A whiteboard drawing turns into a 90 foot robotic rail system sitting on a factory floor nine months later. That is the job.
Bryant Parker is the founder and president of Cynertech Automation in Ogden, Utah. He builds full turnkey robotic systems for American manufacturers, everything from automated storage and retrieval to picking, packing, and palletizing in the food and agriculture world. He started the company as a side project selling components, and when the parent company went out of business three months later with his fourth child about to be born and needing surgery, he had to make it work. It worked.
In this episode Bryant and Carl get into what a systems integrator actually does, why COVID turned a distribution company into an integration company almost overnight, the labor problem pushing plants toward automation, and why he thinks humanoid robots are further from the factory floor than the hype suggests.
If you run a plant and you are paying a temp agency 25 to 50 percent extra just to keep one position filled, this one is for you.
WHAT WE COVER
00:12 Meet Bryant Parker and Cynertech Automation
01:20 What a robotic automation company actually builds
02:34 The 90 foot Kawasaki rail system, from whiteboard to floor
03:20 What a systems integrator does and why manufacturers need one
04:58 PLCs explained, the brain of every system
05:30 How Cynertech started, and the surgery that made it real
07:24 The COVID pivot from selling parts to building turnkey systems
08:40 Hiring and keeping motivated people
09:48 The best part of the job, the whiteboard becoming real
10:20 Who they serve, food, agriculture, egg, protein, and medical
11:45 Modular engineering and moving into warehouse and distribution
13:30 Humanoid robots, the hype and the reality
16:51 Where humanoid robots might actually land first
17:45 Price volatility since COVID and bidding profitably
19:17 Automation audits, finding the bottleneck
19:50 The temp agency labor squeeze
21:23 Favorite place in the US, and the bugs for water trade
22:51 The Fourth of July
23:30 Advice to the next generation, learn from other people's mistakes
25:30 Find a mentor two or three steps ahead of you
BEST LINE OF THE EPISODE
"Learn from other people's mistakes as much as you can, because that costs you a lot less than learning from your own."
ABOUT THE GUEST
Bryant Parker, Founder and President, Cynertech Automation
ABOUT THE SHOW
What's Made in the USA celebrates the people, companies, and ideas behind American manufacturing. Every episode, host Carl Holden sits down with the entrepreneurs, engineers, and skilled professionals building real products right here in the United States.
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