On this episode of Manufacturing Matters, Jean-Marc Vico, vice president and general manager of BizLink Robotic Solutions USA, discusses the importance of a quality technical training program for production operators and maintenance technicians. Unlike generic teaching courses, the company delivers customized, hands-on training – either at BizLink’s facility or by bringing its mobile work cells directly to a customer’s facility – that mirrors the customer’s robotics cell so that students learn how to use and troubleshoot their own equipment.

BizLink uses a systems approach to training that includes an entire integrated automation system rather than the individual components. Vico also emphasizes that courses are taught by specific developers with years of real-world experience. Plus, get a sneak peak of the next generation of cable management systems for robots.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:06] Hello, everybody. This is Winn Hardin. I’m with Manufacturing Matters podcast, and I’m lucky enough to be here today with Jean-Marc Vico, general manager of Bizlink Robotics USA. Thanks for joining me today, Jean-Marc.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:00:18] Thank you, Winn. I appreciate to be with you today.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:20] How have you been enjoying the weather? A little bit better than Michigan?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:00:24] It’s much better than Michigan, even if inside it’s freezing cold because the air conditioning is way too low for me.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:30] It’s the truth, my God, I remember when I first came into the hotel, my room was about 59 degrees. And that’s about what it felt like when we came in the main hall. But yesterday we had a frost delay, so I’m not sure. I think it’s starting to warm up a little bit, a little bit more. We probably should just be outside playing.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:00:46] Enjoying the nice blue sky and sun shining. And I know that in Michigan it’s raining right now, so it’s much better here.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:55] There you go. No four months of gray skies in Orlando, that’s for sure. All right, as I said, we are meeting with Jean-Marc Vico from BizLink, which used to be a part of Leoni.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:01:05] Correct.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:06] Until about how long ago?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:01:07] So we have been Leoni since 2000. The company has been created in 1996. In U.S. was called Engineering, Product, and Services, EPS. Became Leoni EPS in 2000, and then BizLink acquired that part of Leoni one year ago. We are, in fact, celebrating one year and one month exactly.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:32] Wow. Okay, fantastic. So I know BizLink a little bit as a cable company and a connectors company. So tell us about the new BizLink Robotics.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:01:43] So BizLink Group is a company that has a headquarter in Fremont, California. It’s a company with 16,500 employees today. And with the acquisition this part of Leoni Industrial Business Group moved from $1.2 billion global sales to $1.7 billion global sales worldwide. And this is a very solid, financially speaking, company, which gives us a very security, safety in our development that obviously we want to do since multiple years that we were not necessarily able to do that in the past.

