Mike Ogle: [00:00:00] So steve welcome to the supply chain careers podcast

Steve Simmerman: Oh, thanks. Mike. It’s great to be here. Great to see you again. Been a long time friends in the industry

Mike Ogle: How did you get started in supply chain? What were some of the biggest influences, both people and different kinds of opportunities that got you deeper into supply chain?

Steve Simmerman: Yeah, it goes, I won’t tell you how many years ago, but it goes a ways back. And honestly I was lucky in my lifetime early in my career. Prior to starting college I was fortunate to be introduced to a gentleman who ended up being a lifelong mentor to me. I was really fortunate to be introduced to this guy and I’ll tell you the story.

You can edit it down, et cetera, any way you want. This gentleman’s name was Brother Leo Ryan. He was a cleric of St. Viator and was president of St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois. My dad had just gotten transferred to Chicago, as we were talking about earlier. And I had met some guys in the neighborhood and we went [00:01:00] to the local high school.

We’re playing football or baseball or something. And here comes this gentleman walking across and they’re, Oh, brother Leo. So they introduced me. And the net of it is that was the summer before I started my freshman year at the University of Notre Dame. That was also the summer before Brother Leo became the Dean of the College of Business at Notre Dame.

So he and I were freshmen together at Notre Dame. And so and, he was an advisor, mentor to me through my college days, into my graduate school days. I did my MBA at Notre Dame. I ended up opening Notre Dame’s graduate business program in London with Brother Leo. I was an assistant to him there.

And interestingly enough, he introduced me to a guy by the name of Jim McHugh. Way long time ago. The name McHugh may ring a bell. McHugh Freeman was one of the early WMS providers in the industry. And Brother Leo introduced me to Jim. I was living in Chicago in grad school. Drove up to Milwaukee to interview with [00:02:00] Jim on a Saturday.

We hit it off. I had an internship between my first and second years of college. I’m sorry, MBA school. And then following MBA school, I had done the rounds. I had interviewed. I wanted to get into IT. IT. And manufacturing or logistics at the time. But I, my, my dream job was to go to work for at the time, Anderson consulting, because they were leading in that field, right?

They were the logistics, IT superstar. And I did the interviews with them, but I’ll tell you, at the end of the day, it came down to my relationship with Jimmy Q, they were a small company, maybe 12 people at the time and had grown to hundreds. Globally thousands globally over the years, but I was fortunate to have brother leo as a mentor.

How did I get started in the business? I started like everybody else jimmy q came into my office one time at one time in my first couple of months He says steve you’re going to be in this business. You need to learn how to program a computer So I sat down with computer programming books [00:03:00] and read them and started to develop code etc.

You know from the ground up we were doing early Inventory management systems and sales order entry systems for customers, which eventually led us McHugh at the time being based in Milwaukee to work closely with some of the older material handling companies, primarily automated storage and retrieval companies like Harnish Baker, if you remember that name, Mike.

So Harnish Baker actually outsourced a lot of the software development to McHugh. So we had an engineering group. Within McHugh that did controls and automation software. Then we had a business software unit that did the inventory control, etc. I eventually got into more of a sales role. I expanded the McHugh office into the Chicago area.

My wife is from Chicago. She wanted to move back. Not that she didn’t love Milwaukee, but she really liked Chicago being close to her family. But we came across an opportunity with a very large automotive customer in Chicago. And I remember having a conversation with Jim McHugh and others at the time saying, why are we in there doing all the heavy [00:04:00] lifting on this inventory control system and quote unquote warehouse management system at the time, I said, we have way more experience Then the provider of this software.

And that led to the development of the first WMS with McHugh Freeman. And from there, it’s just been a rocket ride, absolute rocket ride. Long history there. I apologize, but having a mentor was absolutely critical to my long term success.

Mike Ogle: Yeah, absolutely. A couple of quick notes.

But in 98, when I first ended up joining MHI and had the WMS group, assigned to me, and there were like 45 companies that were part of that very quickly became like, 32, down to 18 or 12, it was everybody bought each other.

