Manufacturing Insights

Manufacturing operations create massive amounts of data. To use that data to improve financial KPIs it takes a single verifiable version of truth that every person can access and understand.

Given the tariffs announced last week, it's unlikely that any supply chain moving forward in 2025 will look like it did in 2024. The question is: how will tariffs impact your supply chain? To help us make sense of this information, today's podcast features an expert who has his ear to the ground when it comes to supply chain challenges and what smart leaders are saying we should do in this changing climate. Ron Crabtree is the host of the MetaPod podcast where he talks with supply chain experts from around the world about the challenges of building a modern, resilient supply chain. He's also the CEO of MetaOps, helping organizations clear operational challenges like the one facing all of manufacturing today. Questions to Ask Your Procurement Team: Do we have the data to model the impact of tariffs? Do we have the technology to help us quickly make changes?

Everyone in sourcing, procurement, and manufacturing has questions about tariffs. Not only will they impact my bottom line, but how do I know which of my products are impacted? And how do I make the right decisions about my supply chain with the minimum amount of disruption and the best chance of resilience in the future? Today, two experts will discuss how they obtain these insights using aPriori. Originally recorded as a live webinar, this presentation walks through how to use aProri to see the impact of tariffs on your bottom line, make trade-offs between sourcing strategies, and analyze your entire product profile for hidden cost drivers, manufacturability challenges, and speed to market. At the end of the presentation, live audience members will raise their questions and get answers.

Procurement teams can't solve today's challenges of changing tariffs, rising materials prices, and shrinking time windows, if their best tool is email and excel. In this third conversation between LightSource CEO Spencer Penn and aPriori's director of product Marketing, Chris Jeznach, we hear what's missing from the current procurement model in most manufacturing companies today. And we'll learn how new software technology can help bridge that gap. Spencer Penn draws from his vast experience working at Tesla and then founding LightSource, where he aims to revolutionize direct procurement in manufacturing today. From this frontline perspective, he explains the gaps he's seen in procurement and what's possible for teams that adopt new technology to bring the procurement process into the modern AI era.

For manufacturers who want to reduce cost, improve performance, and bring innovative products to market, sourcing and engineering teams should be a match made in heaven. Sourcing can help engineering avoid costly redesigns by sharing what's possible to make in today's market, while engineering can help sourcing get a head start in finding the suppliers with the right capabilities to make products at cost and at scale. But it often doesn't happen that way. Today we're discussing what holds back procurement and engineering teams from reaching their full potential together. It's all about communication in the second of our series of conversations between Spencer Penn, the CEO of LightSource, and aPriori's Director of Product Marketing, Chris Jeznach.

Procurement teams can learn from early successes and failures at Tesla, especially when it comes to trade-off analysis and early collaboration between design, sourcing, and suppliers. In this podcast, LightSource CEO Spencer Penn talks about trade-offs at Tesla between cost, performance, and risk.

To solve the labor shortage, manufacturing companies must re-brand as great places to work for a diverse group of workers including women and GenZ. What does it really take to attract, train, and grow a workforce that includes workers from a diversity of backgrounds? And what can manufacturers do today to make sure we're ready for that labor market of tomorrow? Mariana Cogan is a former SVP at PTC and the current head of Marketing at Hexagon America. From her vantage point as a winner of Forrester's Program of the Year and Full Circle Insights Greatest Overhaul Award, Mariana Cogan is ready to tell us passionately about how we can engage a new, diverse generation of workers in manufacturing and technology.

When you think about offshoring, restoring, or nearshoring, you're probably thinking about cost. Certainly, the cost of labor and energy is a primary deciding factor when it comes to offshoring, restoring, or neashoring decisions. But what about the hidden costs of offshoring? This is a subject our guest knows a lot about. John Gardner writes about the hidden costs of offshoring and the increasingly apparent benefits of nearshoring. He is the author of Manufacture Local: How to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World.

What does it take to balance high product development velocity with cost efficiency? In this Executive Talk podcast we hear from Hank Marcy, Former VP Global Product Technology, Whirlpool Corporation, about how he employed a modular strategy and smart tools like aPriori to keep costs down and velocity high.

