Episode Transcript
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Music.
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Welcome to the podcast. My name is Terry Bush. I'm a business development manager
for Logic Controls, IIOT, and Motion.
I've been with Power/mation, a high-tech automation distributor, for over 29 years.
Today we'll be talking with Stephen Leeds, a senior salesperson at Power/mation,
and we're going to talk about where Power/mation started, where we are today,
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and where we're going to go in the future.
We're here with Stephen Leeds from Power/mation. Stephen, go ahead and introduce
yourself. Hi, Terry. Thanks for having me today.
I'm with Power/mation. I've been here since 1989. I joined as a PLC manager.
And then in 1998, I moved across to running a sales group. And I've been with Power/mation ever since.
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And today, we're going to talk about the evolution of Power/mation.
But you also got to talk about an important part, and that's I worked for you
when I first started back in 1995. 995.
You were my best hire, Terry. Thanks. You were one of the best.
So one of the interesting stories is how Power/mation started and how we evolved over the years.
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And I think you probably had a little better perspective than I,
because I was pretty young and pretty green back then. But let's talk a little
bit about our history and where we started from.
Yeah. So I joined in 1989 and Don Craighead was the founder along with his father.
In 1961, Don started the company called Craighead & Associates,
which was more of a rep company and it was focused on power transmission,
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which was Don's background.
He and his father had worked in another heavily power transmission distributor.
Then in 1965, they started Palmatian as a distributor and the early focus was
power transmission, but they migrated into electronics, I guess I would call it, fairly early on.
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They They sort of made a natural transition from variable mechanical drive systems
into electronic drive systems for AC and DC drives.
And also around the same time, they started into the photoelectrics,
which was the early days of photoelectrics. They were incandescent.
These days, of course, they're modulated LED.
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And there's a lot of black magic in putting those together in those days.
So he started the company and he also realized he needed help to expand.
So he hired another co-founder, Ted Moorman from 3M.
And Ted came on board and those two people were very instrumental in getting
Palmatian off the ground and running all the way through into the late 1989
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ranges when they sold the company, 1990,
to a group of four salespeople. Yeah.
And they had, throughout the years, they've evolved from a technology perspective
in the industrial space, right?
So they had the VFDs, the sensors, and then when you came on board,
they transitioned into the PLC logic controllers, PAC controllers and whatnot.
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It was the early days of PLCs.
You know, the PLCs started with names like Modicon and Reliance,
and they were very large, very expensive. And what happened was GE was the first
company to bring out what we call the Shoebox PLC.
And for those that could remember, it's the old GE Series 1.
And this was the first time that machine builders could affordably implement
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electronic logic into their equipment unless they had a very large system.
And so I was heading that group up. And, of course, you were instrumental in that, Terry.
We spent a lot of time training people. It was sort of foundation,
core to Power/mation was to train people and educate people on how to use these new technologies.
As I recall, at one point we were putting over a thousand people a year through
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our one and two day training classes in our St. Paul facility.
Yep. And then we also moved into more servo control, more the physics behind
motion control, sort of interesting and how you deploy, size,
build out those systems and they became smaller and more sophisticated from a servo perspective.
That's right. And I remember in the mid-90s, early 90s actually,
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when I was a Power/mation customer, spent a lot of time putting together servo
systems that I had purchased from Power/mation.
And then when I came on board, I started as PLC and sort of naturally moved
into the motion side of it because I was a motion guy prior to me starting at Power/mation.
And then we moved forward from there. That's right. Yeah, that's right, Terry. we.
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The early mechanical systems gave way to electronic systems,
and servos became a big part of it.
And there's a lot of mechanics that were done by gears and belts and stuff that
these days we just matter-of-factly do with servo systems in particular,
also variable frequency drives.
They also went from the early DC technology for motors and drives across to
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AC, and we were an early adapter in that.
We put on a company called Parametrix that now evolved into ABB,
who's the world leader in VFDs.
But they were the first company to allow us to do AC, variable frequency drives, cost-effectively.