Steve Simmerman: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There was a lot of that going on. That’s for sure. It’s funny too, at at here at Locust Robotics the founder is a guy by the name of Bruce Welty. Who back in the 80s had Welty Leger, the WMS company. So much of what we’re doing at [00:05:00] Locus today from a robotics perspective is that the bots are cool, right?

They’re agile, they’re great to watch, great to interact with, got a nice iPad user interface. It’s extremely easy to use. They make the warehouse associates job so much easier. I’m not pulling a cart. I’m not pulling a pallet jack around a 400, 000 square foot facility. But with Bruce as the founder and he and his other partners with WMS Background, people look at our bots and think the bots are cool.

Yes, we have designed and developed our bots. We build them here in the U. S., but it’s the software behind the bots that really make the difference. In terms of driving productivity, gains, et cetera, the optimization and everything we’re doing from a software perspective is really the secret sauce in terms of our solution.

So in many ways, going back to my early introduction to WMS to where I am today, as I said earlier, the world hasn’t changed that much to be honest with you.

Rodney Apple: I think that’s very fascinating. It leads right into, our next question. It’s [00:06:00] what were some of those big pivotal moves you made throughout your career?

You’ve been on the kind of that supplier service provider side of the house. We know it’s incestuous as we’ve talked about a little bit and there’s been a lot of acquisitions and Some of the smaller companies have been weaved into the larger companies and, but you’ve been in it and would love to hear just some of the key pivotal moves you made throughout your career.

What did you learn from some of those major career steps?

Steve Simmerman: Yeah. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to be affiliated with some of the early market leaders, if you will. As WMS and material handling systems have matured over the years. I would say number one since I started in this business, I’ve been a big student of the business.

I read all the magazines. I read as many today now, blogs, et cetera, that I can. But I don’t read. One of the tests for me, even today is among our sales team, how many people are reading Modern Material Handling or Supply Chain Digest? Because [00:07:00] if you’re not reading those magazines, you’re not on top of what’s happening.

And so you can remember way back when there was a Book called Mega Trends back in the early two thousands. And the whole idea behind me, the mega trends was that, I forget the guy’s name that started it, but he had people that read local newspapers worldwide and would consolidate their findings and learnings from the newspapers.

And from that he would basically develop what are the trends. So I, like I said, I’ve always been a big student of the business, anxious to read about. Technology, material handling, success stories. So being a big student being a student of the business, I think is really critical. And it allowed me, and I take the time and I invest my time to, to read and to study, meet people, talk to people like yourselves, and pick up on those trends.

And I’m either finding, I’ve either found myself in a situation where I’m employed by a certain company that is embracing those trends, And if they’re [00:08:00] not, that’s the first red flag for me that says, you’ve got to pay attention to what’s happening out there. It’s an overused line and I’ll use it.

It’s the old Wayne Gretzky, skate to where the puck is going. And clearly, as you guys know, over the last couple of years, the puck has been moving very quickly toward robotics. Unlike anything we’ve ever seen more so than AGVs and ASRS. Those were the boom years. Here’s the Technologies years ago, but this trend in robotics is just like wildfire right now.

Mike Ogle: Hey, have you seen? Just to toss in another three letter acronym, of course when we talk about the robotics the AMRs, you know running all over the place Have you seen? changes in behavior Of people that are leading companies. What have you noticed?

Steve Simmerman: Absolutely, we we’re a value based solution. Okay based on our software and bots and how we can drive productivity Reduce cost etc. Payback is really pretty phenomenal, but [00:09:00] we don’t always talk about the soft savings With these solutions. And I’ll give you a good example. We’ve got a customer down in Nashville, healthcare products distributor, basically do milk runs to clinics and hospitals in and around Nashville and the extended area.

There are people were using double pallet jacks with heavy resealable totes that would get shipped to their customer. The empties would come back or back the next day. There was a woman probably in her mid fifties. If she weighed 120 pounds, it was a miracle. But she would pull that pallet jack throughout that warehouse, picking orders all day long with an RF device on her wrist.

