Contact Sunny Han
Email: Sunny@fulcrumpro.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yusunnyhan/
Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited today to introduce you to Sunny Han. Sunny is the CEO and founder of Fulcrum Manufacturing, an ERP platform dedicated to helping manufacturers build a better future. He led Fulcrum to raise a $3.1 million seed round of venture capital in 2020. Sunny is dedicated to delivering a connected future where frictionless manufacturing production and supply chains lead to faster and better product innovation. Sunny, welcome to the show.
Sunny Han: Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Lisa Ryan: So, please share with us a bit about your background. Where you started, and what led you to do what you're doing today?
Sunny Han: There's no magical story. My entire childhood was spent playing with computers and writing software and making friends with people that played video games with me and things like that. So I have a deep-seated past in technology. How I got into manufacturing was having no direction after college and working in the consulting industry. Because of that, I was exposed to many manufacturers, and I spent almost a decade working with midsize and small manufacturers. Between five to 10 employees, all the way up to hundreds or thousands of employees, and the flavor of that work was mainly in organizing them, helping them communicate better internally implementing technologies to assist with implementing earpiece systems, customizing them, writing custom software on top of them, helping them position themselves in the market correctly, and doing all sorts of different things.
Through that experience of learning about all different types of manufacturing, I started to get this hunch that a new operating system for manufacturing could drive a very different future of how manufacturers work with technology. It wasn't as if I was born on a shop floor with a tool in my hand or something like that. It was a very circuitous path that led me here. But it's something that I've fallen in love with over time.
Lisa Ryan: That's what we need. Not only do you bring more youth to manufacturing than what we're seeing, but for the most part, the silver tsunami is going. People are retiring in record numbers. So that easy adaptation you bring to technology and your love of manufacturing all woven together is precisely the type that we need to change the conversation. I mean, there's so much focus on er P and technology and everything in manufacturing. However, as you and I spoke a couple of minutes before the show, we still need to focus on humans. So how do you look at that? As far as that ideal mix of making sure we're taking care of our employees, attracting them into manufacturing, retaining them, and bringing in the technology, we need to move forward.
Sunny Han: I think there's this weird tension that exists right now, and I think most people don't understand it. I didn't understand it for an extended time. I don't think I still fully understand it. Still, manufacturing has been the origin of many business concepts, six Sigma, lean, agile, Kanban, kaizen - all of these concepts that have been ported over to software development and other businesses. They were developed primarily to make manufacturing more efficient and have these processes available to improve continuously.
So I think there's a statistic that over half of all the software programmers in the world were CNC machine programmers. So writing software for manufacturers has a rich history of manufacturing - both supporting, sponsoring, and ultimately spreading the word of technology out into the world. So that's where they started. And yet, when you ask them about manufacturing, most...
