical training as the example. You wouldn't start a high school student on a reversing motor starter. You start with basic AC/DC electricity: series and parallel circuits, input and output devices, then building a simple series circuit and using a digital multimeter to measure its current, voltage, and resistance.
Powell says Amatrol teaches differently from a purely theoretical approach. It introduces a concept, teaches it, and then has students apply it hands-on. At the end of a course, the next step depends on the student's career or study path. It might be motor control, three-phase power, or motors and motor protection. In an exploratory program, the student might leave electrical entirely and move on to basic fluid power or power transmission.
Making "Smart Manufacturing" Concrete
The host asks what Powell sees today that wasn't there five years ago. EV, battery, and silicon chip manufacturing all come up, but Powell says the big topic is smart manufacturing. Since the host calls the term "nebulous," Powell explains it through sensors.
"Back in the olden days," five years ago, a sensor counting boxes on a line, or detecting whether an object was metal, aluminum, or glass, gave a simple on/off signal. A smart sensor might calculate the time between the front edge of one product, its back edge, and the front edge of the next. That lets it report line speed and help calculate throughput. The information also travels differently: not through a wire that only says on or off, but over an Ethernet connection to a smart processor that collects the data. Running that data through a program produces manufacturing information that helps operators adjust equipment more precisely for optimal output.
Powell then cites a statistic Powell heard on a podcast or read in an article: 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years. Powell doesn't know how much of it goes unused, but says, "I can't imagine what the next five years means to us." To explain data-driven AI to high school students, Powell asks how many of them, or their parents, used Waze or Google Maps to get to school. Everyone raises a hand. The app uses information from phones to tell drivers to avoid a crash and take another route. Powell compares this to smart sensors: collecting more data than on/off switches lets manufacturers make better decisions quickly and make a better product in less time.
Why Adoption Lags: New Lines vs. Existing Ones
The host asks whether companies are actually acting on their data. Powell cites a Conexus report, recalling it as from 2022. In that report, 23% of companies had considered doing anything with smart manufacturing, rising to 43% the following year. Powell says the "scary number" is the large share of companies that haven't jumped in yet.
For a local example, Powell mentions friends at the Jim Beam distillery, which uses Endress+Hauser instruments. When Powell asked whether they were using smart instruments, the engineers said it costs far more to add smart technology after a line is running than to build it in from the start. New processes go in with smart sensors, Ethernet communications, and wireless instrumentation sensors, but the old equipment isn't being ripped out. Powell calls this a question of where to invest. More companies are now adopting smart technology for new installations and retrofitting older ones. For Amatrol's customers, especially community colleges, this means they need to be ready to teach both old and new technology.
Fundamentals Plus the New Stuff
The host asks how much slow adoption comes from the greenfield/brownfield issue and how much from a lack of trained people. Powell says, "I'm not sure I know how to answer that question," and answers from a different angle.
Powell looks at the three fast-growing industries: silicon chips, electric vehicles, and batteries. Much of EV manufacturing is the same as traditional vehicle manufacturing, with torque wrenches, air guns, and the rest. What's new is battery technology: managing heat, the cooling system, and connecting electrodes. An existing workforce may need training in just those new skills, but a new plant built from scratch has to teach everyone everything.
Powell's broader point, drawn from school clients who train both new students and incumbent workers, is that experience doesn't exempt anyone. Someone with manufacturing skills who moves to a battery plant still has to learn battery technology. Someone with 20 years in manufacturing who moves to a chip plant has to learn precision manufacturing, motion control, clean rooms, and vacuum systems. "So it's not either or," Powell says. "It's fundamental plus the new stuff."
Smart HVAC and Automatic Adjustment
Before moving on, the host brings up the smart HVAC training equipment seen on the floor. The host's point is that smart manufacturing is often discussed as a large, enterprise-wide transformation while simpler applications get less attention. Powell explains that HVAC has been around a long time but has now crossed into smart manufacturing. Any new system in a manufacturing facility includes smart sensors, electronic motors running the dampers to direct airflow, and zone controls that communicate wirelessly to a hub. That hub may pass information to a monitoring center miles away.
Doing all of that with copper wire would take miles of wire, Powell notes. Using an Ethernet connection makes it possible to monitor the system and make changes on the fly. The algorithms can also be built into a smart controller, so if temperature starts to exceed a set point, the system reacts to stay within range. The host asks whether smart manufacturing means using the data and variables you can see to make automatic changes. Powell agrees: "It's all driven by algorithms."