In 2025 manufacturers are facing pressure from all sides: Inflation Labor shortages Fluctuating materials prices Uncertainty about the future of tariffs All impacting decisions for offshoring or nearshoring This is a perfect moment, in other words, to reconsider strategy and make sure you have the insights you need to make crucial strategic decisions about your manufacturing operations. To learn how today's forward-thinking manufacturers are staying ahead with the information they need to mitigate risk and keep a lid on costs, we are hearing today from someone who spends her life talking to and helping top worldwide manufacturers — the CEO of aPriori Technologies, Stephanie Feraday.  In this conversation we talk about cost, competition, and what the top manufacturers are doing to stay ahead in the economic climate of 2025.

When tech architecture is decades out of date, manufacturers end up with a tech stack that costs a lot and delivers little. All this can change with smart AI solutions. Mike Bowers is Chief Architect at FairCom where he helps companies reduce costs in their manufacturing processes by finding the right technological solutions to solve their biggest problems.

We talk about technology adoption within the manufacturing industry as if it's a magic elixir. With the right digitization effort and the right insights platform, we say that manufacturers can lower their cost, decrease design errors, speed time to market, maybe even get CO2 under control. But is that true? Or is it all too good to be true? My guest today helps manufacturers throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India through their digitization efforts and realizing the promise of Industry 4.o. Paul Haimes is the VP of EMEAI Solutions Consulting at PTC. And he's here today to talk to us about the promises of Industry 4.0 and whether or not they really are too good to be true.

If you want to make meaningful progress towards key targets, whether that's profit margins, production cycles, or sustainability goals, you need to be humble about where you went wrong in the past and find the right insights to bridge the information gap for your decisions moving forward. In this second installment of aPriori's executive talk series, Senior Director of Product Marketing Chris Jeznach talks to Peter Bilello is CEO of CIMdata, a global researcher and strategy consultancy focused on product lifecycle management and realizing the value of PLM for the entire organization.

In today's climate of increasing competition and decreasing time to hit an ever-shrinking target, the obsession of every executive must be: How can technology help me? How can the latest smart software and solutions help my company do more with less, reduce errors, and get more value from our data? Here on the Manufacturing Insights Podcast, we thought this would be a great time for a series of high-level discussions about these market-shaping questions and how executives today are thinking about them. For this series, we're bringing in a special guest host: Chris Jeznach is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at aPriori, and a strategic thinker about the ways that market dynamics in the software solutions and technology space really impact the productivity and ultimately the success of product manufacturers. In this first interview of the Exec Talk series, Chris Jeznach talks to Fielder Hiss, aPriori's Chief Product Officer, and an expert in the ways that the solutions manufacturers use to design, produce, and service their products work together to unlock value across the product lifecycle.

Time is money, but for manufacturers designing and releasing new products to the market, how much money is it really worth to be on time? Or put another way, what is the real cost of delays when it comes to design engineering? Matt Mullan is the Senior Director of Cost Model Development at aPriori. He comes from decades of experience in aerospace engineering and cost modeling, and he's brought to us today some sobering statistics on the cash value of time, as well as some concrete solutions on how to recoup both time and savings in the design process.

Get the update on the adoption of AI within the manufacturing industry, from an expert in Industrial AI. Bryan DeBois is the director of industrial AI at RoviSys, where he helps manufacturers realize the value from incorporating AI into their industrial processes.

Shifting left in product design empowers teams to make informed decisions early in the development process, significantly impacting cost, manufacturability, and sustainability. Using a digital copilot, designers can access expert insights and real-time data, enhancing their ability to create more efficient and effective products, thereby reducing downstream risks and accelerating time to market.

From students designing innovative electric vehicles, to worldwide automotive manufacturers, all teams benefit from an agile approach to product design. In KA-RaceIng the most brilliant engineering students and the most innovative technology companies come together to produce amazing automobiles and learning opportunities all around. The guest on this podcast is Jonas Sandelmann, the team lead for the KIT University racing team. aPriori is a gold sponsor for the KIT University racing team 2024-2025.