Yup. We deployed the bots when the bots were deployed. I should say prior to the bots being deployed, she was one of the lower performers on the team just because it was so strenuous. Yup. After a while, we deployed our bots. She went in and thanked the VP of HR for deploying the bots. And when the VP of HR asked her why, she said, Because when I go home, my back and my feet don’t ache.

And I don’t wake up in the morning [00:10:00] dreading having to go to the warehouse to pull a pallet jack around the facility. The CEO of that site said, Steve, even if your bots were break even from a cost perspective, I would still deploy the bots because of the work life improvement that we’ve provided to our associates.

That is, that’s the answer you want to hear. They have virtually eliminated turnover, their retention is through the roof, their productivity is up, and their people are just happy. Absolutely happy. We see that time after time. Another good example is when we go live with bots. Some customers will say we’ll take 10 percent of the bots this week and ramp it up to 20 percent see how it goes, slow but sure.

What happens a lot of times is we’ll take that first 10 percent of the workforce and train them on the bots. They’re running around with the bots while everybody else is running around their pallet jacks or pick carts. And the people with the pick carts and the pallet jacks are saying Who did I irritate?

Who did I rub the wrong way that I have to pick with a cart versus the bot? So we see adoption, people want to be happy at work. They want to enjoy their work. They don’t want it to be laborious. And so that’s a [00:11:00] huge game for our customers, to be honest with you.

Mike Ogle: Yeah, that’s a great example.

One of the things

when we wanted to be able to have you on the show was to have the audience understand, what in the world does a VP of global alliances do, what kind of skills, both hard and soft skills does it take to be successful in that kind of position?

Steve Simmerman: Yeah, it’s a great role.

And again, I’ve been fortunate in my career going back to learning to become a computer programmer. I was a project manager, got into sort of associate sales, then got into sales. I’ve done product management, you name it. I’ve done just about every function within WMS technology or an automation environment.

I am not an engineer. I I’m the son of an engineer, so I have a, I have an inkling towards systems design, et cetera, but I’m not an expert in that area. But as a VP of global alliances, again it’s it’s a people business. So when I talk to prospective partners there are two things that have to be in place to have a successful alliance between two, any two organizations.[00:12:00]

Number one is implicit trust. You have to just trust each other. The second thing is we have to answer What’s in it for the partner? Why does this make sense? My view on partnerships in my role here at Locus is that we are providing additional value on top of the value that our partners are already delivering to their customers.

And that’s really what it’s all about. I’m fortunate to have been in this business a long time and traveled the world and have a tremendous network. From an alliance perspective, it’s all about relationships. That’s really what it is. We understand, our partners understand our business, we understand theirs.

It’s not easy, we’re not always right or perfect, right? Things do happen. But, it’s really a relationship based business. It has been forever. And any hints to the audience about some of the characteristics that it takes to be able to have that relationship be strong? [00:13:00] Yeah, it’s you talk about what skills, soft skills are needed.

Again, it’s a people management business. Be able to communicate, right? Sit down and have honest conversations. Look somebody in the eye, right? Don’t be afraid to address, the tough issues. Don’t hide from those. Okay. So it really is just relationship management. Over time certainly there’s a component from an alliance perspective of sales management.

I treat my partners as an extension of our sales team, right? So we have expectations that we will provide solutions to our partners that they can build their business on. And so there’s a lot of that. Sales management, deal negotiation sales process and sales methodology, et cetera. So there’s certainly that sales side of it.

That’s critically important because look, if the partner is not successful with our solutions, it’s not going to last very long. But the really good partners are the ones that are committed to delivering innovative solutions to their customers. And are looking for those trends and aren’t afraid to [00:14:00] address those trends.

As I tell my partners if they aren’t talking to their customers about robotics, I guarantee two or three others are. Jump on the train, learn what you can. We’re not the answer to everybody’s problem out there. But in the right setting again, it’s all about working with their partners to help them grow their business.

Rodney Apple

So Steve and my business where we’re doing more on the talent recruitment side of supply chain and, we work with more small to midsize companies, even though I grew up in some behemoth corporation.

