Shop Matters - EMO 2019 Recap

Wade Anderson:

Hey manufacturing world, this is Wade Anderson with Shop Matters, sponsored by Okuma America. This podcast is created to discuss all things machining and manufacturing. I'm in the studio here in Charlotte, North Carolina talking with Craig Cottrell. Craig's a 30-year veteran with Morris Group Incorporated. Thanks for coming today Craig.

Craig Cottrell:

Thanks for inviting me Wade. Happy to be here.

Wade Anderson:

So Craig and I recently took a trip to EMO. Anybody that has not been to the EMO show, this is, I would say, IMTS on steroids. Would that be an easy way to describe that for anybody that's in manufacturing that's been to IMTS?

Craig Cottrell:

It's big. It's probably two or three times the size.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. So I've been going to IMTS since ‘90... I've got to add it up here. '94 was my first IMTS show.

Craig Cottrell:

You must have been like 10 years old then.

Wade Anderson:

Felt like it. I think I was 18 or 19 the first one that I went to. It's funny when you put things into perspective. I look at IMTS as such a massive machine tool show for the United States and I've only been to two EMO shows. How many have you been to Craig?

Craig Cottrell:

I think this was my seventh or eighth one, maybe six of them in Hanover and I'd been to Mulan a couple of times.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. So I went to EMO in Hanover probably five years ago, I guess it's been with my friends with EMEC Machine Tools up in Canada. We went over and spent a couple of days. At IMTS, usually in two to three days I can pretty much cover everything that I went there to see. You know, the things that I really wanted to look at from a bullet point standpoint. EMO, I've noticed, I still haven't been to every building they've got. How many buildings were there this year?

Craig Cottrell:

Well the campus is 25 or 30 buildings, and I would say two thirds of them were filled with technology. The biggest issue you have is that if you have multiple appointments, if you go with a mission and you lay it out, it can take you half an hour to get from one side of the show to the other, and that's riding the buses. So I was there three and a half days and I wish I was there four. I had a schedule of some appointments and some things I wanted to see. And then I wanted to be able to walk the majority of the halls, and three and a half days just didn't do it. I was exhausted. We are there from the second it opened ‘til the minute it closed too.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Yeah. I noticed when I went to EMO I spent a lot of time in the Okuma booth. That was in hall 27, and then I would take the bus route from hall 27 up to the front, and like you say, it was a 30 minute wait sometimes. 15 - 20 minutes to get on the bus and then you've got a 10 or 15 minute bus trip to go around all the buildings just to get to some of the front buildings where a lot of the third-party aftermarket-type vendors and things were.

Craig Cottrell:

It was nice this year though, it wasn't 90 degrees or pouring rain or both.

Wade Anderson:

Oh my gosh! Yeah, the weather was beautiful.

Craig Cottrell:

It was gorgeous.

Wade Anderson:

I live just South of Charlotte here in a little town of York, South Carolina. It was 98 degrees when I left. I get there and it's almost a shock to the system. I think it was in the mid 60's when we got into Hanover there. So, talking about going to a show like that, going to Hanover in Germany. You've been several more times than I have, but for people listening that have not been there, let's talk a little bit about just the logistics getting to the show. Do you find it difficult? Easy? Hotel accommodations, things of that nature?

Craig Cottrell:

No, it's a piece of cake. I mean, it's actually kind of frustrating. I live in the Hartford area and it's more expensive to fly to Charlotte than it is to fly to Frankfurt.

Wade Anderson:

Isn't that crazy?

Craig Cottrell:

It's crazy. We flew out of JFK and the flights were easy. Lufthansa had beautiful planes and great service. I was stunned at how low the prices were, at that time of the year anyway, not in the summer. Getting around Germany's easy too. Their public transportation is just so much better than it is here. Certainly, it seems like everywhere in the country, not just isolated places. So it was all great. I mean the accommodations were super, the hotels and the food. You never run into problems with people not speaking English. If anything though, they do have special pricing during the show, which is special the wrong way. The hotels were pretty expensive, but other than that, everything else was great.

Wade Anderson:

We got caught with a little bit of that. We stayed at a Best Western, of all places, outside of Hanover. We were probably 25 minutes away from where the show was. Some of the service guys that we were there with said that that's usually where they stay when they're doing business there. The hotel under normal circumstances is like $90 a night. It wasn't a real high-end place by any stretch of the imagination, but we paid right at $300 a night there during the show itself. So they definitely take advantage of the amount of tourists coming in.

Craig Cottrell:

Well, I can say you got ripped off because I paid $350 and the Dalai Lama was staying at our hotel there the last time. So I would say the worst thing about mine was my heated floor in the bathroom was not the exact temperature I'd normally like it.

