AWS Industrial Insights

In this episode, we speak with Amazon, one of the original AWS customers. Our guest, Shreya Hegde, Sr. Product Manager in Reliability Maintenance Engineering at Amazon, guides us through her experience working with AWS and its partners with a focus on utilizing AWS IoT TwinMaker to proactively address safety in design.

Hear how Belden improved visibility into factory performance metrics by initiating a project to streamline data collection across disparate equipment, moving from clipboards to an AWS-connected process, resulting in a productivity improvement of around 10%.

Hear about the role of cloud in the development and adoption of a simplified methods, strategies, and steps to navigate a complex SAP ERP cloud migration, system consolidation and simplification, infrastructure transformation, and change management.

This episode’s special guest, Dr. Oxana Pickeral, is the VP GM of Connected Life Sciences & Logistics & Software Business Model at Honeywell. For International Women’s Day, she joined us to discuss her career in STEM and how her experience empowers her to bring legacy technology, software, and consulting knowledge together to innovate in numerous ways and deliver new value to customers. Covering topics that range from the importance of mentors to suggestions on how to get more underrepresented people into STEM, Pickeral comes with a crisp perspective and plenty of advice. Listen now One Woman's Journey: Diversity in the Tech Industrial Space In honor of International Women’s Day, we spoke with Dr. Oxana Pickeral of Honeywell, the VP GM of Connected Life Sciences, Logistics, and Software Business Model. She supports innovation at Honeywell to drive business around their focus areas: industrial automation, the future of aviation, and energy transition. She joins us to discuss her varied career in STEM, covering topics ranging from mentors to building networks to the value of a diverse workforce to what female representation in the broader industry looks like today. Finishing with suggestions on how to bring more underrepresented people into STEM, she provides a crisp perspective with plenty of advice for the next generation of women entering industrial and technology fields. Listen now On the value of mentors: “Nobody can grow without the help of people around them. There is a long list of formal and informal mentors that I'll always be very grateful to. And I think, what's important, because I do think we have a fairly diverse audience here, is I think different mentors give us different things at different stages in the career as we grow.” - Oxana Pickeral On creating space where everyone is heard: “One of my favorite kinds of behavioral rules at Amazon was the most senior person always tries to speak last in the room, and that's the way to get everybody to speak up and not be biased by the most senior opinion.” - Oxana Pickeral On what lasting advice from her mentors: “There are areas where we need to, obviously, be fact-based and bring our experience to the table. At the same time, it is okay sometimes to find a way to speak up without having 100% confidence, 100% certainty.” - Oxana Pickeral

In this episode, our guest, Steve Hooper, vice president for design and manufacturing software tools at Autodesk, walks through the nuanced conversation around generative design and generative AI in the manufacturing space.

Establishing trust and open dialogue between IT and OT teams is crucial to the success of implementing new cybersecurity measures, yet it’s something that can be overlooked. Taking time to understand the other team’s priorities regarding operations is invaluable despite how tricky it might be given differences in process, business rhythm, and work culture. Tune in to the conversation with Steve Applegate, Chief Information Security Officer at Dragos, as he shares career wisdom from his experience bridging IT and OT communities for more secure operations. He speaks on leading by listening, minimizing the use of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in conversations, and recognizing the impact a threat or patch has on plant operations and even safety. Check out this episode for expert advice to bolster your role in championing your organization’s security journey.

Join us as we talk with Gabe Green, Chief Information Security Officer for Koch Industries, about taking an informed approach to security in manufacturing. In this episode, Green shares with us insights from Koch’s journey to provide consistent IT and OT security across their very different environments, and how a bottoms-up approach creates space to leverage each employee’s comparative advantage.

Listen in as we continue our conversation with Jason Bergstrom, Principal Smart Factory Go-To-Market Leader, and Stephen Laaper, Principal, Smart Factory Leader, from Deloitte and get their perspectives on striking the balance between people and automation in the factory of the future.

In this podcast, we’ll highlight how smart factories, also known as smart manufacturing, smart refining, or digital operations, leverage rapidly advancing technology to create an impact in the manufacturing environment by connecting data from across the enterprise, systems, and supply chain.

In our final episode during cybersecurity awareness month, we turn our discussion with Robert to examine the myths and misunderstandings surrounding industrial IoT systems that persist throughout the manufacturing industry. Robert tells us “A lot of the myths that are out there with regards to industrial IoT systems, unfortunately, misdirect us. They make us think in some directions that are problematic and you’ll end up trying to solve a problem that maybe doesn’t exist.”