I would love your perspective on how this has evolved because, the companies with the deep pockets, these solutions have been cost prohibitive over the years, right? For smaller midsize companies. But now we’re seeing a lot of our clients adapt some of these automation and, Robotics.

What what are you seeing in terms of trends when you think about, large companies, deep pockets, now you’re starting to see costs come down there. There’s more competition, right? Economies of scale are kicking in. Are you seeing more adaption with your kind of small to [00:15:00] mid market companies?

And then what would you advise part two is what would you advise to companies that are thinking about solutions? How should they go about evaluating? And what should they watch out for as they think about going in this direction?

Yeah. It’s amazing that a lot of midsize organizations are looking at robotics and I guess we’re fortunate.

We, and our competitors are fortunate in today’s market, but the labor. Constraints and costs are such a dominant factor in the decision making and whether you’re a mid size, large size customer, if we can show the value in the ROI, there’s no more compelling reason. And I’ll tell you, a lot of the mid size companies are driven by entrepreneurs.

They know there’s a better way of doing it and they’re not afraid to take some of those risks. And in many cases, that includes incorporating robotics into their operations, because you’ve got to do something to address that labor problem. They just can’t, you can’t scale and grow [00:16:00] if you’re continuously facing that labor.

Shortage issue. So part of I think the magic of our solution is that we are extremely scalable. We have customers running fewer than 20 bots in a building. Could be 10, 12 bots. Now that’s not common, but it is possible and we’ve done it. On the flip side, on the large side, we’ve got customers that are running four or 500 bots off peak season.

During peak, they’re going to just under 700 bots in a single building. It is. Absolutely insane to see, but that scalability and it really comes down to the value and the payback. If we can deliver that to a mid, small sized company, and they’re driven by a, a really strong entrepreneurial spirit, they’re going to jump on it.

I think, too, the other impact that we’ve seen is on the traditional material handling consultants and systems integrators. Bots have dramatically changed their world. We’ve never had to design distribution centers With AMRs until what, five years ago, six years ago, this is all [00:17:00] brand new territory. The days of, Oh, you’re a shoe distributor.

So we’re going to put in a pick tower and here’s the conveyor. And here’s all the other conveyor to drive. Those days are disappearing in many ways. Our customers are saying. I don’t want to bolt anything to the floor anymore. We had one customer that referred to our bots as liquid conveyor because we can queue them up just about anywhere.

I thought it was a great description. But that shift in design mentality is really interesting to watch. And I won’t name names, but we have a couple of partners that I say are really strong, emerging providers of AMR and other automated solutions in that regard. It’s really an amazing shift.

Rodney Apple: And could you speak to some of those? We know that The labor shortages are driving a lot of this. But before we got on this call, I was doing some research and found some fascinating content such as this is actually improving retention rates throughout the company. And I would argue job [00:18:00] satisfaction. Anything you could speak to around that piece.

Steve Simmerman: Yeah I think, early on, if I should go back four years ago, it was all about where can I get the labor? I need bodies in my facility. We seem to have gotten through that a little bit because what I’m hearing now is more in line with what you’re saying is that how is automation helping me improve my, my retention?

But by workforce, and the example I gave you down in Nashville is a perfect example. The business owners, the leadership team, and that organization said, we’re dying in our current mode. We’ve got to do something, or we’re going to lose the good people we have. So they adopted the bots. They did a great job of change management, training, et cetera, et cetera.

And they’ve turned that, they’ve turned that whole psyche upside down. They’re not really worried about retention anymore. In fact, a lot of our leading customers use robotics as a recruiting tool. Would you rather walk side by side with an autonomous robot, or would you rather pull this 600 pound cart around a warehouse?

You tell me. So it’s really interesting how [00:19:00] automation has helped on the recruiting side of things.

Rodney Apple: I would imagine this leads into helping with selling the solution you’re in, too, when you’ve got all these awesome stories where it’s not just saving costs and productivity, but you’re getting better retention rates.

That costs money, too, when you have to continuously rehire and replace people, right?