Wade Anderson:

Oh wow.

Craig Cottrell:

It was very, very nice.

Wade Anderson:

We had a shared communal bathroom at the end of the hall. No, I'm just kidding.

Craig Cottrell:

But you asked, in general, is going to Germany tough? Absolutely not. The trains are great. The transportation, even the bus schedule was great.

Wade Anderson:

So I grew up in the Midwest, in Missouri. I was a meat and potato eater all my life. So you can probably imagine, I love the food every time I go to Germany. That's my kind of food.

Craig Cottrell:

Seven pounds I put on in that week. Seriously.

Wade Anderson:

I believe it. Oh goodness. So let's talk a little bit about just the technology in general that you saw at EMO. So when I go, I had a handful of items, I go with a plan of who I want to see and meet. That's one thing I noticed talking to people, you have to plan out your visit to EMO because it's so big and there's so many halls. People that I would talk to would say, I'm here until 9:30 and then at 10:30 I got to be in hall two. Then at 10:45 I got to make my way over to hall number four because I got a meeting with so and so.

Wade Anderson:

So you've got to do a lot more pre-planning, I think, for a show that big then maybe you do some of the smaller regional shows or even IMTS for that matter. But I spent most of my time going from some of the different machine tool builders, but then I'll try to make it a point to go see all the supplier-type companies as well. So, I notice kind of that front hall section from three, four, was three through seven I think was along that front-

Craig Cottrell:

I think all the way to nine actually before it turned and went to the big machine halls.

Wade Anderson:

You can almost get lost in a sea of technology. So were was some that really stood out to you that you saw while you were there?

Craig Cottrell:

Well, I agree with your comments by the way. It's hard to get around and you have to make appointments because the other thing is their style of selling there is way different than it is in the US. At IMTS, it's not unusual to walk into a booth and feel like you've accomplished something. Maybe you have in a 15 minute standup meeting in front of a machine. Then, there's coffee, there's donuts, there's lunches and breakfast and snacks.

Wade Anderson:

That's a very good point. IMTS is really a buying and selling show for the most part where-

Craig Cottrell:

It's a relationship builder over there.

Wade Anderson:

Completely different focus.

Craig Cottrell:

It's much different. It's like trying to show up at your grandmother's house for Easter and leave in 10 minutes. It doesn't happen. And there was a number of times we got stuck in booths and we couldn't get out because they just brought the second round of coffee. I mean, that's just the way... And they think it's awkward that we don't work that way. There's no such thing as a “to go” cup really there. That's an American thing. You want to sit with a coffee in a mug and relax and enjoy it. So from a planning standpoint, that was tough.

Craig Cottrell:

You asked a question about technology, I mean there was tons of technology, but if I picked a couple, I would say the robotic focus, the automation focus, let's say automation in general, but robotics especially is huge. I saw it everywhere and inexpensive, small, medium, large, easy to redeploy. I think it's really, I call it the UR effect, the universal robotics. They changed the game on price and simplicity and now everybody's chasing them. So I saw an unbelievable amount of combinations of UR robots, and then some of the big boys trying, like the Kukas and the Fanuc and such trying to catch up.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. So that's something I think over the last couple of IMTS shows, automation has really been a theme. It's grown over the last two shows. More and more builders are incorporating different types of robotics into their system. What I noticed at EMO this year in terms of automation, everybody's got it. Every machine tool builder, all the way through the show.

Craig Cottrell:

Every product they offer.

Wade Anderson:

Have a huge focus on it. But it really, to me, they raised the bar on what they're doing with automation. Some of the things that stood out to me. There was a really neat, it was Heimer. I actually saw two. One was in another machine tool builder's booth where they had a FANUC collaborative robot on top of an AGV that was going through the cell changing tools out. And then in the Heimer booth itself, in their own booth, they had a great robotic cell taking everything from the shrink fit, taking expired tools out, pulling the expired tool out, heating it up, putting the new tool in, presetting it, and sending all that data to the control, all through automation. I'm used to seeing machine tools being automated where you're loading parts and unloading parts, but I haven't really seen people take it to the level of, okay, where else do we see manpower that we can pull away and automate it. And changing out tools, seeing some of that was a real eye opener for me.

Craig Cottrell:

I think Zoller had a very similar installation in their cell. You mentioned AGV, AGV is not new, it's been around for decades, but in the applications that we saw at the show, half a dozen or maybe eight, stunning. I still wonder about whether it pays back in a reasonable time period. They're expensive, but from a flexibility standpoint and from a, let's say a future redeployment, so now you don't have to have your machines all lined up or you don't have to have every piece of technology existing right from the beginning. Saw a ton of that. But certainly the concept of get the people out. It's not that we're trying to replace people with robots, it's there's no people.