With experience in both design engineering and procurement, Chad Wicklund knows how smart design feedback can reduce cost early in sourcing.

For manufacturers to truly take advantage of digital transformation, they not only need good software solutions, they need a change management strategy to ensure that business processes and the people involved with them adapt at an equal rate to technological change. Many large manufacturers look to consulting services to help with process optimization, product strategy, and strategic change management. Consultants work with internal teams, lead stakeholders through strategic planning and ensure that the new technology really makes the business more agile and adaptable. But whether or not you can engage a Change Management Consultant, anyone regardless of job title can be a change leader and help realize the benefits of digital transformation.

One of the most challenging tasks of engineering leaders is to roll out the adoption of a new process or technology. A lot can be said about right and wrong ways to push for change. In this podcast we talk about some of those best practices, and mistakes to avoid when it comes to change management. But change doesn't happen in a vacuum. If change is needed in an engineering organization, it also means there are people resistant to change. How can you make the case for change in a way that leads to success? Here to talk about change management in engineering is an experienced change leader. Hank Marcy led Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning as Vice President of Technology and Innovation, and then as Vice president of Global Product Development. Before that, Hank Marcy was the senior Vice President of Product Design and Engineering at Bissell Inc. and the Vice President of Global Product Technology at the Whirlpool Corporation.

With twin goals of achieving science-based targets for Scope 3, and saving millions of dollars annually, sourcing and procurement specialists are learning how to use smart manufacturing insights to reduce scrap at their suppliers.

The commitment to environmental sustainability is rippling through the manufacturing world, from lifecycle management initiatives, to promises on behalf of executives to reduce the carbon footprint of their products. But it takes smart tools to give manufacturers the kind of data they need to evaluate real trade-offs between cost, carbon and design functionality. That's why PTC and aPriori have partnered together to deliver sustainability insights directly to design engineers, cost engineers, and sourcing professionals right within the software they're already using every day, such as PTC Creo and other 3D CAD products. Catherine Knicker guides PTC Strategy as the Chief Officer of Strategy and Marketing. We spoke at aPriori's recent Manufacturing Insights Conference, where Catherine Knicker explained how PTC helps industrial and manufacturing companies incorporate sustainability throughout their entire product lifecycle, from design and manufacturing to service and end of life. We spoke about the skills and data that front-end designers need to really make a measurable impact on environmental goals. And she talked about how successful companies are empowering their decision-makers with the data and the tools they need to make the best real-time decisions for their business and for the planet.

Digitization makes it possible to analyze carbon footprint across the supply chain. So why are only 50% of manufacturers ready with a digital thread? The COVID-19 pandemic brought into focus the need for digital tools to manage supply chains, preferably tools with intelligent analytics capabilities that look out for cost savings and manage risk in a shifting procurement landscape. Digitization was already near universal in some industries such as retail, but for physical commodities such as non-ferrous metals, oil, and gas, the adoption of the digital thread for the supply chain is still less than 50%. What does it take for these industries to move away from traditional paper and spreadsheet methods and what's the upside when they do so? Andrea Aranguren is the CEO of MineHub. On this podcast, Andrea Aranguren makes the argument that digitization of the supply chain is not only good for inventory management and productivity, it opens the door for sustainability assessments that help companies reach their net carbon targets and reduce emissions throughout their supply chains.

The market demands for product development today mean that the product design process must include steps for ensuring design for manufacturing DFM, as well as design for assembly DFA, which are both rolled into one term DFMA, or design for manufacturer and assembly. A modern DFMA program might include steps to analyze the assembly costs, analyze the ease of assembly, assembly time, and the associated manufacturing costs of each manufacturing process. When you add in optimization for your particular supply chain, and then layer on top of that your sustainability goals, that's a hefty calculation to perform before a prototype even hits the factory floor. This is why finding a digital solution for DFMA holds such a huge potential for cost savings and the real time productivity gains that ensure you hit your time to market goals. Today we're looking at a live case study of how one company simplified their design for manufacturing and assembly methodology through a digital twin solution.