Steve Simmerman: Yeah, you know what’s interesting is you hear the stories about associates on the floor who share with their families, the fact that, Hey, this is cool. I’m working with a robot at work. We’ve had customers that have set up family visit days where they, the associates are allowed to bring their family members in to see the bots in action.

So it’s really fascinating that it’s even among my partners our marketing team is genius. Yeah. They’ve created coloring books about robots for children. And so for our partners, we give them kind of children’s kits, coloring books squeeze toys, et cetera, that are all bot driven.

So just to see the reach into these people’s lives on a personal basis is really [00:20:00] fascinating. . It makes you feel good.

Again, it comes back to being a people business and being a student of the business. I like to meet as many people as I can in the hope of a, I’m able to help them.

I’m not I’m not overly zealous in terms of servant leadership, but I believe in servant leadership. If I could help you guys in some small way today, I know down the road you will do the same for somebody else, or I may need to come to you for some help. So I am a huge proponent of it’s the golden rule.

It’s very simple. I don’t just go out and network and just cast a wide net to a thousand people. Most of the people that I have met that are influential in my career are through guys like you. Somebody that you would like to introduce me to. So you may have a friend that’s looking at robotics.

Call Steve. He’s, he’s a good source of information. But again, I think it’s putting my partners, my customers, my coworkers first, right? Not me. As I always tell my sales teams, if you’re worried about the commission check you’re getting on this deal, you’re [00:21:00] getting beat of the deal.

You need to focus on the customer and their problem because the commission program will take care of itself. Trust it. Okay, but stay focused on the customer and their problem and the value you’re delivering and the good stuff will happen in the background. It’s no more complex than that.

Rodney Apple: Amen.

Steve, you talked a lot about technology, robotics, and this has been intertwined throughout your career. Could you give our audience a bit more details on the types of solutions that Locust Robotics provides and where they can find more information about the company?

Steve Simmerman: Sure. First of all, I would welcome anybody to connect with me on LinkedIn send me an email, give me a call.

I’m happy to talk about locus robotics, the market in general. So I just make myself available as a resource to, to your viewers and listeners. , I think that we as an organization, LOCUS as an organization is all about providing value, driving productivity, helping customers with the retention rates, all those [00:22:00] kinds of things, all the benefits associated with the bots.

Now, we today go to market with basically two bots that are really geared around high volume, either case picking or each picking, put away replenishment. We’ve expanded our functionality. In our software with our bots. So we’re doing picking we’re doing put away replenishments. We’re doing cycle counts In multi level mezzanines our software controls the pick and pass of totes among the levels where we have robots on the various levels so there’s constant innovation from a software perspective, but again at the end of the day It’s all about driving productivity, eliminating non productive activities, particularly walk time.

Our customers generally see a very dramatic reduction in non productive walk time. So back to my customer in Nashville that associate, she’s no longer pulling that double pallet jack around the facility. She works in a contained zone. The bots travel to her and make her work life much easier.

Her productivity is [00:23:00] up. Fatigue factors go away. And simple things like, as we call it, gamification or productivity reporting on the iPad, as I complete a pick, we have a little module, a graphic in the upper right that has an a graphic in the upper right that has an iPad. My image, it’s got a halo around it to show that A, I’m on target from a productivity perspective, I’m ahead or I’m behind.

We will show that associates their current pick rates, total number of picks. We will also show if they are part of a team, there’s a little trophy that pops up. And the number on that trophy indicates to that associate where they rank on the team in terms of productivity. So there’s a little bit of competition that gets built into it.

That makes it fun as well. And our customers use that gamification and productivity for all kinds of rewards and recognition, et cetera. It’s not always just hard dollars. But yeah, it’s from that perspective, it makes it a fun solution to work with. Yep. Awesome. I was going to ask how that made.

How that may tie into incentives, which you answered that question. [00:24:00] Yeah we’re we’re continuing to be challenged by our customers with use cases. How do we use our heavier duty bots that we call vector? It’s got a 600 pound payload. How are we using that to help customers?

Address non conveyable or bulky items or delivery of materials to a manufacturing line in a point to point manner. Our customers get wildly creative. I had a call yesterday with a customer that wanted to take our software on our iPad, but just let an associate walk around with the iPad and do the picking.

