Roger Bassous has spent about a decade doing something most people would find deeply uncomfortable: walking into other people’s buildings and asking permission to watch. His software measures machines, which means it also, inevitably, measures the people running them, and Roger has watched more shops react to being watched than almost anyone alive.
He did not start in manufacturing. He and his brother Richard were software guys at CompuWare in Detroit when Android launched, and they built a phone backup app that spent years in the top five of the Play Store. When that market crowded out around 2013, Roger opened a bar and started hanging around the mold shop where his middle brother Ed had spent sixteen years. One day Ed showed him the machine monitoring software the shop was stuck with, and it was so bad, so wrong, so slow, that a light went on. The whole city was buying this. The three brothers, two coders and a toolmaker, decided they could do it better. They went to a big Windsor mold builder, asked if they would buy it before a line of code existed, got a yes, and built RER.
Roger learned once the software was running: machine monitoring is a people problem long before it is a technology problem. Roger and Jim get into the fear of Big Brother, the brother who made it personal, a story about eyebolts that shows how data changes a conversation, why your best machinist might be the one who looks like he is slacking, and why the owner who buys the bright shiny object without asking the floor ends up with a hundred-thousand-dollar paperweight under a dust tarp.
Key Takeaways
Monitoring is a people problem first. The hard part was never the software. It was earning the trust of people who fear being watched, which is why the brother with sixteen years on the floor was the key to the whole company.
The utilization gap is hidden capacity. Shops that believe they run at eighty or ninety percent often run at thirty. That gap is not a failure, it is room to take on more work, and it is how reshoring actually happens.
Data changes the conversation. A machinist complaining about missing eyebolts gets ignored. A machinist who logs the hours lost looking for them gets every bay restocked in a week. Numbers make the floor’s problems undeniable.
The report card cuts both ways. Monitoring lets the real top performers prove it, and it lets owners see that the guy who looks like he’s slacking may be the one whose machines never stop.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and who Roger is
03:01 Icebreaker: a sci-fi movie
05:34 What culture means to Roger
09:27 Before RER: CompuWare and a top-five app
12:19 From a backup app to a bar to a mold shop
13:19 The bad software that became the opportunity
14:40 What Ed brought from 16 years on the floor
15:20 Idle reasons, and the pop-up that changed everything
17:45 What the early product got wrong, and finding the small shops
21:47 AI, hype, and garbage in garbage out
27:27 A people problem before a technology problem
28:38 You think you’re running at 90 percent
29:14 Capacity, reshoring, and the hidden headroom
32:31 The eyebolts story: how data changes the conversation
36:19 Walking over dollars to pick up pennies
37:32 The report card: career paths and pay for performance
41:44 The machinist everyone misjudged
43:10 What’s next for machine monitoring
45:36 What makes Roger proud
47:13 Why shops resist, and the $150K paperweight
53:02 Close
Find Roger
LinkedIn: Roger Bassous
RER Software