And that was another important stepping stone for Power/mation as we sort of
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moved through and evolved more into the motion side of things.
Yep. And from what I understand, the early vision around Power/mation was to
have highly technical salespeople, as well as people to support the sales team,
but the salespeople themselves be able to help deploy,
size, quote the systems.
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And that's kind of an integral part of what we do today, which is kind of how
we're able to become a little bit more intimate with the projects.
You want to speak a little bit to that? Yeah, that's right.
The vision always was that the customer is number one with Power/mation.
We like to get to where we're collaborative with our customers and the typical
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salesperson for Power/mation today has an engineering degree or background.
That's not to say we don't have a good percentage of people that have sort of
evolved out of other backgrounds, but the one thing that we all have is a passion
for automation and a natural curiosity.
And that's why you'll find that we work extensively generally with the technical
people at our customers.
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And it's historically been our
strongest areas to collaborate with the customers on the technical end.
One of the evolutions of Power/mation, of course, we have to get very good at the
fulfillment end as well.
And with working with the supply chain management people, those are sort of key elements today.
But for us, our vendors are important. They're key.
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And we work closely with them and we pick large strategic vendors around the
world, best of breed, I would say.
But the object of the vendor is to allow us to provide our customers with the
best solutions for automation.
Another piece that I think is unique is the high-tech automation side of what we do.
And we founded or co-founder of the high-tech automation distributor group. That's correct.
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And what's interesting about that is that we focus so much on the high-tech,
we sort of maybe overlooked a little bit of the low-tech.
So 15-ish years ago, we signed up some of the lower-tech products inside the
control panel, panel confidence. We speak to some of that stuff.
Yeah, that's right. So as I said, we were power transmission,
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and we did the PLC very early.
And then one of the things we then realized was when we're working with our
customers, every customer needs electrical components.
And you call it sort of inside the panel. And it became obvious to that we were
not giving our customers a complete solution if we did not be able to offer
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them the enclosure to the terminal blocks,
to the power distribution systems internally, the contactors, et cetera.
And with that in mind, we then found what we'd consider the best of breed,
large global suppliers.
And we use those people today to provide those type of solutions to customers.
It's a key segment of our solutions business where we can do complete turnkey
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solutions, everything from UL-listed panels to general mount.
Pieces that go onto a back panel and equipment manufacturer.
The cool thing about that is a customer can buy a machine from us.
All the components can be delivered in a bin or a tote. And when they get the
machine, this type A or type B machine, they can assemble it all in their shop
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without grabbing individual parts and pieces, nuts and bolts.
They can grab an assembly and put it together. So their time from they get the
box in the door to deploying the machine is much, much faster.
It saves them time, saves them money, and it's actually a little easier for
us too because we can take these things and kit them and bundle them together
for customers and send it out in one big tote instead of five, 15, 20 different boxes.
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Yeah, that's right. That's part of our solutions business, which has been a
very high growth area in our overall business over the last 15 years or so.
Part of the other evolution we did was we went to PLC.
We evolved into a much stronger presence in panel components.
More recently we've moved into robotics
and collaborative robotics and we've picked world leader
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in in that area to work with as well the second largest robotic manufacturer
in the world and then finally the the big large move we've made is into pneumatics
where we pick one of the top two global suppliers of pneumatics in the world
to fill out our portfolio now so we can literally go from the robot,
the air, the servo motion control, to the overall logic control,
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all the way to the panel components and put it together.
And of course, one area you're involved in pretty heavily, Terry,
is our IAOT and our cybersecurity area as well with remote connectivity.
Yeah. The interesting thing about IAOT, cybersecurity, there isn't necessarily
a direct correlation between the money spent and the value behind it,
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because it's like an insurance policy, building things correctly.
The industry is moving very, very quickly, like machine functional safety did
in the late 90s, where if you, back then you'd say, well, don't put your hand
in the machine and you'll be safe.
Today, we really can't have that same mentality when it comes to cyber.