Because when they get into peak season, they don’t necessarily want to bring all these extra bots in, et cetera. But. They’re constantly challenging us for newer and greater solutions. At Modex, we announced the latest version of our dashboards are reporting Locust Hub, cloud based very powerful.

We took a lot of customer input when it came to designing those dashboards and visibility and our customers absolutely love that, that visibility. So we’re continuing to invest. We’ve got a number of really good R& D projects happening right now that are aimed at even taking more labor.

Out of the equation and [00:25:00] making it, and further optimizing because the problem is not going away. The labor shortage from everything that I’ve read and seen is through the year 2030 and beyond. It’s becoming a generational thing. Yeah. Demographics are a challenge whether, Oh, go ahead, Rodney.

Rodney Apple: So Steve could you speak to the career path side of the robotics industry, or maybe broader automation material handling, but as we speak with a lot of folks that are getting into supply chain or want to switch gears and transfer into other functions or career paths, what would you find that’s common in, in your space and robotics?

Like what are the hot areas to get into? And if, Somebody was looking to seek a career path. You got engineering, design, you got deployment, sales that you’re in. What can you speak to those core areas and where do you see the trends going in terms of career growth? Yeah, if I just look at Locus in terms of career opportunities, And the types of people that we seek and need to grow [00:26:00] and drive the business forward.

Steve Simmerman: It’s amazing. Every time I go back to our headquarters in Wilmington, Massachusetts, we’ve, we do a lot of the final assembly and test of our bots. We build all the bots here in the U. S. We work with a couple of contract manufacturers to do the heavy lifting, but we do all the final assembly.

Testing in our facilities and I’ll walk prospects partners customers through that facility And we’ve got a really nice demo floor where they can play with the bots But they’re fascinated when they get back into the manufacturing engineering side of it And every time I go back there, I say steve you’re working for a manufacturing company Yeah, you sell bots, you manufacture software, et cetera, but fundamentally we’re a manufacturer of robots and supporting software.

And then we have all the people systems to deploy them. So in terms of career there are so many opportunities with us, with our competitors in this space right now, supply chain is so hot. I just had a conversation with my youngest son who’s, as I mentioned earlier, as part of a continuous improvement team for food manufacturer, he is right in the throes of [00:27:00] supply chain.

And I told him I said you have so many opportunities in the coming years Whether you want to stay in continuous improvement get into consulting. There’s so many applications out areas out there So if you if we look at our organization, i’ll even pick on our people operations our hr group. They’re growing, right?

There are opportunities in hr. There are opportunities in marketing digital marketing within our marketing group the world has gotten so complex from a technology perspective. I, when I look at our marketing organization and I see the skills of behind us with digital marketing we have a guy that does all of our video work, drone, flying drones through facilities.

It’s fascinating. So we’ve got manufacturing requirements, electrical engineering logistics, scheduling. Customer support. We also have a continuous improvement team that works with our clients over time. So just within our little locus world, there are tremendous opportunities. And so I would advise anybody that’s interested in getting into supply chain, robotics, et cetera take a step [00:28:00] back, start to become a student of those organizations and technologies.

Talk to people like us, can offer some guidance or some connections, those kinds of things. But there is just absolutely tremendous. Career opportunity, not only with us, but with our customers need different types of skills that they’ve ever had with the bots, right? You’ve got maintenance and engineering, you’ve got supervisors that need to work with people and bots now all of a sudden.

So just absolutely fascinating opportunity in the market right now.

Rodney Apple: What’s the hardest roles to fill within this sector? What stays open the longest and everybody, Complains about

Steve Simmerman: There’s a lot of demand right now for developers, software developers, a lot of demand because it’s not just locust software.

It’s now, how are we incorporating artificial intelligence? That’s completely changing. The view of the way that we’ve managed and marketed products in the past. So we now have a very extensive data science, AI ML team that quite honestly, didn’t really [00:29:00] exist when I joined, five years ago, four years ago, but the market is driving us there.

So I would say just to my casual observation I would say development resources we’ve got a lot of demand for that within our organization. And I know the market’s extremely competitive in that regard.