Craig Cottrell:

I don't know if you saw in the Wall Street Journal this week, there's an article about the apprenticeship program in Germany and in the last decade has gone from 800 to 900,000 kids, everybody's a kid to me, and high school students that would normally enter the apprenticeship program is below 500,000 now.

Wade Anderson:

Oh my gosh.

Craig Cottrell:

That's not my data. I just read that in The Wall Street, but that just shows even in a country that's so dedicated to apprenticeship and growing that next generation of people that are going to run all these machine tools, the country that led in it is struggling like we are here. So automation now is not get the cost out, get the people out, it's there aren't any people. And then a lot of the people who come in don't know how to run these machines. You mentioned Heimer or Zoller, that's high-technology stuff. And if you're going to automate it, it's got to be right. So the handful of people who do enter this business, who are, I think lucky enough or fortunate enough to make that decision, this is not dirty hand sweating out on the shop floor. There is a little bit of that. But it's really, how do you apply some new technology?

Craig Cottrell:

Let's call all that automating to acknowledge the fact that there's not enough people. And so I think at this show, more than ever I saw it. I think DMG Mori had 90% of their machines were automated. Big focus on... Okuma had a lot, Doosan had a lot. So all the majors are acknowledging that.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, well, Okuma, they had the Armroids this year. So that's-

Craig Cottrell:

Integrated robots.

Wade Anderson:

Integrated robot inside the work cell. And the key focus there that you don't need an integrator. So the machine ships with the robot mounted inside of it and then you configure your inbound and outbound the way that you want it and eliminate the need for custom integration, which I thought was kind of interesting. A different take on automation.

Craig Cottrell:

It stops the argument about should I buy a Fanuc or an ABB or what color robot.

Wade Anderson:

So tell me a little bit more about Zoller. You spent quite a bit of time in the Zoller booth?

Craig Cottrell:

I did. It was almost unbelievable. And at the end of the hour, what we saw, because they had automated so many of the steps, even with shrink fitting and some of the things that tended to be very manually intensive. One of the VPs of sales was there and I said, "Tell me, where you have this installed?" And he said, "Right here." So, I think some of it might've been a little future technology as opposed to present day, but it shows where we're going. Half a dozen or a dozen years ago, 5-Axis was that. 5-Axis is passé now. I mean, everybody's doing it. Everybody's got a small, medium, large and inexpensive one or an expensive one, a blood and guts 5-Axis and a super high accuracy. And that's old news. Everybody had 5-Axis. It was there for sure, but it is old news.

Craig Cottrell:

So I wasn't offended when he told me that they didn't have a lot in the field or they only had elements of it out there. But basically, what it does is that addresses some of the issues of unintended operation. If your tool's no good and you're fully automated, you're just efficiently making bad parts. So, I was impressed with how they're addressing some of the things you need in a truly unattended operation.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, I went through BIG KAISER's booth. They had a really nice booth. I did spend some time with Jack Burley. He took me around, showed me some of their technology. And one of the things that stood out to me, the communication side of the industry, the IOT or IIOT, has been a big buzzword for several years now. And for me, I always struggle wrapping my brain around, everybody can monitor everything in the world, but then, what do you do with it? What do you do with all this information? Well, BIG KAISER had a boring tool that was pretty unique. They would go through and they would cut a bore under size, probe the bore, feed back the information to the tool, the tool itself would actually adjust in one micron increments.

Craig Cottrell:

And would it probe the part?

Wade Anderson:

So they would probe the part, find the diameter of the hole and then adjust the boring tool to accommodate, to recut, to put it right on size. And again, you're kind of taking the operator, what used to be in my brain or your brain back when we were running machine tools and putting it into the communication, the intelligence of the system. And what I thought was really unique about it was they've got software for this tool that can actually learn your cutting process.

Craig Cottrell:

Wow. I could not see that part.

Wade Anderson:

If you're cutting aluminum, for an example, and you need to make a five micron adjustment, maybe you make four microns to get it close to size. But if you're cutting Inconel, well you may need to bump it a little more to actually get it to come out on size. It would learn that over time, and then next time you go into this material and you need to make offsets, it recognizes, oh, you're cutting Inconel, we need to bump it one or two microns more. So just like you and I would do with tool offsets back in the day, right. You cut it. Okay, I'm going to just do a spring pass. I'm just going to clean the bore off, or I'm going to bump it out a little more because I know when I cut, I'm going to get a little bit less. So I thought that was pretty unique. It shows how you're tying in the communication string from the tool, from the measurement and the control system and making a much more intelligent cutting process.