Winn Hardin: [00:02:30] All right. All right. So the BizLink with its cable connections, connectors. I can understand that connection to your previous company. But I don’t think a lot of people knew that even when you were Engineering Products and Services, or Solutions, excuse me, EPS, you guys did a whole lot more than just cables and drives. So do you want to lay out some of your service and your product lines?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:02:53] Correct. In fact, we are known as a cable company, but here in the U.S., we are not producing any cables. Our cables are coming from our sister company in Canada, close to Toronto. Our specialty is to make the assembly of all the needed cables and hoses to convert different types of current and different type of water or air or sometimes both together to make what is called the cable management system on a robot, or more classically a dresspack. We are dressing robots, so this is our speciality. We are doing that since almost 30 years now. In parallel, we have activities that we started with training on robots. Now we are training on processes. So the training consists of bringing to the customer a solution that is as close as possible as the one that they have in production to make sure that what we are teaching to the students, mostly users of installation or maintenance people, to either how to use the installation or mostly to troubleshoot when there is an issue. Our strong activity here is to provide all the components connected together. So the robot with a PLC, with a drives, with the different components like conveyors, everything together to make sure that when there is a trouble, you don’t stay concentrated in one of these components to find that it is not that component, is not the other one. And most of the time is in between these components.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:40] Right. And that’s why I’m always impressed by BizLink’s mobile work cells, the mobile training work cells you guys put together, because basically you’ll have almost a duplicate of a subset of a line or whatever it is that the new employees, maintenance, or engineers are being trained on.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:04:57] We want to have that flexibility to bring the equipment to the customer place. We can do that, of course, in our facility in Lake Orion in Michigan as well in Nashville, Tennessee. But usually customers prefer to train his own employees at his facility, particularly for OEMs, where we can easily have a group of eight students, which is our best case scenario. Always two students per equipment, means that for eight students we need four sets of equipment. So it’s quite a CapEx needed to realize this training. But this is one of the quality that we are giving to our students is to make sure that they are hands-on and not just sitting in a class and looking at the equipment and videos and not touching that. We know that the robot can do a lot of things but can be as well dangerous if we are not paying some attention. So we want to make sure that the students are touching physically a robot and programming and making the robot move. Yes, sometimes we have some accident — robot touching some components. But this is good. This is the real life.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:11] Right. Being able to recover from those e-stops and so forth is kind of the most important part to a certain extent of the training that we’re doing.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:06:17] And the most up-to-date sales that we can ship to customer, because they are all on the size of a pallet that we can easily put on a truck, are including vision systems as well. And we even develop a remote control that the instructor can create an incident remotely when the student is working on something on the cell, and suddenly there is something wrong and the student has to find what.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:49] That’s a real quiz. No theoretical test in that or exams there. That’s the real deal when you’re troubleshooting. So how does that differ from, say, if you were purchasing a bot from FANUC or a Doosan or somebody else or Kawasaki, Yaskawa? They would obviously provide their customers with some amount of training. But how does BizLink with this whole unified approach of the PLC, that seems like a different approach.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:07:16] Yes. So we are completely agnostic. We are working with any type of brand, robot manufacturer, PLC equipment, and even we are training in the press, for instance. So we are working with different brands on that, and we bring all the equipment together. So as you mentioned, when the robot itself is on the pallet-size cell, then we have on the side another pallet size, which is the PLC equipment with all the safety components like light barriers, simple proximity switch to detect if we have a part present or not. Multiple components like that connected all together, and there is a real physical connection between the robot cell and the PLC equipment. And then we can multiply that with drives, with conveyors, with different other components, with obviously the process itself. We can even have the welding gun, for instance, that is connected to the robot. And we are training, we are teaching the students on how to use that equipment, how to troubleshoot that equipment, being on-site with all this physical equipment in front of them.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:32] Okay, so you mentioned earlier you’ve got locations up in Michigan and down in Nashville. So I’m going to just take a sneaky suspicion that the automotive industry is important to you.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:08:41] True.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:41] All right. So I’m going to guess, the next question is, considering how many follow-on projects and training you’ve done for Ford, GM, the Bigs, that the companies who would know the best very much like this approach to training, this holistic approach, hands-on training, bringing together all the different components. But have you done any kind of studies or just some anecdotal feedback from your customers about how much more the technicians get out of this approach?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:09:11] Yeah, in fact, they really love the way that we are teaching because they are comparing that with some OEM training. And I don’t want to be negative in any way. For me it’s, again, the hands-on and the fact that we are connecting the different key components together is really giving the difference. And we are developing, obviously every time that there is a new technology or an evolution on the technology, we are updating our curriculum. We are as well developing curriculum that are teaching the students to switch from one brand to another one. So if you are used to doing something in one brand in programming, for instance, whether it’s robot or PLC, and you switch to another brand, we are showing how you are doing today compared to how you should do tomorrow with a new brand. So it’s really something that students love because our instructors are coming from the industry. They know the processes. So combining all these elements together is really somewhere the secret sauce of our quality of training.