Mike Ogle: I did want to ask a follow up, asking about being having that global alliances responsibility if you can step back to your first international experience and how you thought international business is done and how you learned how it really is done and maybe how it’s changed up to today.

Steve Simmerman: Yeah. I’ll go back to the story we talked about earlier in my career. I was fortunate at the beginning of my second year of MBA to have spent a semester in London to study in an international setting was absolutely fascinating. It Opened my eyes to the things that I’d never seen in the world.

Just deep living in London in and of itself on weekends and breaks, [00:30:00] just touring all over the UK, going to Germany, going to France. It was just absolutely fascinating. You can ask my wife I’m a rolling stone. I gather no moss. I love to travel. I love to deal with people, the thing is, Mike, is when I look at.

What we’re doing with our partners in Europe, in Asia Pacific, it all comes back to relationships, people skills, understanding each other, the languages might be different, the customs may be different, but fundamentally when we’re talking about business and about helping our customers drive their business, It’s sales, it’s marketing, it’s the same thing and sort of the politics and struggles in sales situations are, they’re universal, right?

They may be speaking German or French, but at the end of the day, it’s navigating with that customer or prospect, trying to find the right deal, et cetera. It, it really is pretty much the same, I think from my own experience. But yeah, international businesses to me is just absolutely fascinating.

Always learning something. My first trip [00:31:00] business trip was to Stockholm, Sweden. And actually we were about two hours north of Stockholm and we were there in the winter and it was already getting dark at 1. 30, 2 in the afternoon. It was a really strange experience. And our hosts were wonderful people.

They were so happy to have us there. We were there doing a demo of a WMS myself and one of my colleagues. And they were so excited. They couldn’t wait to take us to a Mexican restaurant in their neighborhood. And we were like, wait a minute, we’re in Sweden. We’re going to a Mexican restaurant.

It just, we just couldn’t reconcile that in our heads. We had a great time. I still work with that customer today though, 20 some years later. But yeah, it’s anybody that has any kind of yearning toward international business, go for it. It’s a fascinating world. Fascinating.

Rodney Apple: Yeah, as we wrap up here, Steve you’ve given us a lot of great information on, the robotics segment it’s hot as you described.

And if folks want to learn more about your solutions where would you point them to obviously you’ve got the website, but any other places where they can learn more [00:32:00] about Locus Robotics.

Steve Simmerman: Yeah, the website for sure and in particular we have just a wealth of videos out there that tell the story Way better than I can in a written case study I would encourage anybody interested in learning more about locusts go to our website.

Look at the video tab There are dozens and dozens of videos and you can see where and how our bots are interacting in our customer settings that would be number one And I would say, depending on who you are, where you are in your career trade shows for sure. Go to the trade shows engage with our people, with our competitors to learn as much as you can.

Those the major trade shows, the ProMats the MoDex of the world Manifest of the world. Those are great learning opportunities without a doubt. And I would say just reach out to me. If you’ve got particularly strong interest in locusts or something you really want to get into, let me know.

I may not know the answer, but we’ve got all the people that can help you. That’s for sure. But yeah, definitely go to the website look at the [00:33:00] videos. And if you get a chance to visit one of our customer sites, if maybe you’re a local member of a work chapter or something along those lines. We set up visits regionally to our customer sites.

And I’ll tell you that watching our bots on the video or one thing, but when we’re actually on the warehouse floor and a bot goes zipping by, I swear every customer has that aha moment. They’re like, Oh my God, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. So I would encourage you that I have an opportunity to visit whatever sites go.

It’s a great experience.

Mike Ogle: And before we do the final closing there, I also wanted to ask about some of the advice. You’ve had a career with a good number of organizations and some great people that have influenced you over the years. Are there a few pieces of advice that you’ve remembered over time that people have given you and you’ve taken to heart?

And then there are a few that you’ve learned along the way that you share with others .

Steve Simmerman:

Yeah I, again, I go back to my mentor my first full [00:34:00] time job out of grad school. I was fortunate to be associated with organizations that really cared about, A, their employees. But their customers and their name and reputation. And I go back to, servant leadership. That’s to me, that’s what it’s all about today in my career.