Why Louisville Is a Manufacturing Hub
Asked what manufacturing means to the region, Powell says, "It's our future, it's our path forward," and calls the area a great place to start a manufacturing company. Powell describes Louisville as having been the logistics heartbeat of the world, and still largely so, with UPS's world hub located there. Powell says hundreds of companies in the greater Louisville area build panels and design and build conveyor and sortation systems.
Powell also mentions the automotive sector: two Ford plants in Louisville, a new battery plant going up in Elizabethtown, and other plants across the greater Indiana–Louisville area. Then there is distilling. "Bourbon is King around here," Powell says, adding that Powell can't buy a favorite bourbon locally because it all ships elsewhere. Powell also credits the education system: the University of Louisville, the Ivy Tech college system on the Indiana side of the river, and KCTCS on the Kentucky side, which Powell says are doing wonderful work preparing young people for manufacturing careers.
Kentucky FAME: Earn, Learn, and Graduate Debt-Free
The host asks about the Kentucky Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, known as Kentucky FAME. Powell says FAME began at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. Toyota had a mezzanine full of Amatrol equipment. Young people worked at Toyota three days a week and spent two days on the mezzanine training on that equipment to become productive on the line. The idea "grew legs": it left Toyota, was picked up by the Manufacturing Institute in Washington, D.C., and FAME programs now operate across the U.S.
According to Powell, Kentucky has 12 FAME sites. In Louisville, the program runs out of a lab at Jefferson Community and Technical College on First Street, which Powell says has millions of dollars' worth of training equipment. It serves companies including Bosch, Toyota, and Ford Motor Company, among others Powell can't recall. Powell describes the model from a student's view: you're a high school graduate with some credentials, you think you might want manufacturing, and a company recruits you into FAME. The company pays you to work and pays for school. After two years you have a two-year degree, a job, and no debt.
Asked how students get recruited, Powell says there are probably a couple of paths. One is joining the SkillsUSA affiliate at a local school. Another is FAME's own outreach to local high school CTE programs, which invite students to interview. Students must be interviewed and accepted, and Powell compares it to an NFL signing or a college basketball signing day. Some graduates stay on with their company, and some are then sent by that company to the University of Louisville, Purdue, or elsewhere for a four-year engineering degree.
Assessment and Certification as a Ticket to an Interview
On Amatrol's impact beyond the region, Powell says one contribution is showing that the manufacturing skills needed yesterday are still needed today, and that they can be delivered economically through education partners. "The bar is never too high if you can figure out how to get a step up," Powell says, and basic skills can lead to manufacturing jobs that pay off for years.
Powell also names a recruiting problem: when applicants show up, manufacturers don't know what those people know or can do. Amatrol helps by assessing knowledge and skill competency so employers can decide whom to hire. Another route is the industry-validated certifications students can earn during post-secondary education. Powell calls them a ticket to an interview, since people who pass a certification exam and hold a credential often get one.
Consulting With Colleges: The Ivy Tech Example
The host asks how Amatrol works with technical colleges that already have their own certification programs. Powell says Amatrol provides consulting, and its approach is to help a school achieve its own goals rather than dictate what it should do. Powell's example is Ivy Tech in Indiana, where Amatrol is based. Ivy Tech asked Amatrol to help build a two-year smart manufacturing digital integration degree built around certifications from the Smart Automation Certification Alliance. Amatrol helped align those credentials with training equipment and online curriculum so the college could deliver what students need to earn the degree.
Powell says the company does the same worldwide. Schools often come to Amatrol when a particular industry is arriving in their town, and ask what skills to train for, how to set up the learning environment with online curriculum and equipment, and which industry-approved certifications might help students succeed.
Taking the Stress Out of Hiring
The host relays a comment from Justin of Industrial Solutions Network, who was watching the recording: Amatrol essentially takes the stress out of hiring, because employers know what skills a program's graduates have. Powell says Powell wouldn't have described the company that way but thinks it fits. Powell cites the mission statement, about transforming the workforce one life at a time, and notes the word "stress" isn't in it. Still, Powell argues, if technical training is meaningful, self-directed, and competency-based, a candidate should face no stress in a job interview or an assessment. "If we've done our job right, they'll have no problem passing the online quiz or the hands-on test," Powell says, adding that the company's job is to "de-stress" the whole process through learning environments delivered by partner schools.
One Life at a Time
For the last question, the host asks how Powell has seen that mission play out. Powell tells the story of a single mother of three who lost her job. By attending a college that uses Amatrol curriculum and hands-on equipment, she could keep a part-time job, attend classes in the evening, learn at her own pace, and earn a degree leading to a full-time job that "will far exceed the expectations of her family." Powell says stories like hers come up in every city and state Powell visits.
Asked how many people Amatrol has reached, Powell says, "I don't know," adding, "I would love to say millions." Powell notes that the company has been doing this for more than 40 years and works with thousands of colleges worldwide, and agrees the total is hard to track. Powell closes by crediting the company's customers: Amatrol has been successful because its clients have been. "We're nothing without the success of our clients," Powell says, and "if they're successful, then we're successful."
90% of the world's data was developed in the last 2 years. Think about that for just a second, that's a lot of data. Now how much of that data goes unused? I don't know, but if 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years, I can't imagine what the next five years means to us. I didn't know that stat going into this conversation. It's crazy.
Live from the Louisville area, in this episode we're going to be talking to someone that's taking some of the most meaningful action to impact the workforce challenges that manufacturers are facing, from building equipment and curriculum for technical education to defining what smart manufacturing is really all about. Kent Powell of Amatrol is about to tell you what it takes to impact the workforce at scale, one job at a time.
Kent, welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. I was going to say it's a belated welcome, because we've been really doing this for a few hours up until this point, but we're just getting into the meat of the conversation now, or I should say the bourbon of the conversation, being here outside of Louisville. So in Manufacturing Happy Hour style, if we were having this conversation over a beverage, where would that be? Maybe paint a picture, somewhere in downtown Louisville.
You know, there are so many to choose from. I would say one of the favorites of mine, a very historical place, is the Brown Hotel. The lobby bar at the Brown Hotel, best place to get a rye Manhattan in town. Anything else beyond just the rye? Because a hotel lobby bar is, I feel like, a good choice down in the South actually. You know, I think there's some good ones I've been to in Memphis and Nashville. What else characterizes that place?
The other thing that characterizes the Brown is a famous dish that they have made there for years called the Hot Brown. It's famous to Louisville. If you ever come here Derby week, everybody's selling the Hot Brown. You want the original, I think you got to go to the Brown Hotel. Okay, so we're having Hot Browns and rye. You got it, at the Brown Hotel.
So in any story fashion, we want to hear your story first, because I do have some questions around Amatrol coming up, but let's get some history on this company, right? How does someone that was working in the aerospace industry move back here and end up creating a company like this?
That's a good question. Don Perkins started this company, he and his wife Roberta, and I'll tell you what, he wanted to move back to town to be closer to family. Family-driven man, and wanted to get back to town, and there weren't a lot of aerospace jobs here. So he was a really super smart guy and had a passion for automation, and back in those days automation had all to do with electricity and pneumatics and hydraulics. So he went into the custom machine building business, helped a lot of companies around here, bottling companies, aluminum extrusion companies, and wound up not only developing the equipment in the plant, but he also had a passion for giving back to his community, and in doing that he found himself liking the role of teaching people. When you combine his knowledge for machine building and teaching people how to make it run, he just really thrived, and the business continued to grow.
There's a lot of focus on education here at Amatrol, which we're going to get into here in a second, but we also want to hear your story, because I believe you've been here 18 years. You have a long history in the automation world up until that point, so tell us how you made it here.
Well, interestingly enough, I left school here in Louisville and got a job working at Allen-Bradley Company, of all places, and I'll never forget the first meeting with my boss. He told me this is the best company you're going to work for, it's a privately held company, it'll never be sold. By the end of the year Rockwell Automation had bought the Allen-Bradley Company. I worked at Rockwell Automation for 17 years, various jobs throughout the country, more responsibility, moving around, wound up coming back to Louisville for personal reasons. I left Rockwell, went to work for an old friend of mine and signed a 5-year contract. When that contract was over, I wound up back at my very first customer that I ever had at Allen-Bradley Company, and that was Amatrol.
What a full circle story. And I'm actually going to take our conversation full circle as well, because we're going to take a figurative journey back to the Brown Hotel, where, let's say it is Derby week, it's busy, you only have like 30 seconds to answer this question, but someone asks, hey, what does Amatrol do? Right, I understand you're a global leader in CTE, career technical education. How do you answer that as if you're at a bar with someone?
Well, first I'd ask them if they know what CTE, career and technical education, is. After a few drinks, and they may not. So I would explain it to them that it's really the backbone of technical education and manufacturing here in the US. And if you think of all the things that we've seen in the past 20, 30, 40 years, America being the manufacturing headquarters of the world, and then diversifying into other countries and offshore everything, and then lo and behold things like the pandemic show up and all of a sudden we're reshoring and bringing manufacturing back. If we don't take serious the job that we all have to teach and train people in the skilled trades, then we've lost our mark in the world, and we're here to make sure that we continue as a world leader in manufacturing.
And I'm interested to learn how you and your team do this, because we hear a lot about the need for skilled trades, the lack of available workforce right now, and you have a very, I'd say, unique approach, because you do a couple things that not everyone does, right? There are companies that write curriculum, or there are companies that make equipment, right? How do you go from, let's say, what do you need to know when you're talking to a client, or what do they need to do, to creating a curriculum and equipment solution? Because I see those two sides that you do as one of the unique things about you.
Two key words in your question to me was what do you need to know and what do you need to do. So we take a real serious approach to teaching people, and we want to teach them what they need to know. We do that with our subject matter experts and technical writers that actually create the content that makes up the curriculum. We start out with understanding what those skills are, what does somebody need to do, and then we take that and teach them what do they need to know that enables them to do that job. We're the only company that I'm aware of that actually combines the need to know, need to do, and pulls it all together in one really world-class training environment, and we try to do our best to deliver that for a variety of technologies across a wide variety of industries and learning environments.
What are, in this day and age, we're recording this in late 2023, what are the things that people need to know and people need to do the most? What are you seeing?
Oh wow, I could answer that question so many different ways, but you know, it's interesting, in a manufacturing environment one of the things that I hear when I talk to other people in our situation is they need workers that know how to show up on time. They need to understand safety, that's paramount. They need to know how to do the right thing and how to elevate concerns throughout the network, through the chain of command. So you know, some of us learned that in the military, some of us learn it in a school, some of us learn it at home, and the tricky part is you've got to bring that into the manufacturing environment to be effective. We can teach some of that here.
But then the other things that you need to know in a manufacturing environment to be really successful is the basic foundational, fundamental things that you must know: how to communicate, how to be able to take criticism from somebody, but how do you follow an order, and how do you take somebody that has spoken to you and be able to interpret that and then act upon it in a reasonable way. And oftentimes that means following instructions, whether it's written or oral, as well as understanding basic technology: how to use a tape measure, how to use dial calipers, how to use a piece of electrical test equipment. Those foundational things are so critical to being successful in a manufacturing environment.
So what I'm hearing is a lot of the timeless, let's say, technical foundational skills as well as the work foundational skills. When someone is taking one of these trainings, do they know that's what they're going to get out of it, or are they really thinking more, I'm going to learn this technical skill? I'm just curious, is this something that they're expecting, or does it come as a bit of a surprise that they're getting more, let's say, 101 skills of just how to be in the manufacturing world?
So it depends on where they are in their learning life cycle. So for instance, if you take a high school student, they may have never played on a team at all, and we put them in a high school classroom and we go through, basically it's a career exploration course, and that career exploration course also includes project-based learning. So we're teaching technology in a project-based environment where groups of students have to come together, they have to interpret the problem, identify the problem, and then come up with a solution to solve that problem. It has to do with math, it has to do with maybe an electrical component, a programmable component, it may have to do with the design component, but they all have to work as part of a team to bring that together. Now if they've never worked, or if they've never, you know, played baseball or field hockey or something like that as part of a team group, this is their team, very much like what you see in a manufacturing environment.
I would bet of all the people you've interviewed in the manufacturing space, nobody has worked by themselves alone to accomplish a single goal. That's correct. Part of a team, yeah. So if you take that team concept, I get back to the reshoring topic I mentioned earlier. If you're making silicon chips, you're probably not doing the entire process, you're probably doing part of the process, shipping that product somewhere else where they, you know, assemble and test and all that. Very much like we build our products here. We have some wonderful suppliers that not only help us by supplying equipment, but they also help us with our inventory management, they help us with being introduced to new technology. And so again, it all gets back to teamwork. In a high school classroom, people are working as part of a team to develop a solution for a problem. In industry we're also working with our team members, our suppliers like E&H Electric, our suppliers like Rockwell Automation and others, to help bring us a solution to a problem that we have, which is to develop and deliver world-class training systems.
I want to focus on this teamwork aspect as well, because it gets into, like you're talking about, the people side of the equation, and I think one thing folks listening might be trying to figure out is, okay, who are the people that are taking this training, right? Is it, you know, college, you know, reskilling people that have been in the workforce for a long time? And I imagine it's multiple markets as well. Who are you serving?
Sure, so primarily it's the education space: high school people, career centers, community and technical colleges, and we actually work with a lot of universities as well. There's a portion of our business that is dedicated to working directly with industry clients. Let's face it, the big problem right now is skilled workforce.
So I'll tell you a little story. So we talked about Don Perkins. 40 years ago when he started the company, he would make a habit out of asking his industrial clients, so what keeps you up at night, what prevents you from growing and improving your productivity? And the answer that they would give him then is the same answer that they would give him today: we don't have enough skilled workers. Now back then, you know, a skilled worker needed to understand relay logic, air logic, mechanical apparatus, you know, electrical inspection, things like that. Today they need to understand programmable logic controllers, PLC programming, robotics, autonomous robotics, cybersecurity, network communication. There's all kinds of things that need to be done now that weren't even invented 40 years ago, but it's still a technical workforce that's going to help us solve those manufacturing problems, and we don't have enough of them.
There were a lot of interesting things we saw on the shop floor when we were walking around earlier, which is in line with my next question. Like we looked at training systems for smart sensors, for like utility scale wind equipment. I'm getting into some of the nitty-gritty here, but to your point about you're training people on different things at different times, how do you decide what you need to be training someone on next?
So we look at it this way. We assume that, pick a topic, pick a technology, electrical, let's just say electrical to start with. You would assume that you would not start with a reversing motor starter or contactor. You wouldn't start a high school student there. You typically would start at the very beginning. So we're going to teach them basic electrical, AC/DC electrical: what's a series circuit, a parallel circuit, an input device, output device. Teach them a simple series circuit with different components, and then teach them how to use a digital multimeter to measure the current, the voltage, the resistance of that circuit. So we would typically start at a very basic level and take it up to the end of whatever that course is. But we kind of do it differently. Instead of just throwing theory at them, we would start with theory, but then we would integrate the hands-on component. So we'll introduce a concept, teach a concept, then have them apply what they learn.
Once we get to the end of that course, there may be a couple of different ways they can go. It might be going directly to a motor control course, or to understand three-phase power. It may be going to understand motors and motor protection. It may be going to, if it's an exploratory type of thing, it may be leaving electrical and starting on basic fluid power or basic power transmission. So it kind of depends on the career path, if you will, or the study path that the student might be on, which would tell us where we take them next.
We were talking earlier about industries that are demanding talent these days. You mentioned EV, you mentioned battery, you mentioned silicon chips. I'm curious, what are you seeing today that you weren't seeing five years ago, whether it's from an industry standpoint, a curriculum standpoint? I'm interested in your take on that.
Those three definitely, but the big topic out there today is smart manufacturing. So smart sensors. We didn't know what smart sensors were. The sensors weren't dumb. I don't even know if most of our audience knows what a smart sensor is, to be clear, because we've talked about this, like smart manufacturing is a bit of a nebulous term sometimes. So if you can help make it more real for us through this example, that would be tremendously helpful.
So back in the olden days, five years ago, if we had a sensor on a line that was simply counting, let's say counting boxes coming down a line, or is it metal or is it aluminum or is it glass, it would simply give you an on/off signal. Okay, a count. What a smart sensor would do for you is maybe be able to do the math between when it saw the front edge of the product and the back edge of the product and then the front edge of the next product. Now it can give you line speed, it can help you calculate throughput, it can help give you a lot more information. That information then doesn't just go through a wire that says I'm on, I'm off, it goes through an
Ethernet connection that goes back to a smart processor that accumulates all that data, and then running that data through some analogous program, some process, we can come up with all kinds of manufacturing information that helps us more precisely adjust the equipment for optimal output.
Exactly. Well, that makes perfect sense to me, right? You're basically talking a more binary output in the past, and now you're talking about, hey, you've got information like line speed, like throughput, and that data on its own might just be information, it might just be data. But once you use that data to make a decision around your manufacturing process, or basically draw a smart conclusion on, hey, this isn't running as well as it should, and this is maybe why it should be running faster and how we can get it to run faster. At least that's what I got from your answer on what can make smart manufacturing smart manufacturing.
Sure. Well, if you think about it, there's, I was on a podcast or read an article the other day, this interesting statistic came to me, 'cause we're a data-driven company, we make decisions based on the data. 90% of the world's data was developed in the last two years. Think about that for just a second. That's a lot of data. Now, how much of that data goes unused? I don't know. But if 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years, I can't imagine what the next five years means to us.
I didn't know that stat going into this conversation. It's crazy.
So if you think about data-driven AI, I tell this to high school kids all the time. I ask them if they know what AI is. Well, we're talking about smart manufacturing and data and big data analytics, and they don't really know. And as I ask them, how many of you have, or your parents have, used Waze to get to school today, or Google Maps, and they all raised their hand. Well, it tells you the best way to go based upon the information that it receives from your cell phone and does some kind of calculation to tell you, don't go that way, there's a crash, go around this way and go in the back entrance.
So all this data is important to modern manufacturing, and by using smart sensors, as opposed to what we used to use, on/off switches and sensors, we're able to collect more information, make better decisions in record speed, and make really a better product in a shorter amount of time.
Are you seeing more companies actually do that? Because I think one of the challenges we run into is, you gave a very good definition on what smart manufacturing is and a very good example around that. I don't know if enough companies have really put that into action, where they have all that data but they haven't done smart stuff with it yet, if that makes sense. I'm just interested to see what you see in that.
So I read a Conexus report, I think it was 2022. At that point, 23% of companies had considered doing anything with smart manufacturing. Last year it was up to 43%. The scary number is there's a large number of companies that have not even dived, they have not dived into that water yet.
So I've got a bunch, we're in Louisville, bourbon country, I have a bunch of friends that work at Jim Beam distillery, and so I asked them about, are you using smart automation? Are you using smart instruments? They've got Endress+Hauser instruments. Are you using smart instruments? The answer I get back from the engineering community there is, it costs way more for us to implement it after the line is running than it does to build it from the beginning. They're putting a new process in, guess what's going in? It's smart sensors, it's Ethernet communications, it's wireless sensors on their instrumentation process. It's all going smart, but they're not going back and ripping out the old stuff that they do. So you kind of have to weigh where do I make the investment. It costs you a lot of money to rip out what you have to put in the smart.
But what we're starting to see now is a lot of companies are adopting smart technology for new installations and retrofit for old installations. Now, what that means to our customers, the local community colleges, by and large, is that they need to teach both. Yeah, they really need to be prepared to teach both kinds of technology.
Yeah, because I was interested to ask, what does this mean for you as a company when it comes to smart manufacturing? Because when I think of Amatrol, I'm like, okay, you're educating the workforce, right? So is it an issue of people not having folks that know how to do this in the field, why we might not have seen some of that adoption, in addition to what you mentioned, kind of that greenfield-brownfield aspect, where if we're doing it from the ground up, easy, but if we're doing it brownfield, it's a little more challenging? So how much of it is that side of the equation, greenfield versus brownfield, as opposed to, hey, we just don't have people that are educated in this yet?
Yeah, I'm not sure I know how to answer that question, but I'll answer it this way. If you look at those three new industries that are popping like crazy right now, silicon chip manufacturing, electric vehicle, and electric battery, a big majority of what we're seeing in electric vehicle manufacturing is the same that we've been seeing in vehicle manufacturing for years. You still have torque wrenches, air guns, you still have all the stuff that makes the vehicle. Yeah, but now you've got that extra piece that's called the battery technology. You've got to be really careful about the heat, the cooling system that goes in, and how do you connect the electrodes, and how do you do those things. So you might have to train your current workforce for those new skills, but if you're building a new plant from the ground up, you've got to teach everybody everything.
Here's the interesting thing that I've learned about our clients, schools teaching that group of people, whether it's a new student or whether it's an incumbent worker, and that is, if you already know manufacturing skills and you're going to go work at a battery plant, you still have to learn battery technology. If you've been working in manufacturing for 20 years and are going to work at the chip plant, now you need to understand precision manufacturing, motion control, clean room, vacuum. You have to learn all these other things. So it's not either/or, it's fundamental plus the new stuff.
I love it, because by the way, it's totally fair game to answer a question on manufacturing happy are with a totally other related insight. So that was very, I'm impressed with that answer. But no, very helpful, understanding that, hey, as you are going between these different, as you were talking about the in-demand verticals, there are going to be different skills that you need going from the different areas.
So I want to touch on one more thing around smart manufacturing before we get into a little bit about the local region, and one of the things we saw out there on your floor was smart HVAC. You had a piece of training equipment for that as well. So we sometimes lose the forest for the trees when we talk about smart manufacturing, where we're talking about this big thing where it's like, we're going to take all this data across the facility and transform our enterprise, when there are really other things we should be talking about that we don't always hear about as well, using smart HVAC as an example.
So if you think about, you know, HVAC has been around for a very long time, but it's now crossed over into the smart manufacturing area as well. On any new system that's being put in at any manufacturing facility, there are smart sensors, there are electronic motors running the damper systems, and in order to get airflow in the right part of the plant, there's all kinds of sensors that are telling you to do that. There's also different zone controls that are all communicating via wireless technology back to a hub, sending that information on to maybe a monitoring center that could be miles away. So if we did all that with carbon wire, or I'm sorry, copper wire, it would be miles and miles of wire. But if we can do it over an Ethernet internet scenario connection, it really opens up the ability for you to monitor your system and make changes on the fly. You can also build those algorithms into your controller. It's a smart controller, so it knows that if you start to exceed a temperature set point, it will then react and help you stay within your temperature, you know, your temperature setting points that you want.
Would you say part of smart manufacturing is taking the information, the data, the variables that you have visibility to, and using those to make automatic changes taking place?
Absolutely. It's all driven by algorithms. Absolutely.
I love this. You've given a very good way of breaking down smart manufacturing, especially when most people talk about it in a very in-the-clouds type of way. Moving on from smart manufacturing, though, I want to bring it back here to Louisville and the Louisville region. So in your own words, what does manufacturing mean to this area?
Oh, wow. It's our future. It's our path forward. If you look at just everything that's going on around here, it's a great place to start a business, to start a manufacturing company. Years ago, this used to be the logistics heartbeat of the world right here, and it still for the most part very much is. The world hub is here for UPS. There are literally hundreds of companies that do everything from build panels to design and build conveyor systems and sortation systems, focused right here in the greater Louisville area.
Automotive business, we've got multiple automotive companies right here in town, two Ford plants in Louisville, a new battery plant going up in E-town, and other plants in the greater Indiana-Louisville area as well. Then you look at the distillery operation. I mean, bourbon is king around here, and I mean, I can't buy my favorite bourbon in town because they ship it all over the place and I can't get it here. But the distilling market is going crazy. Just what's going on with the manufacturing space and building automation and all that, this is a great place to really have that kind of a manufacturing business.
The other thing that really I think helps is the fact that we have an incredible education system around here. You've got the University of Louisville, you've got the Ivy Tech college system on the Indiana side of the river, KCTCS on the Kentucky side of the river. Both are just doing a wonderful job training young people for futures in manufacturing.
And I'm curious, I'd love to get a more specific answer from you, not that that answer wasn't very specific, but I wanted to ask about a specific group within Kentucky, which I believe you've talked about, the Kentucky Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, before. Tell us a little bit about that organization. Kentucky FAME.
Kentucky FAME. So FAME was actually started here in Georgetown, Kentucky, at the Toyota plant, and they used to have it up on this mezzanine. They had a bunch of Amatrol equipment up there, and they would bring young people in to work at Toyota three days a week, and then two days a week they'd go to the mezzanine and they would train on equipment to learn the manufacturing skills to make them productive on the line. It turned into such a great idea that it actually grew legs, for lack of a better term. That program kind of left Toyota, was picked up by the Manufacturing Institute out of DC, and now you find FAME programs scattered out throughout the world, well, throughout the US.
Kentucky has 12 different sites set up, but here in Louisville is a fabulous lab over at Jefferson Community and Technical College on First Street. They have millions of dollars' worth of training equipment. They run the Kentucky FAME program. They serve companies like Bosch, Toyota, Cardinal Conduit, Ford Motor Company, and others. I forget all the companies that they are related to, but it's a great work-and-learn program.
So imagine this: you're a high school student, you've earned some credentials, and you've earned a high school degree. You think you might want to go into manufacturing, and you get recruited by one of these companies to go through the FAME program. They pay you to work, they pay you to go to school, you wind up with a two-year degree, you wind up with a job, two years under your belt, and you have no debt.
How do you get recruited by this? I feel like that would be a question if I'm a high school student that heard this. I'd be like, well, how do I get this good deal?
I'm pretty sure there's a couple of avenues. One of those avenues is probably to join the SkillsUSA affiliate at the local school. But the schools are always doing projects. Part of the FAME program is to reach out to local high school CTE programs and invite the students to come in and interview. You know, it's one of those things where you're actually interviewed and must be accepted by the organization, and it's kind of like the NFL signing deal or the college basketball signing day. So it's a big deal, and when people graduate, it's a great thing. Some of those students actually not only are kept on by the company that they work with, but that company oftentimes will send them to the University of Louisville or Purdue or somewhere else to continue their education career for a four-year engineering degree.
What I like about Kentucky FAME is it feeds into another question I want to ask, which is how is what you're doing here at Amatrol impacting manufacturing beyond this region? We just talked about how that program came out of a local Toyota plant here and then spread. So what are the things that you're doing here that are impacting the broader manufacturing community in the US and, honestly, worldwide?
Well, I think one of those things is shedding some light on the fact that the manufacturing skills that are needed today, that were needed yesterday, are still needed today, and we have a very economical way of delivering those through our partners in education. You know, the bar is never too high if you can figure out how to get a step up, and we can help you with that. Just some very basic skills to get you on your way, there are manufacturing jobs that will pay dividends for many years.
You know, part of what we run into with our manufacturing friends in recruiting people is they don't know what people know, and they don't know what people can do when they show up on their doorstep to give them a job application. The way that we help manufacturing here locally, and quite frankly worldwide, is we have a unique ability to help them assess for knowledge and assess for skill competency, so that they can figure out if that's somebody they want to hire or not.
There's another way to do that, and that is, there are multiple industry-validated certifications that people can earn while they're in their post-secondary education that are, for lack of a better term, their ticket to an interview at a manufacturing company. If they pass a certification exam and they have a credential, they oftentimes get an interview.
So you talk about assessing for knowledge, assessing for skills, that's what you do to help these groups. And we've talked about this in different forms throughout the conversation, but I want to make it clear as we get towards the end of this conversation: how do you work with, like, tech colleges? Right, we're hearing about Amatrol, we're hearing about the certification, we also know tech colleges have their certification programs. So just to make that really clear for the audience before it wraps up.
Sure. So when we work with a technical college, let's say, we provide consulting services. Sometimes they have a very good vision of where they want to go, but what we really try to do, we don't want to tell them how to do what we think they need to do, we want to help them achieve what they want to achieve. So for instance, Ivy Tech here in Indiana, which is where we're located, they came to
us and ask us to work with them and help them figure out how to put together a smart manufacturing digital integration degree. It's a two-year degree, and it's all built around certifications from the Smart Automation Certification Alliance. We help them align those certifications, those credentials, with training equipment and online training material that would help them deliver to the students what would be required to earn that degree.
We do the same thing throughout the world. We have schools come to us all the time that may have a specific industry coming to their town, so they look to us to consult with them on what types of skills they need to train for, how best to provide students the right learning environment with online curriculum and training equipment, and possibly industry-approved certifications to help those students be successful.
There are a couple ways I feel like we've described what Amatrol does today, and I want to focus on a couple of them that I feel like are very much people-centric, human-centric, right? You were just talking about consulting on certifications, talking to the colleges about the skills they need, and actually it was Justin, who's watching us right now from Industrial Solutions Network, that brought up that you in many ways essentially de-stress people during the hiring process, right? The people that are doing the hiring, because people know through the type of programs that are offered the type of person, the type of skill they are getting. Would you say that is, like, in a human-centric way what you do, or do you have another way to describe that?
Wow, I don't know that I would have described what we do that way, but I think it sticks. I think it works. You know, if you just look at our mission statement, it's really simple, it's a really simple one, and it's all about, you know, transitioning the workforce one life at a time.
Yeah, there's not a word stress in there at all.
So what we do is, if we can deliver the technical training in a very meaningful, self-directed, competency-based way, there should be no stress when they go to interview for a job or even have to do maybe an assessment to see if they know the stuff. If we've done our job right, they'll have no problem passing the online quiz or the hands-on test. So our job, I guess that's really a good explanation, our job really is to de-stress that entire process, and if we can do that by creating a learning environment delivered by our partners at the schools that is self-directed and competency-based.
Competency-based, I think that's a beautiful way to do it, and I've heard you talk about transforming the workforce one life at a time. So my last question then is, how have you seen that play out? How have you seen the work you do transform someone's life? Feel free to be specific, etc. Ball's in your court.
Wow, you know, I've seen this in a lot of different areas. You know, I tell the story about the single mother with three kids that lost her job, and she's trying to figure out, how do I put myself back in the workforce? By attending a college that is using the Amatrol curriculum and hands-on equipment, she's able to work a part-time job and able to come to school in the evenings and really learn at her own pace and earn the degree that she wants to get her a full-time paying job that will far exceed the expectations of her family. Those stories abound in every city, every state that I go to. I talk to those people that have that experience.
How many people do you think Amatrol has impacted?
Oh geez, you know, that I don't know. I would love to say millions.
Yeah, I was going to say it's got to be up there in those seven figures.
It's a big number. Think about it, we've been doing this for more than 40 years, and we're in thousands and thousands of colleges all over the world.
It's probably hard to track at this point, honestly.
It is hard to track, but we've been very successful simply because of the success of our clients. We're nothing without the success of our clients and the people that kind of lean on us and use us to get what they need done, and if they're successful, then we're successful.
Well, I appreciate you taking us through such a straightforward journey on training, certifications, smart manufacturing, all the above. I think our rise are getting pretty empty at this point, so we're going to need a refill, which is, I'd say, the perfect time to wrap our conversation. Thanks so much for jumping on the show today, Kent. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you. Cheers.
Cheers.
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