Manufacturing Hub

Deglobalization is rewriting where factories get built, and Ujjwal Kumar of Siemens explains what has to change on the plant floor before reshoring actually works.
For thirty years the manufacturing playbook was labor arbitrage. Move high volume, low mix production to wherever disciplined labor was cheapest, then ship it back. Ujjwal Kumar, President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas, argues that model has quietly stopped making sense. Demand has fragmented into high mix, lower volume, regionally specific production, and the factories in Suzhou running on robots and autonomous systems no longer carry a cost advantage over the same operation in Chicago. When the labor content collapses, the business case for distance collapses with it. That single shift explains more about the current reshoring wave than any tariff headline.
The trigger was not one event. Supply chain disruption after COVID proved that geographic proximity to supply was a profitability advantage, not a nice to have. Then came the political shock: vaccine access turned out to be governed by country of citizenship rather than global distribution, and leaders across every region started sorting industries into a folder marked critical. That folder now holds semiconductors, steel, power generation, defense, space, and life sciences. Ujjwal walks through where the money is actually landing right now, including AI data centers in remote locations that demand autonomous and remote operations, power generation across fossil, renewable, nuclear, and hydro, and a level of greenfield life sciences investment in the United States he has not seen in decades. The life sciences point is the sharpest one in the episode. Drug manufacturing left as mass produced batch operations and is returning as cell and gene therapy, personalized medicine, and precision biologics, which means lot sizes of one and R&D sitting physically next to production. The design it here, build it there model taught in business schools simply does not survive that.
About Ujjwal Kumar
Ujjwal Kumar is President of Automation for Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from the Michigan Ross School of Business, he began his career at General Motors in Detroit and went on to spend ten years at GE and seven years at Honeywell Process Solutions before leading Teradyne Robotics, one of the largest physical AI based robotics platforms. He oversees the Siemens automation portfolio spanning discrete, process, and intralogistics automation, and he continues to mentor MBA students at Michigan Ross.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
2:00 Career path from General Motors to Siemens
6:10 What deglobalization means for manufacturing
9:00 COVID, vaccine quotas, and the reshoring trigger
13:05 Labor arbitrage versus automation arbitrage
15:50 Attracting the next generation of factory workers
19:35 Why semiconductor reshoring will take years
23:00 Tribal knowledge and the documentation problem
26:00 Where the investment is going right now
32:30 Adaptive manufacturing and the AI hype question
35:30 Platforms, ecosystems, and Siemens Xcelerator
43:20 Careers, AI, and advice for engineers
References
Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace: https://xcelerator.siemens.com/global/en.html
This episode is sponsored by
Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare, and it supplies industrial automation hardware and industrial software to manufacturers worldwide. Its Digital Industries business covers discrete automation, process automation, intralogistics, and the Siemens Xcelerator platform.
https://www.siemens.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Understanding Supply Chains: https://www.joltek.com/blog/understanding-supply-chains
Manufacturing Challenges with New Machinery and Plants: https://www.joltek.com/blog/manufacturing-challenges-new-machinery-plant
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

After several weeks away from the podcast, Dave Griffith and Vladimir Romanov return to Manufacturing Hub to unpack their experiences at Automate 2026 and discuss what the event revealed about the current state of industrial automation.
Automate showcased an enormous range of robotics, industrial AI, machine vision, software, cloud connectivity, and emerging automation technology. However, some of the most revealing conversations were not about futuristic factories. They were about PLC 5 migrations, aging SLC systems, obsolete PanelView terminals, industrial networks, basic data collection, and how platforms such as Ignition actually connect to plant floor equipment.
Vlad shares what he learned from demonstrating a complete packaging line environment built around a CompactLogix PLC, an industrial computer, Ignition, and production performance data. The demonstration was designed to show how manufacturers can use OEE, downtime information, and machine states to identify production bottlenecks and determine where capital investment could deliver the greatest return. Instead, many attendees wanted to understand the underlying architecture, where Ignition runs, how it connects to PLCs, what protocols are required, and whether it can replace traditional HMI and SCADA platforms.