Yes. I manage our global Alliance team, but I spend an awful lot of time coaching and mentoring and sharing the lessons and experience I’ve learned over the years with some of our younger team members who haven’t had that many years. I think that’s really vitally important to tell those stories and lessons to learn when some of our associates or.

Partners think they’re in a tough situation. It’s not the first time that’s happened in the industry. We’ve all been through it multiple times. Maybe you haven’t, but here’s some guidance. Mentoring is a big part of my job these days, to be honest.

I often get asked, what, where do you see robotics going in the next, three to five years? And I jokingly say, I think that in five years, we’re going to look back at some of these [00:35:00] locust bots and say, wow, those are like model T’s compared to what we have today.

There, there’s just so much innovation happening right now. It’s happening at such a fast pace. It’s just, I’ve never been in a more fascinating time in my career in the business. Just have this unbelievable demand in the market, customers calling, asking to learn.

Now, they’re not always buying, but the interest in robotics in the market is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in material handling, to be honest with you.

Rodney Apple: So Steve, can you tell us what you’re seeing in terms of trends within the robotics industry? Where are things going? And then we’ll layer that back in as I watched the original Terminator movie last night with my son, he was totally poking around dang, dad, how old is this? Movie? I said, Oh, this is 1980 something. And to see that what was probably 1 of the. First humanoid robots, at least on film that I could have ever seen.

Steve Simmerman: One of the trends that I see happening [00:36:00] is that if you look at the last, let’s call it five or six years a lot of these robotic solutions ourselves included served in a niche, niche role within a larger distribution center. So yeah, we might go address the e commerce fulfillment side of the house, but aren’t necessarily dealing with, the bulk storage side of the house.

And what we’re seeing now is convergence of these various robotic subsystems within a single building. So we’re seeing more and more auto store plus locust type opportunities, and I think that’s a trend that’s going to continue because we don’t do what they do. They don’t do what we do, but somehow customers need to bring these worlds together because look, not everything can go on a locust bot, not everything can go in an auto store.

The challenges exist, but I see these these multi system environments coming together more and more. I think that’s a trend we’re going to see that also has an impact on the software side of things. [00:37:00] So we are now seeing a number of startups built around AMR or robotics orchestration and optimization, bringing an auto store software solution together with.

The locus fleet management and who’s driving the bus across the whole building. Yeah. I think that’s a fascinating area I think it’s a bit of a brass ring that a lot of people have reached for over the years. I won’t name names it’s a formidable challenge though It really is a formidable challenge because, at the end of the day, a lot of these subsystems providers are truly competitors and how much do I really want to share and interact a lot of those issues have to be dealt with, but it’s a trend that we’re seeing coming for sure.

Rodney Apple: Do you ever think we’ll get to a place where it’s completely, you hear the term lights out, right? Where it’s all robotics, there’s no humans. Do you see that in the foreseeable future? Yeah.

Steve Simmerman: Yeah. I do. Maybe not lights out, but lights dimmed. Yeah. How’s that? Love it. We see that and not necessarily a market that that we play in we see that [00:38:00] in frozen foods, frozen goods, the whole storage retrieval of that pallet.

So I’ve got ambient docs. I’ve got a frozen cube where I store all my product. I pull a pallet out, I do some layer picking, case picking, that pallet goes back to the freezer. But I’ve got people on either side, but nobody in the middle. So I think we will start to see that. And it depends on the industry, I think.

But I do think we will see more and more, quote unquote, lights out, lights dimmed, applications. Absolutely.

Rodney Apple: Fascinating. Steve, we very much appreciate you coming on the podcast today. It’s been a, just a fascinating conversation to learn more about the world of robotics the advancements in the technology the fascinating ever evolving career paths that exists within this segment.

And we really appreciate you sharing your perspectives.

Steve Simmerman: Thanks for having me guys. It was a pleasure to speak with you today. And I look forward to seeing you on the road somewhere. Okay. Sounds good.