11: Robotics in Manufacturing - with Daniel Rogge

a BROADcast for Manufacturers

Meet Daniel:

Daniel Rogge is the CEO of Tormach and has a diverse background that includes experience as a professional metal fabricator, educator, Motion Control Engineer, and software developer. He holds a BA from Grinnell College, and an MS in industrial engineering, with the focus on manufacturing from University of Iowa. He continues to focus professionally on what he spent his time doing as a teaching assistant at Iowa, helping people make things!

Erin: Can you explain what is done over at Tormach?

Daniel: We design, sell, and support tools that help people make stuff, largely smaller computer controlled tools. So, milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, CNC routers, more recently, automation products, like industrial robots, but the general idea is, these are all tools that especially when the business started 20 years ago, were incredibly hard to get your hands on. So we make that stuff available to everybody. We have a very wide range of customers.

Kris: Do you know what your customers are going to do with a machine before they purchase it? Is that something they're often sharing with your sales team or to discover which machine they need?

Daniel: We don't have a sales team. More and more people do their research online and buy stuff without even talking to people. We have like tech support staff that are machinists and engineers and we do have two people that do like kind of up resale advising a lot of folks, they know that a milling machine could be used to make their part, but they don't quite know how and they want to ask questions. We don't call people or, you know, take names that trade shows and then call to follow up or anything like that. It's very much customers come to the website. And if they call us up, we ended up talking to them. I don't, um, it kind of varies by industry. Okay, whether we know what they're making, some folks are really vocal about it, and some folks not so much. And it also kind of varies by product, like the robot is a pretty new product. And so we definitely ask a lot of questions before somebody buys a robot because some people think you can do just about anything with a robot, which turns out is not true.

Lori: What do you think is going to be critical and vital for the next 10, 20, 30 years for American manufacturing to really excel and flourish here?

Daniel: We could come up with a national health plan or socialized medicine. I talked about that person that didn't have to quit his day job in order to become basically a cottage industry. He was he's manufacturing products in his garage and he didn't have to quit his day job. And the reason that was important to him is he has healthcare through his day job, as I'm sure perhaps the other people on this call have either healthcare through their jobs or their spouse's job. That's a huge burden to people starting small businesses, to people starting small manufacturing businesses. There's a lot of there's a lot of demand for manufacturing here, more demand than there is capacity. And there are plenty of small folks that would be happy to go out on their own. I mean, the big market that we sell to, but it's it's tough doing without decent health care, A and then B, over the next 10 to 15 years of health care costs continue to go at the pace that they have, I mean, they're outpacing even today's crazy inflation and health care costs are up with so clearly the country has to do something about that. But I actually think that would be helpful for manufacturing the United States.

And so much more…

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Connect with Erin on LinkedIn and visit http://www.earthlinginteractive.com for web-based solutions to your complex business problems!

Connect with Lori on LinkedIn and visit www.keystoneclick.com for your strategic digital marketing needs!

Connect with Kris on LinkedIn and visit www.genalpha.com for OEM and aftermarket digital solutions!