Craig Cottrell:

I still think that whole industry 4.0, if that's the correct master way to say it, is, we'll see where that all comes. Something new for me this year was that umatty interface. I knew Mt connect, and then there's... GNL control has their own OPD or OPC, I think it's called. And so there's a bunch of different formats, but I'd never heard of umatty and I guess that's a fairly popular thing in Europe now. But, my thing is that you create a monster amount of data and so what do you do with it? You can't just give it to anybody, you have to have a purpose for that data. Otherwise, you're just making whoever's your data storage person wealthy.

Craig Cottrell:

And the other thing we're seeing too, at least with my customers, I'm with customers a lot, its most of my primary focus in my job, is they don't want pay for it. So they believe that that information exists there. That's my data that's in my machine, why do I have to pay you to extract it or monitor it or massage it? Not unlike a cell phone, where all that data is there and most of the apps are free. I mean that's what they're viewing. So we're having a heck of a time trying to figure out if there's a way to monetize it, or if that's just part of the machine now, like the sheet metal almost.

Wade Anderson:

All right. Some of the demos, some of the cutting technologies that I saw there were pretty interesting. There was a lot of focus on gear cutting. The Okuma booth had a Multus doing skiving and gear cutting, different aspects of it. Something that I saw that stood out in my mind, every time I go, I just talked about the BIG KAISER boring tool, but I always look for what's unique ways of work holding or unique ways of actually processing parts. I saw some tombstones that use electronic clamping. And something that stood out to me, when I look at that and I look at all the technology going into horizontal machining centers, we're still running hydraulics through the pallet or overhead. And I look at this electronic clamping system that's an opportunity to be able to put work holding your automated system and eliminate the need for hydraulics. So did you see anything that stood out from like a tooling or work holding standpoint?

Craig Cottrell:

I wouldn't even know how to begin that conversation because I was overwhelmed with what I saw, especially in quick change. From majors and from minors and little niche players and such. And I think that old guys like me, we want to go buy a tombstone and machine it and build all custom fixtures and have hydraulics and just do it the old fashioned way because that's what we knew. I really think that the youngsters out there, and they're going to come forward and they're going to design processes around flexible work holding. So when you go to the Schunk booth and the Curt booth and... I used to think… something simple. When you go in there it's all this quick change. So they're going to be thinking about that from the get-go and designing around utilizing the capability there.

Craig Cottrell:

I love it. My head was spinning though. If you gave me a part today and said put this on a horizontal or whatever, a mill and go get me the best flexible work holding, I'd ask for a year and then I can maybe get back to you. So, yeah, there’s just a lot going on. That's why I think, again, the young people get into this, grab that new technology and start thinking about it right from the start. I think the same applies, we saw a lot of additive. I think additive is still a solution chasing a problem that maybe doesn't exist just yet. And I think it's because parts and whole processes aren't designed around it from the get-go. You keep thinking of taking an old technology and now putting it into an additive. The problem is the additive’s so expensive. So it's just the math doesn't work. You don't get a payback.

Craig Cottrell:

Same thing in the work holding. You used to think about making it all custom, now the question is how do I take all these Lego pieces? I'm going to steal a kid's toy thing. But I take the Lego pieces and make it work. And now you can tear it down, reassemble it and use it for something else without throwing it out. Or, like you said before, adding all of the accessories like hydraulics and things that you need to do it the traditional way. It's not flexible.

Wade Anderson:

Right? Yep. I think that plays hand-in-hand, again, with the automation discussion. So, the more you can standardize things. Yeah. Be able to reuse it. And even just to have a commonality from how the robot grabs a part to get it into the machine tool. If you've got an operator loading parts in an outside area, or even a robot loading a part in an outside area, but the pickup point going from the load station into the machine tool, that's common, then the robot's not changing into tooling things of that nature.

Craig Cottrell:

Hey, you mentioned before about the gears. Did you pick up on this transformation of the automobile from internal combustion to electric? Every booth, wow. Yeah. I mean EMAG had... I'm pretty sure it was EMAG, had cutaways of 10 different automotive OEM electric motors and drive systems from Tesla and BMW and Volkswagen. They had them all. Fascinating. It's technology, but it's way different than we're used to. And so most of the stuff that you're going to need outside of the motor is in the drive trains and maybe some gearing, but not like it used to be.