We have to build the systems. We have everybody in the chain of building it,
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The manufacturer of the components, the integrator that puts it together,
the end user that deploys it, all the people in the chain have to take ownership
and responsibility behind it.
But it is an interesting segment or interesting part of what I do,
as well as motion control and logic and controls.
Yeah, the other comment I would make is it's gotten a much more complex world.
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You know, you can obviously see the robotics areas is there, the servo areas there.
But we've also got functional safety, which is a segment for us,
and we have a devoted business development manager that understands the standards and how they apply.
And we bring that expertise to our customers, some of whom may not be up to
speed on the standards from OSHA and UL and WSB.
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And that all means that education is so important for not only ourselves,
but also for our customers.
So one of the requirements for our salespeople is that they go to two factory
classes a year, and that also every month we run meetings for the sales force.
And in those meetings, the vendors come in and they will give us training on
new products or new technologies,
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or on new pending standards that are coming out, not only from the United States,
but also over in Europe and perhaps even Asia, a lot of our customers are equipment
manufacturers and they're shipping equipment around the world.
So we need to sort of be aware of all those and be able to bring that expertise to our customers.
For customers, we do training not only in our facility, but we'll also come on site.
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And so one very popular segment that's come out in the last couple of years,
what we call lunch and learn,
our marketing group will deliver lunch to the the customer and we'll bring in
the appropriate experts to go over during the lunch period at the customer a
topic that's of interest to them.
And we have a broad range of them published on our website, but we also will
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customize something that the customer wants, especially for their engineers.
Yeah. One of the questions that sometimes comes up is what's our future look
like? What are we going to do moving forward?
My thought is it's voice of the customer. If the customers come to us and say,
hey, it would be really great if Power/mation would add this or add that,
then we add it. You got any sort of insight on some of those things?
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Yeah, that's right, Terry. So we add key vendors, I guess.
These are vendors that we think are going to be very large providers to us,
multi-million dollars.
But we also pick strategic technologies and maybe sometimes there's smaller
vendors. One example is radar safety that's emerging.
A small company in Italy developed this technology and it's a way to eliminate
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terminate hard guarding or light curtains or laser scanners.
And it's not a very big company, but it's growing rapidly.
And we're bringing that technology to our customers here in the United States.
For us, the key for the future is training the next generation of people.
And we have a program called TSAs, Technical Sales Associates.
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Every year, Palmatian goes out and hires fresh graduates, typically engineering background.
And we put them them through a 18-month to two-year program at Power/mation to
try to teach them the real world of automation.
And they go through a series of segments at Power/mation to sort of train them in the different areas.
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And that includes getting them out in front of our customers,
working with their business development managers, working in our solutions group.
And to us, that's the key to our future.
Those people are the ones that are going to pick up and bring us into the next
generation of automation.
Technologies and where this business is going. And it's a high growth area.
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Automation's key. We know the trends, I think, that are onshoring back on manufacturing
to the United States, and we need people in there.
There's a lot of competition for those people. So we need to get them excited
and passionate about it and just keep this going forward.
So why do you think automation is so important?
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Well, Terry, I think for those who've been in this for a long time,
we understand that automation is core to this country and generally globally.
Productivity is how you raise a standard of living. And when you're a high-cost
country like the United States, you can't throw bodies.
You need to get productivity up, and that allows people to go and do other things or a better job.
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And so I like to think that in the automation industry,
we're helping everyone by raising the standard of work that's available to people,
by giving people the opportunity to make more money and have more leisure time
and not be down there, you know, throwing bags of flour on a pallet or something like that.
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So there's just no doubt that gets more and more important as we go on.
You know, the shortage of technical people and the willingness of people to
go and do what I would call the true blue collar work on the factory floor, there's a shortage.
And so the way out of that is to continue to automate.
And we're an important part of that industry. And we're raising the standards for the whole country.
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And it also helps us, you know, to protect ourselves as a nation.
Thanks for joining us. In future episodes, we'll be featuring industry updates,
supplier spotlights, technology deep dives, and customer interviews. See you next time.
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