Q&A with Ryan Henderson at Conexus Indiana
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New Paris-based boat company Smoker Craft received the inaugural Conexus Indiana Manufacturing Innovation Award at the TechPoint Mira Awards last month in Indianapolis.
One of the largest fiberglass deck boat manufacturers in the world and specializing in aluminum boat production, Smoker Craft implemented automation solutions to solve its labor shortage and increase productivity and revenue.
Conexus Indiana, the state’s advanced manufacturing and logistics initiative, selected six innovative manufacturers in fields ranging from food and beverage to fluid analytics from its Manufacturing Readiness Grant applicants as nominees.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with Ryan Henderson, director of innovation and digital transformation at Conexus about the selection process, the specific innovation Smoker Craft implemented and how the manufacturing industry is evolving in Indiana. This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What prompted the award category?
The impetus was manufacturing and logistics companies across Indiana provide more than $100 billion in gross domestic product for the state. There’s more than 9,300 manufacturers located here and the Conexus Manufacturing Innovation Award is the first category to really celebrate industrial innovation within the advanced manufacturing and logistics economy, and we really just hope it inspires further technology investment and business growth within these sectors.
What was the criteria to select the winner?
We’ve developed a database on our website of Manufacturing Readiness Grant case studies. We sit down with these manufacturing companies that have undertaken a technology adoption project. This year, we were able to look at those companies that we’ve sat down and done case studies with and assessed the innovation they implemented against a judging rubric that we created. Our Smart Manufacturing Fellows committee selected a winner from these case studies.
What technology did Smoker Craft implement that clinched them the inaugural award?
Smoker Craft is one of the largest and oldest boat manufacturers in the world. They’ve had roots in that community since 1921. They implemented a robotic welding system to automate their pontoon assembly process, and it really just changed the entire way that the company makes these pontoons.
So a couple of really compelling parts of their project was they partnered with a local technology integrator out of Fort Wayne. So they leveraged outside expertise in automation to be successful. They went from manual welding to robotic welding. The robots that they have on this automation line are doing the equivalent work of 20 manual welders. They also expanded their production capacity so they can meet more customer demand and they improved their product quality. So a lot of really significant improvements with this innovation project.
Something else that is unique to Smoker Craft is that they’re making proprietary products. They produce about 60 pontoon boats a day, but a lot of those products are unique. So you think about some of the other manufacturers that are just making thousands if not hundreds of thousands of parts a day. Smoker craft is making just 60 a day and many of them are unique. So that’s a real challenge to automate a process like that, but they’ve been able to do that with this project.
How do you see the Manufacturing Innovation Award contributing to the overall goals of Conexus?
We’ve been focused on accelerating what we call Industry 4.0—the fourth industrial revolution. That really means integrating advanced technologies into manufacturing; so think robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, and machine vision. There are a lot of different technologies that are associated with Industry 4.0 and we want to see more implementation within these 9,300 manufacturing companies across Indiana.
It takes a lot of time, resources and talent to implement these technologies and many of the investments come with a six-figure price tag. It costs a lot of money to make the right investments in these facilities, and we want to inspire more of that.
What are the trends that you’re seeing in the manufacturing industry as regards to innovation?
There’s really two big sides to innovation within manufacturing. One is product innovation, so making products, creating new things, and bringing these new ideas and new concepts into the market. The other is process innovation. That’s really what we were focused on in our award. We want to see manufacturers change the process of how they make things and, of course, as I mentioned, we want to see technologies overlaid into those processes—robotics, machine vision etc. We want to see companies make more products faster, better, cheaper and that’s what they’re doing.
How do you see these technological innovations solidifying Indiana’s position as a manufacturing state?
Technology adoption and process innovation increases productivity, but it also improves efficiency, lowers costs for manufacturers, so they do more with less. There are many benefits to it that are well documented. Within the six nominees for the manufacturing award, a lot of the benefits centered around improving capacity and productivity in the workforce.
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The robotic arm Smoker Craft included in its pontoon making process. (photo courtesy Conexus Indiana)
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(photo courtesy Conexus Indiana)
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(photo courtesy Conexus Indiana)
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(photo courtesy Conexus Indiana)
Does Conexus have any educational affiliations or partnerships with schools in the area?
I mentioned the case studies earlier on. Those have been through the Manufacturing Readiness Grants Program, which we started back in 2020 with Indiana Economic Development Corp. and the Next Level Manufacturing Institute. The program’s been successful. We’ve seen tremendous demand from manufacturing companies across the state.
We’ve actually awarded 526 grants to manufacturers across the state, totaling $57 million across 79 counties in Indiana. These technology adoption projects have helped companies invest over $800 million in total. So they’ve got skin in the game, and they’re trying to modernize their facilities and bring in new technologies. That’s been a big partnership and it’s allowed us to expand our Industry 4.0 programs statewide.
We just announced a new partnership with Ivy Tech focused on growing a pipeline of digital manufacturing skills and Industry 4.0-enabling occupations. So we’re just starting to get that work off the ground and a lot of that is going to be meeting in communities across Indiana and really hearing from the manufacturers about what they need in terms of digital skills.
What are some examples of digital manufacturing skills?
There are many different types of skills associated with machines. When I say digital skills, it could be interacting with a machine, programming, conducting maintenance. It even bleeds into software programming. So there are a whole host of skills. It’s mostly machine interaction and software integration that many manufacturers are dealing with at the moment.
How do you see innovation and Industry 4.0 affecting job availability in the manufacturing industry moving forward?
So there is sort of a mainstream rhetoric about automation eliminating jobs, but it’s not what we’re seeing. We have some good survey data about the exact opposite. In fact, when companies invest in technology and automation, they tend to add jobs and grow their companies. Of course, with any automation project, there’s always a possibility of eliminating some of the manual tasks. But what we’ve seen is Indiana manufacturers are very quick to upskill, reskill, and then redeploy their existing workforce. So it’s not something that is a big risk to us. There’s also just a limited labor pool available to manufacturing at the moment. So they’re really trying to optimize the existing workforce, they’re not looking to reduce positions.
Did Smoker Craft also repurpose their workers?
There’s some nuance to that. I believe they had four manual welders but they needed to grow their production capacity. In order to do that, they didn’t feel that they could hire 20 more welders. So they implemented this robotic system, reskilled and upskilled their existing welders and so now those welders have programming, maintenance and other roles.
They just knew that hiring 20 additional welders would be a big challenge. So that’s why they looked to automation to solve that labor shortage. There’s limited availability of the talent and that’s widely known across manufacturing, not just in Indiana but in the United States as a whole.
What advice would you give to companies or individuals looking to innovate within Indiana’s manufacturing industry? What are some opportunities that you’re seeing in the industry at the moment?
We have 63 case studies on our website of small to midsize manufacturers that share learnings about what they’re doing with technology, how they’ve upskilled their workforce. So I would encourage companies to look at those stories and hear from people that are like them. With less than 100 employees, they don’t necessarily have big engineering teams to do technology adoption, but they’re still able to accomplish great things.
Certainly look at some of the great resources that the state of Indiana has. The Manufacturing Readiness Grants should be reopening, hopefully in July. That provides up to $200,000 and one-to-one matching funding for technology adoption. Keep looking at some of the leading resources in terms of education, Ivy Tech, Purdue University, Vincennes and IU. There’s some great resources out there to help upskill the workforce and start integrating some of those digital skills.