Wade Anderson:

Right. From my perspective, that's kind of the question that's dangling out there with a lot of the automotive suppliers is where are we going? What does the future look like over the next couple of years? And that was big with a lot of the customers that I talked to over there. If they're in the automotive industry, where are they shifting to? What are they doing from between now and five years down the road, what's that going to look like? It's changing rapidly. Even the electric motor side of things and the batteries and how they're approaching electronic vehicles is changing as we speak.

Wade Anderson:

So that's an interesting topic that I don't know that I'm knowledgeable enough on to go super deep on it, but it's a very interesting time and there's a lot of change going on in that marketplace. And that's probably the largest sector for machining at the moment. So when you talk about taking away the internal combustion engine and okay, now where does that move you to? If that's what you're tied into. Drivetrain components are getting lighter, they're being machined out of harder-to-machine materials. You're seeing a lot of the aerospace-type materials now in the automotive world because everything's centered around gas mileage, right? So how do we…

Craig Cottrell:

Get the weight out.

Wade Anderson:

Get the weight out! Yep. So, that changes perspective on how you machine parts.

Craig Cottrell:

Sure. I heard a comment at the show that there's, in any given year, you would have half a dozen or a dozen major automotive programs, forward-looking one, three, four, five years out, in the engine department, engine drivetrain, the traditional parts of a car. There's none, there's none. It's all about E mobility. Then the other thing they said is that the people who will make those parts will be different than the traditional people who make them now. So there's a lot of first, second, third tier suppliers to automotive that had been entrenched for decades.

Craig Cottrell:

I had one vendor caution me, he said, "Make sure you're calling on everybody. The next big deal might be somebody that you never heard of and they're providing an important part of an E mobility car." So, for me, again, my kids talk about it and they say, "I'll have an electric car someday." And you know, my attitude is I will if you give it to me. It's not that I'm against it, the thought that at 200-some miles, I have to plug in is too limiting to me. But my kids are all in their 20's and they don't feel that way. So, I think it's just a generational thing.

Wade Anderson:

I agree with that. And how you grew up. I grew up with big horsepower and needing more power, more everything I do. I think the vehicle I've got that gets the best gas mileage gets maybe eight, nine miles to the gallon. I drive lifted Jeeps and things. So, yeah, definitely a different trend there. So one thing that I noticed talking to customers there was everybody seemed to be busy, whether they were American customers or European customers, shops were busy. What was your take? How are you seeing things in the overall business environment?

Craig Cottrell:

Well, it was tough. I felt like I needed a beer or something in my hand every time you got into a business discussion because it would tend to lead to politics. A lot of drama and politics, here, in Europe especially right now, and even in China and such. So if you can separate the politics, because there's nothing we can do about it, in general, the business was positive. I think what I heard was people who were complaining about business had maybe had a five or 10% drop from last year, forgetting that we've had one record year after another since about 2010, 2011.

Craig Cottrell:

We laugh at our place. We got 30 year olds who don't understand what happened after 9/11 in a business world or what happened in 2009. So we've seen 50% drops, 70% drops in business. So, when it drops 7% everybody's panicked. I don't have a lot of room for that. So the general level of business is good. Customers we call on are busy. We're scaring them with politics. We're scaring them with the press. We're scaring them with the trade wars. But the strong will prevail I think.

Wade Anderson:

Any key market that stood out?

Craig Cottrell:

Aerospace is still strong, and that's just by the backlog of the planes. And even in aerospace, it's a wonderful story. We need 35,000 planes over the next 20 years and there's some drama about the 737 MAX, which is the elephant in the room in plane production. They'll fix it. I've flown on a MAX a bunch of times. Happy I didn't know that they were having issues when I was on it, but they'll fix that and they got to make something... I think there's 15,000 planes in backlog on A320 and the 737. It's there. So that's going to continue after we get past this grounding. Automotive is going to turn themselves inside out with e-mobility, if it sticks. We expect PowerGen to come back because you got to power all these cars. And so that's been very flat. Now, it may not come back in the traditional sense of power plants, like where coal plants, that's a no, no now, but you're going to have those combined cycle turbines from natural gas and you're going to have solar and wind and such.

Craig Cottrell:

There's a lot of exciting stuff coming up, and maybe fortunately, unfortunately, defense is strong. There's been a lot of demand, at least with our customer base, we're in 26 States. A lot of demand on the defense sides, people will ramp up a little bit. So we're encouraged, we think this year's been a bit of a plateau for our company, and we sell one out of every 10 CNCs in North America, so we are a pretty big presence here. But we see 2020 very strong and it'll carry into '21.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. Well Craig, I appreciate your time coming, spending time with me here today. Again, this is Wade Anderson with Shop Matters, and if you have any comments or questions and topic ideas, please reach out to us. Until next time. Thanks.

Craig Cottrell:

Thanks, Wade.