Geopolitical strategist and bestselling author Peter Zeihan brings a unique perspective on how geopolitical risks are re-shaping the world economy, and what that means for global manufacturing. In this interview we discuss: The long-term labor crisis, and whether reshoring will help manufacturers solve the labor problem. 3 reasons to bring manufacturing to the United States. And why the end of the world is just the beginning for manufacturing

Continuous improvements come from linking design, cost engineering, and procurement in one insights platform. In this podcast, Vincent Bigot, the Director of Design to Cost at Alstom, explains Alstom's dynamic strategy, which brings together the cost engineering team and the design engineering organization through shared data in aPriori. 

For companies to win with digital transformation, they must expand digital twins to include digital process twins and digital factory twins. aPriori's CEO offers a case study in success with digital twinning.

Artificial Intelligence can't be used for profit until your core manufacturing processes are digitized and made available to deep learning.

The rise of AI-driven modeling tools has some people in manufacturing scrambling to understand the impact of artificial intelligence and wondering how the product design process will change as a result. Over the past year we have seen in real-time user-friendly AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and AI image generation from midjourney disrupt the markets for graphic design, web design, and social media content creation. Is product design and manufacturing prototyping the next in line for AI-powered disruption? Today I'm excited to talk to one of the early founders of AI technology, CEO of Fire&Spark, Dale Bertrand. Dale was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research at Brown University where he also trained as an electrical engineer. His experience using AI to solve engineering problems puts him into a unique position to understand how AI design tools for manufactured products might be changing the workflow for design engineers and even the scope of design projects in manufacturing today. I wanted to get a sense from Dale Bertrand based on his experience both in the AI field and in the engineering field, whether the innovations we are seeing today in generative AI and machine learning have any real bearing on the way products will be designed and manufactured in the future. I started our conversation by listing some of the AI innovations I've seen transform the creative process in other industries, and asking whether these digital products have any bearing on the future of manufacturing.

The manufacturing world today is feeling the impact of new environmental regulations. There's CSRD, the corporate sustainability reporting Directive, and the CSDD corporate sustainability due diligence directive, which put manufacturers in the hot seat for reporting and planning their carbon output. Then there's the international sustainability standards boards, S1 and S2, which lay out guidelines for reporting resource consumption and emissions respectively, and then there's the Carbon border adjustment mechanism or CBAM, which will make companies pay attention to the environmental cost of material imports, which will soon add up to financial cost as well. For manufacturing companies scrambling to fulfill these new regulations, the first hurdle is finding the right data, you need benchmarks to calculate carbon energy use and other sustainability goals accurately, and where can you get that data? That's where LCA data providers come in.

What does a cost engineer do? What's the hardest part of the job for a cost engineer? And how can SaaS costing solutions help?

Barriers to change stop engineers from innovating. New technology can help change management. If you talk to any of the top management in large engineering organizations, they will undoubtedly say that they want to push their decision-makers and engineering to adopt more streamlined work processes, to do more with less. They want their frontline engineers to increase the productivity of common work processes, to monitor cost alongside manufacturability and to adopt the best new technology to improve upon the status quo. And then they're frustrated when they find that it's hard to get buy-in from engineering. What common barriers to organizational change are these teams missing? And how can they go about overcoming the barriers to change so that the culture change can happen to adopt new technology in the short term and to adapt work processes to reduce workload and increase productivity in the long term. For this conversation, I'm delighted to have Mark Rushton, an engineer with an in-depth understanding of the barriers to change within engineering organizations, especially when it comes to the adoption of new technology that can help engineers work smarter, more efficiently and with less change projects, if only they adopt it. Mark is going to shed light on different types of barriers to change, emotional, tactical even political that inhibit change and stifle innovation. And also what effective communication strategies can help frontline engineers overcome barriers to change.

The procurement process in recent years has evolved way beyond simple purchase orders and pricing tables. Today's dynamic supply chain calls for innovative end-to-end solutions, that pair the best procurement software with an awareness of the business processes of your individual procurement team, and how they help the company achieve cost savings and profitability. Call it strategic sourcing or innovative supplier management, the bottom line is that the procurement process must change if the manufacturing industry is to meet the challenges of today's supply chain.