Dave discusses his experience inside the Ignition ecosystem booth, the FactoryStack cloud demonstration, the advantages of MQTT in a difficult trade show network environment, and his Automate panel on software defined automation and the factory of the future. He also introduces Elephant, an industrial log analysis and contextualization tool being developed to help users identify meaningful patterns across Ignition gateways, reduce system noise, compare facilities, and diagnose intermittent problems.
The conversation then moves across the industrial automation stack. Dave and Vlad examine virtual PLCs from Siemens, Phoenix Contact, and other vendors, including where software based control may provide value and where it may add unnecessary organizational complexity. They discuss AI generated PLC code, the limitations of translating functional specifications into reliable control applications, and why tools that produce 80 or 90 percent of an automation solution still require experienced engineers to validate the final result.
They also explore AI assisted HMI and SCADA development, Ignition 8.3, MCP servers, high performance HMI design, and the risks of providing AI agents with uncontrolled access to production systems. At the MES layer, they question whether manufacturers should build custom applications through vibe coding or focus instead on creating clean, contextualized, well governed data that can support many future applications.
The central conclusion is that AI tools, virtual controllers, cloud platforms, and dynamically generated applications will continue to improve. However, manufacturers still need reliable controls, secure networks, maintainable architectures, experienced people, and ownership of their operational data. The companies that establish those foundations today will have the greatest freedom to adopt whatever technologies emerge next.
Dave and Vlad also preview the 2026 Ignition Community Conference in Sacramento, upcoming Manufacturing Hub conversations, new demonstrations, and several projects the community will see throughout the remainder of the year.
Join us for a detailed and candid discussion about Automate 2026, Ignition, industrial AI, virtual PLCs, HMI and SCADA development, MES, MQTT, data architecture, and what manufacturers should prioritize next.

Automate 2026 lands in Chicago next week, and Dave and Vlad break down how to work the show floor, where to network, and what to expect from their live booth demos.
Automate is the largest automation trade show in North America, and a four day event rewards preparation. Dave and Vlad share tactics refined over five years of attending together. The floor opens at 10:00 AM on Monday, and registration lines have swung from a five minute wait to nearly two hours, so arriving early matters. Monday morning and Thursday are the quietest days to reach specific vendors, while Tuesday and Wednesday draw the heaviest crowds. The hosts also favor the official show app over a paper map for finding booths and session rooms across multiple halls.
The real value of a show like Automate often lives in the networking. Dave points to the A3 networking event on Monday, a ticket of roughly 45 dollars, and the Manufacturing Champions happy hour on Tuesday organized by Chris Luckey and Jake Hall. Vlad's advice is structural: build a checklist before you arrive. He researches each company, finds the booth number, and tracks every connection in a spreadsheet so the week becomes a series of deliberate meetings instead of aimless wandering. For anyone with ten or more booths on their list, setting up meetings in advance is the highest leverage move you can make.
The centerpiece of the conversation is the live demo Vlad built for the Teguar booth. It pairs a Rockwell CompactLogix PLC with an Ignition gateway running on a Teguar industrial PC, and it simulates a food and beverage packaging line with five assets: filler, capper, labeler, case packer, and palletizer. The line overview screen shows real machine states including faulted, starved, backed up, and running, and the whole point is to make the bottleneck visible. When the case packer needs six bottles from the labeler but the labeler cannot keep pace, you watch the downstream asset flip between starved and running in real time. It is a practical illustration of why line balancing and constraint analysis drive real ROI on a production floor.
Under the hood the stack is modern. The Teguar IPC runs Ubuntu with Portainer managing containers for Ignition 8.3, Ignition 8.1, and a MariaDB database for alarm history. Ignition 8.3 ships new drivers for Rockwell, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and Omron controllers along with OPC and MQTT, and each asset carries ten randomized faults written in both Ignition and PLC logic. Vlad built it for everyone from engineers to the decision makers running SCADA and MES projects. Dave and Vlad will also shoot content at the Siemens booth on Tuesday and the Horner Automation booth on Wednesday, and Dave is moderating a Wednesday session on software defined automation and the factory of the future.