Winn Hardin: [00:10:26] You know, my company has done a little bit of instructional classroom training on the PLCs, for example. So, you know, if you’ve got a lady or a gentleman who’s been a Rockwell PLC customer for a long, long time, and suddenly they have to deal with Omron, it’s really, really helpful to see, okay, this function is this in Rockwell. Here’s the comparative function over in Omron. Here are the slight differences. So that customized training I think is really invaluable, and it’s definitely going to increase the efficiency of the training.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:10:56] We spend a lot of time in developing our curriculum. In the past, we were using instructors to develop this new curriculum. Now we have specific developers that are really coming from the industry that they know the process. If we want to teach on the PLC, obviously they know how to program the PLC in a real environment. They are not just coming from a school, and they learn how to program the PLC and then they teach that. Sometime they are even retired, and we are giving the flexibility to the instructors to be not necessarily working full-time, if they prefer to go fishing during the summertime and because winter is too cold, then they can teach during the wintertime. So this is the type of flexibility we are offering also to our employees.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:46] You know, that’s an interesting point, because we’re supposedly in this era of, you know, basically the retirement era. Right? A lot of folks in the industry that we are in and automation and everything, maybe just a couple of years, maybe 10 years, maybe many decades older than we are, they’re starting to to retire. Do you find that’s providing a great source of – it’s so hard to find human assets. Are these semiretired folks, are they really providing that?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:12:16] Yeah, and they provide the strong experience that that is missing. We have developed with an OEM, one of the biggest OEMs in Detroit, what we call the apprenticeships. So we are taking students that are coming. Well, I’d like to say kids that are coming out of a school with no specific knowledge, and we developed a three-year program where step by step we are bringing these, I’m calling them kids because that could be my kids in fact. We are bringing them to the level that they can go in a production and run a full line of multiple robots and giving the full body assembly of a car.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:58] You know, and again, I think that’s so critical, not just the custom training or the ability to go to them or have them come to your location, but to be taught by an instructor who’s had real-world experience in either the integration, operation, or maintenance of that type of system. So when questions come up from the students, they’re able to relate real-world experiences that they had in their past. And that kind of information, that kind of tribal knowledge doesn’t come easy, cheap, and it’s very hard to find. So that’s really cool that you’re able to tap into that resource and folks. You know, the only other thing is, is it always you guys providing the trainers or do you also coach larger OEMs, perhaps larger manufacturers to develop their own training programs or spread that knowledge?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:13:43] Yes, we are doing that. Obviously, we prefer to do our own classes ourselves, with our team of multiple instructors, but we are as well helping customers to develop their own training. And we have a program of train the trainer that is ongoing with some OEMs. Yes, absolutely.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:04] Very cool. Very cool. All right. So we’ve been talking down where the rubber hits the highway, so to speak, in terms of where BizLink right now is in services. Let’s step back a little bit. We talked about automotive being a key market. What other key markets are important for BizLink?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:14:19] So for us, we are obviously in the automotive industry because robotics has been a lot related to the automotive industry since decades. So this is where we developed our competencies since that exists. We bring the cable management system. Before, our activity was more what we call a spaghetti solution. Means everything tied together, whatever the way to tie that, and going along the robot arm. So we bring a solution that is really engineered for the automotive needs. The difference between automotive use of a robot and I would not say totally the rest of the industry, but the biggest part of industry is that the robots are really solicited. The wrist of a robot is moving a lot in the automotive industry, which brings the need of this cable management system that has to be very robust. And as you know, the repetitivity of the cycle is very important. So we go through a multimillion cycle test. In some cases we go to a 20 million cycle test to make sure that our cables are resistant to such an environment. In the non-automotive, since multiple years now robots are sold in a higher quantity outside the automotive industry, is still for us work in progress. The solution that we have today developed for the automotive is too much engineered for non-automotive application, so we are developing some solution on that. We are working on that aspect.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:58] Is it a matter of highly engineered dresspacks or function packs, because automotive is very repetitive, high volume, and you’re going to develop that particular work cell, and it’s going to do that for the run of the product, multiple years, whereas other industries may have more quicker turnover or changeover requirements?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:16:16] It can be, but if you look at the food industry, everything that is related to packaging, the cycle could be even, it is much higher than the automotive industry. I’m used to saying that an automotive plant could produce 1,000 cars per day. When you go to a food industry, the 1,000 number is sometime per minute. So the robot is working much faster. But it could be just a pick and place. A lot of pick and place, putting some components in boxes, then carton boxes on pallets, for instance. The wrist of a robot is not that solicited like it is in the automotive industry. So the cable management system does not need to have such a highly engineered solution. We still need to put some energy, to bring energy to the end-of-arm tooling that is installed on the robot wrist, which could be just a simple cable signal or just a hose for the air. So we still need to do that, and that has to be conveyed in a correct way to make sure that is not a source of breakdown on the installation.