What is Augmented Reality? And what does it mean for manufacturing? The term augmented reality describes a range of apps, wearable devices, and interfaces that bring the virtual world, and any relevant information it contains, into the real world where it can be used in real time. You might be familiar with ar apps such as pokemon go or other video games for apple's iphone or android. Or you might know about applications of ar systems for work, where ar technology is used in healthcare to project digital information onto the real world environment. But what is the benefit of augmented reality for manufacturing? To answer this question, I turned to Nate Taylor, North American Director for Transition Technologies. Nate Taylor advises companies on how augmented reality technology can help OEMs and customers better leverage digital content, and how companies can use these ar applications to boost their profits in real-life. At a conference where AR experiences were everywhere, where someone in smart glasses was navigating a virtual environment and vendors were exchanging business cards over their mobile devices, Nate Taylor and I shared a very real-world conversation about impact of augmented reality on manufacturing.

Model-Based Definition or MBD can fundamentally transform how we visualize and understand design intent, by adding new dimensions to 2D drawings and pushing the boundaries of 3D CAD models. Learn how to get your organization to realize the benefits of MBD to bring GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing), tolerance analysis, annotations, and even the PMI (Product Manufacturing Information) into the 3D CAD space.

Since the pandemic, the number of open jobs in the manufacturing industry has exceeded the number of available workers. We all know this. The question is how to fix the worker shortage, or even just how to react to the new shape of the labor market as interest rates fluctuate and companies find it difficult to both find enough workers and provide the better pay they're demanding. In this labor market, manufacturing companies need to evolve so that labor shortage does not lead to a shortage of profit or innovation. 

One of the biggest challenges of change management is getting team member buy-in for new technology. This has been even more true since the pandemic sent workers remote and workforces are no longer in person to rally around new technology onboarding or celebrate the wins of early adopters. In this moment of technological change, how can you ensure a return on investment from new technology? How can you ensure adoption of your digital transformation initiatives and drive organizational change towards success? To answer these questions, I talk to someone who spends his life getting end users return on investment from technological change, aPriori's Vice President of Customer Success, Rick Hyde.

Getting a return on investment from your PLM solution means focusing on the right metrics and pushing change management throughout the organization. Chris Morris, Chief Customer Officer at aPriori, explains what return on investment means for product lifecycle management.

With aPriori design engineers can now get DFM, DTC, and CO2 insights directly in PTC Creo. This user case study explains how.

Digital strategy drives quantifiable results for manufacturers, from process optimization to improved customer experience to new revenue streams. This consultant has analyzed the case studies and come up with 4 criteria for a winning digital strategy.

Supply chain disruptions and the fluctuations in raw materials prices mean that unless you have collaborative supplier relationships, you're not going to have any. Learn how collaboration efforts pay off in win-win profits.

Calculating the carbon footprint of your supply chain is key to reducing the environmental impact of your products.

Software can speed up value creation exponentially when engineers and cross-funtional teams take a design to value or DTV approach to product development.

The new technology requirements for sustainable agriculture extend past tractors into digital solutions for tracking carbon and reducing cost. Sam Freesmeyer of AGCO talks about the challenges of breaking down silos (the bad kind) and how companies can plow ahead when it comes to innovation.

Digital Factories eliminate supply chain problems where there's a mismatch between buyers' knowledge and suppliers' capacity.

Embracing neurodivergence can help engineering teams perceive new patterns in data and improve business results.

In the age of materials shortages and supply chain disruptions, a good supply chain strategy means partnering with suppliers to share vital information. A former supplier turned consultant shares how.

What if your costing solution wasn't adjacent to your business processes, but a core part of what made your company competitive? Mike Perrott from Flex shares his experience.

Digital technology can help manufacturers right-size the labor force and to deliver manufacturing a workforce that's ready for digital transformation.

Manufacturers who are serious about sustainable production need a robust solution that reveals sustainability problems before any parts are produced.