Timestamps
0:00 Welcome and Automate 2026 preview
1:50 First timer tips and arriving early for registration
3:10 Networking events worth attending: A3 and Manufacturing Champions
4:40 Building a trade show checklist to maximize your time
7:00 Manufacturing Hub at the Siemens and Horner booths
9:50 Vlad's live production line demo at the Teguar booth
15:40 The line overview screen and five packaging assets
17:30 Fault handling and finding the bottleneck
20:10 Inside the stack: Ubuntu, Portainer, Ignition, MariaDB
23:50 Random fault simulation and PLC driver options
27:00 Who should come see the demo
29:40 Vendors Vlad is tracking and closing thoughts
References
Automate 2026: https://www.automate.org
Ignition by Inductive Automation: https://inductiveautomation.com
Horner Automation: https://hornerautomation.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Connecting an Allen Bradley PLC to Ignition: https://www.joltek.com/blog/connecting-allen-bradley-plc-ignition
Manufacturing Line Speed Optimization: https://www.joltek.com/case-study/manufacturing-line-speed-optimization
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

AI can finally write back to the plant floor, but only if you can trust it. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how orchestration makes that safe.
Industrial AI has reached a turning point. Manufacturers can already collect data, contextualize it, and surface insights, but the hardest step has always been turning insight into action on real control equipment. Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu of Siemens explain how an orchestration layer finally closes that loop. Annemarie frames the tension clearly. Automation depends on determinism, while large language models are probabilistic by design, so the goal is to bring that discipline into AI and validate any suggestion before it changes a set point.
Most executive conversations start with return on investment, and two forces are making the case easier to prove. The workforce shortage has stretched the expected payback window from 18 months toward 36 months, and when a line cannot run for lack of people every idle minute costs thousands of dollars. The other driver is overall equipment effectiveness, since most plants run near 70 percent OEE and even a fraction of a percent of gain can justify a project. Energy is a standout case too. A BorgWarner sustainability effort used a digital twin to flatten demand peaks and reportedly paid for itself in under six months, even as data center growth pushes electricity demand higher through 2040.
On trust and safety, Annemarie borrows a principle from industrial safety. Just as fail safe IO modules rely on two channel evaluation, every AI suggestion is validated against a state machine, a workflow, or a physics based digital twin before the orchestration layer passes it to a controller. With virtual commissioning and soft PLCs a change can be tested virtually, approved by a human in the loop, and only then written to control, an approach PepsiCo and NVIDIA echoed at CES when they called the digital twin a must have. Making AI real, the pair argue, comes down to discipline, clear scope, acceptance criteria, and focused 90 day challenges, plus the change management and user experience that drive adoption. Their favorite quick win is preventive maintenance driven by machine data, which both BorgWarner and Maersk tied to millions in savings.
About Chris Stevens
Chris Stevens is President of US Automation at Siemens, where he leads a roughly one billion dollar business spanning software, services, and hardware. He brings more than 25 years across Siemens Digital Industries, starting in the field selling assembly and test equipment, moving into the software and digital twin world, and returning to automation to bring the hardware and software sides of the business together.