Winn Hardin: [00:17:30] So one more step backwards. There’s a lot of conversations. Alan Beaulieu is here at the conference giving his forecast, which I have not heard the latest up on. But of course, we’ve all been listening to worries about recession over the last 18 months, 24 months. We really haven’t seen evidence of that in North America, except possibly in very small niches. But let me ask you the question. So you’re looking in automotive. You’re also in food. What are you seeing out there in the great big world?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:17:55] For me, it’s the best place to be. We are one of the components in the automation industry. And I’m used to say to my team that our future is really bright. Automation will only increase for multiple reasons. Despite Alan Beaulieu mentioning the potential small recession in 2024, I’m fully convinced that we will not see that in our activity because of shortage of labor, because of reshoring of the activity. And the only solution that can reply to that, to this aspect or these conditions that we cannot change is automation. So more robots, more automation, more needs of cable management system, more needs of training for the employees to use that. And for me, this is a really great move because we are bringing education to people that do not necessarily have that because of the history of the past, and we are removing the very basic work that nobody wants to do right now.

Winn Hardin: [00:19:10] The dangerous, dirty, and dull work — what robotics were designed to do. That’s fantastic. I like optimistic forecasts. I mean, and I don’t think this is a rose-colored glasses type approach. As we’ve seen, the automotive industry, because of manufacturing, because of reshoring and those drivers you talked about, the market has just been, our forecasts continue to be strong, pacing well above the rest of the economy. That’s a good thing And helping to make a little better quality of life both for the worker as well as for our citizenry, which is a good thing, even a great thing. And in food, certainly critical. We’ve all, you know, with COVID not too far behind us, remembering the gaps.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:19:51] Yes, everywhere we see a strong development of the robotics activity, even in agriculture, when we always thought in the past that, well, the ground is just dust. It’s not necessarily something that is very well under control. We obviously need vision, because without vision in this aspect we cannot do anything. And we see more and more applications on that. That’s great because it’s as well an industry where it’s difficult to find workers today. No one wants to spend the day in a field and with the weather condition, that could be good but not always, working on that. So robots probably will be a solution.

Winn Hardin: [00:20:41] I do look forward to our technology transferring more and more into agriculture. Personally I’m with you 100%. I think that’s going to be a very hot market for us. One more question. So what should we be looking for from Bizlink in 2023? What’s new and exciting that might be coming from you guys?

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:20:57] 2023 maybe a bit too early, but we are working on the new generation of dresspacks of a cable management system that will be able to give some prediction when a trouble will appear. I cannot say more than that because we are really in the deep R&D phases. It’s an R&D that is split between different continents, different activities. So mostly Germany, France, and U.S. And yeah, the result is coming probably more in 2024 than 2023. At least we can probably start this year with some first installation. But something new in the cable management system is coming, and that will be really on my point of view a revolution of that.

Winn Hardin: [00:21:48] You don’t want to use that word “revolutionary” too much, but when you’re adding in asset management into what has been a totally passive component for all of our lives. Well, that’s exciting. I look forward to hearing a lot more.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:21:59] I’m really excited of the future.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:01] Fantastic. Jean-Marc, I appreciate you making some time for us today, joining us on Manufacturing Matters. So until next time, we’ll see you all later.

Jean-Marc Vico: [00:22:11] Thank you. Bye.