Jim Witherspoon, product manager at Zebra Technologies, shares how recent acquisitions have allowed the company to strengthen its portfolio in automation and vision solutions while opening the door for new customers — and markets. Zebra’s goal is to create the best solutions by merging product lines catering to machine vision novices and expert engineers alike. For example, Witherspoon acknowledges that while deep learning is often overhyped, the technology will allow customers to solve specific use cases, such as OCR, while building up its capabilities over time. Zebra also sees the continued growth of 3D imaging and is “creating easy tools for people to start dipping their toes into [that] world,” Witherspoon says.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:06] Hi, everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing. I’m here in Orlando at the A3 Business Forum 2023. And I’m joined by Jim Witherspoon of Zebra Technologies. Hey, Jimmy.

Jim Witherspoon: [00:00:17] Thanks for having me.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:17] Thanks so much for taking the time. For those unfamiliar and I will have to say that at this point, it’s probably not too many people. Could you let our audience know what Zebra Technologies does?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:00:27] Certainly, yeah. So Zebra is a large company. It’s been around for 50 over 50 years now, almost 10,000 employees. So it’s in a lot of different industries, right? So most people will come up to us and say, oh, you’re the printer people or you’re the tablet people or the mobile computer or handheld scanner people. But I come from a group called the Machine Vision and Imaging Group, and we focus on anything machine vision based, which is fixed industrial scanning, 3D, deep learning and standard machine vision technologies.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:55] Sure. Yeah. So on that note, and the note of machine vision, deep learning and sort of the overall industrial automation space, you know, I have to ask and I’m sure you’re, you’re sick of being asked this, but, you know, the acquisitions of Adaptive Vision Robotics and of course Matrox, that’s exciting stuff. Right? So what what excites you about that?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:01:13] It’s super exciting. Right? So the group has been around for four years, right? And Zebra is all about growth, right? We have a tremendous customer base and they always want to push us to directions. We have things called adjacencies, right? So people who have used our products for printing or people have used our products for other barcode reading, keep pushing us to new areas. And one of them is this particular space. So about four years ago we started our group and we created a homegrown product. What that product allows us to do is focus on some of the sensor style inspections as well as some machine vision fixed industrial scanning style applications. From that point, the results were great. People wanted us to do more, and the only way to do more is to acquire great companies sometimes, right? So the adaptive vision piece came in that allowed us to do some more focus on deep learning. The fetch came in and allowed us to focus on just integrating a new space of automation, of factory automation and such. And then the Matrix piece allowed us to complete that line and give us one of the most deepest portfolios of products to be able to handle all your machine vision and fixed industrial scanning needs.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:02:10] Yeah, so like I said, it’s really exciting. And the matrix one is the one that I really looked at and said, Wow, that’s a big deal. Matrix. Super exciting. Yeah, yeah. Well established, long standing company in the machine vision space. With Matrix in particular, how do you see that portfolio complementing existing zebra offerings?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:02:25] Yeah, again, great question. And one we get quite often. Everyone wants to know, hey, what are you going to do with the product line? You’ve got this new flashy toy. What are you going to do with it? It boils down to, you know, taking what we have existing and productizing it and making more out of it, right? So we’re going to take things and we’re going to merge product lines. We have some fixed industrial scanning stuff we have on the zebra side. We’ll optimize that, put it on the matrix matrix side, take some of the stuff matrix, move some of that around, be able to create the biggest and best parts. Our goal is to try to make the best solutions. Think about like vision for the masses, right? So take all the cool components of all the things we’ve acquired in the past, put them in packages and allow people who may not be vision experts to start getting a taste of vision. Right. But still keep that technology so that those engineers who are familiar with the technology can still go out and create their own solutions and do those sorts of things. So it’s a balance, right? And it’s all about merging and packaging and that’s what we’ll be doing over the next few years, is taking all these different pieces and parts, stacking them together to create a better, stronger portfolio for all the people out there to use.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:22] So I’m really looking forward to seeing how that all plays out. I think it’s going to be great for the machine vision community. You know, one question I wanted to ask on the deep learning side of things, when I was familiar with the Deep Division before the acquisition, and I know that Zebra recently announced A or launched an OCR tool, a deep learning OCR tool for its Aurora software. Now AI and deep learning has been hyped, you know, for for years now. And it’s not it’s maybe not the magic tool that it was hyped as initially, but now there are these well-defined use cases of deep learning and this represents one of them. So what are some ways that you’re seeing or you see AI and deep learning benefiting, benefiting the automation and manufacturing space?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:04:02] You have some really good questions and this is a good one. We get this one quite often, and the way to go about it is just like you mentioned, right? Remember the early days of vision where people tried it and they go, oh, vision is horrible, right? And you had to go and talk to them. We can’t have that same problem happen with deep learning today. So you’re absolutely right. Focusing on applications, right? Ocr is a great one. Looking for specific applications you could solve, get that deep learning feat under people, right? Get them used to just trying the technology. There’s a lot of overblown hype about it. It’s the magic thing. It’ll just, you know, paint some things on a picture or hit a button and magically you’ll get this thing trained. It’s not that easy to use, so you still need the expertise and you still need vision people to help you do that. I think the future of it is a lot of productization of it, right? Solving specific use cases, allowing people to look for specific things, and then building upon that as you go on over time.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:04:50] I like that looking towards, you know, you mentioned over time looking towards the future, what are some trends or technologies that you’re most excited about?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:04:58] Well, deep learning is still one of them, right? Even though it’s got the overhyped piece of it. If we can do it right. And this is not just zebra, it’s the whole industry. If we do it right, package that right and bring it to market correctly, that’s going to solve a lot of problems. There’s still a lot of applications out there that are difficult to solve. Right. But you’ve got to take steps to do those right when you know where your defect is and what your defect is. Those are great, you know, machine vision applications when you don’t know what defect is and you don’t know where it is, those tend to be really hard ones. So maybe there’s a middle ground where some of that deep learning plays in. I think there’s a spot for that still in the market. Now, is that to be 100% inspection? No. But if you could get 80 or 90% inspection, maybe that’ll be good for a lot of people that are out there. Another technology that’s really important is 3D. We see 3D still continue to grow an area where we’ll be focusing on a lot over time. And that’s just being able to you know, whether it’s a static image, you’re moving a rastering, a device, putting a reader on a or a head on a robot, all those different things to get that 3D profile. There’s a lot of inspections you can do with 3D out there. 3d is not necessarily always easier. Sometimes machine vision is hard enough with two dimensions, so you add a third dimension. It can be a little more complex. So creating easy tools for people to start dipping their toes into the 3D world, playing with that point Cloud in three dimension, I think is going to be also a thing you see a lot moving on in the future as well.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:15] All right. That’s great. Jim, what else? What haven’t I asked about? What are you excited about? What’s the company excited about?

Jim Witherspoon: [00:06:21] Just the growth, right. Meeting new people, new aspects. This show has been fantastic, right? There’s a lot of new potential players in the market, right? A lot of people who have interest very interested to talk to that. Seeing more industry, right, seeing other industries adapt, machine vision who have traditionally stayed away from it in the past. There’s a whole bunch of areas where this stuff could play where it’s not traditionally used today, or it’s just in its infancy. In some of those places. If you look at automotive manufacturing, it’s one of the places where machine vision has grown, right? It was born there almost, right? But now you start getting into some of these other ones, some life science things outside of the traditional normal machine vision world. I see a lot of play there as well. I’m excited to get that. That’s a whole nother set of people to talk to. One other set of people to create marketing materials for and and really learn about what they’re trying to do and then create products and solutions around that. So that’s the cool part for us is, is helping people at that edge, bringing the different technologies together, going out and finding new technologies or deciding as a company to go and develop those technologies. And that’s really what drives us. It’s, you know, it’s cliche. I want to make the world a better place, but we want to do that by helping people with their jobs, right? And helping people enjoy their work, helping companies do better, become more profitable and those sorts of things. So that’s really you can see I’m getting excited already. I mean, that’s really what gets us excited about.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:34] Well, you know, Alan Boullier did say earlier in his global economic outlook, which is always a great one to catch, that automation is going to help keep the economy afloat in the coming years, especially during a recession. So it’s you know, it’s not maybe a too far to say, you know, it’s it really is the case, I think.

Jim Witherspoon: [00:07:52] Yeah, I agree with you. It’s and that’s again, that’s the excitement of it. Yeah.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:55] Jim, thanks so much for taking the time today. Really appreciate it. You bet, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to listen or watch. This has been the Manufacturing Matters podcast and thanks for joining.