About Annemarie Breu
Annemarie Breu is a senior technology leader at Siemens Digital Industries focused on automation software deployment and customer technology partnerships in the US. She began at Siemens about a decade ago as a systems engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with consumer electronics manufacturers on virtual commissioning and digital twins. Her work today centers on bringing the determinism and reliability of automation into industrial AI.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction and Automate 2026 preview
2:50 Meet Chris Stevens and Annemarie Breu
9:30 The first AI question is always ROI
14:00 Workforce gaps and OEE drive the business case
19:30 Energy management and the data center demand surge
23:20 Data, sensors, and contextualization requirements
28:00 Guardrails, hallucinations, and two channel validation
32:40 The digital twin and the human in the loop
37:40 How partners and integrators move up the stack
45:30 What it takes to make AI real on the floor
55:50 Preventive maintenance as a quick win
59:40 Predictions, career advice, and book picks
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Edge Computing and the Value of AI in Manufacturing Data: https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-data
IT and OT Architecture Integration: https://www.joltek.com/services/service-details-it-ot-architecture-integration
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Industrial network protocols decide whether a machine talks or stays silent. Chuck from Horner Automation breaks down how they win, fade, and converge.
Chuck has spent 36 years at Horner Automation and lived through what the industry once called the fieldbus wars. Before Horner became known for its all in one controllers, it spent a decade building specialty IO modules for GE Fanuc during the era of DeviceNet, SDS, InterBus S, PROFIBUS, and CANopen. His core argument is that most of those early protocols were technically fine. The ones that became standards won on the commercial weight of the companies backing them, not on superior specifications, with EtherCAT a rare exception that succeeded largely on technical merit.
Trust is the recurring theme. Industry adopts slowly, and for years Ethernet was dismissed as too unreliable and not deterministic enough for control until Ethernet/IP, PROFINET, and Modbus TCP proved themselves. Today the market has settled around a big four set of protocols, and Chuck does not expect it to narrow further. For high speed motion he points to EtherCAT and PROFINET IRT as the implementations he most respects, since both step away from standard Ethernet at the device level to reach submillisecond timing.
The episode is also a reality check on building your own hardware. Chuck and Dave describe how custom development routinely costs teams hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and how the real trap is obsolescence and maintenance rather than the first build. On the product side, the standout is FPD-Link, a serialization technology borrowed from automotive that carries video, touch, and power over one coaxial cable. Working with Safe Fleet, a maker of ambulances and fire trucks, Horner now mounts rugged displays up to seven meters from the PLC while still programming everything as one device.
Looking ahead, Chuck argues that every PLC should now be treated as a data device first, because digitizing the process is the prerequisite for doing anything useful with AI. He also flags cybersecurity as the next burden for application engineers, with new mandates forcing both manufacturers and integrators to implement protections that were once optional. At Automate, Horner is showing HMI Connect and a 300 dollar CPU 151 that packs 18 IO points, wireless connectivity, and edge capability into a micro PLC.
About Chuck and Horner Automation
Chuck is a technical brand ambassador at Horner Automation, where he has spent 36 years across applications, product management, and education. An electrical engineer who started in the automotive industry, he now produces in depth tutorials on industrial protocols for the Horner APG YouTube channel. Horner Automation is a privately held controls manufacturer best known for its all in one PLC and HMI controllers, edge ready PLCs, and rugged hardware for industrial and mobile applications.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
2:20 Chuck's Background and 36 Years at Horner Automation
9:20 End User Engineer vs OEM Manufacturer Perspective
13:20 New at Automate: HMI Connect and the CPU 151 Edge PLC
21:30 The Fieldbus Wars and the History of Industrial Protocols
24:20 What It Takes to Implement a Protocol Stack
29:30 Why Protocols Win: Commercial Force vs Technical Merit
32:40 Will Industrial Protocols Ever Converge?
40:30 High Speed Motion: EtherCAT, PROFINET IRT, and Ethernet/IP
44:40 FPD-Link: Rugged Remote HMI for Ambulances and Fire Trucks
55:00 PLCs as Data Devices and the Push Toward AI
1:02:40 Cybersecurity Mandates Coming for Application Engineers
References
Horner Automation: https://www.hornerautomation.com
About Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Understanding Plant Networks: https://www.joltek.com/blog/understanding-plant-networks-how-industrial-connectivity-evolved
Industrial Ethernet Reliability: https://www.joltek.com/blog/industrial-ethernet-reliability
Dave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.live
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-network
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub