Jill Jusko: Very near and dear to my heart is the Industry Week Best Plants Awards, which will be the 2026 winners will be presented at this event. For those of you who don't know, Industry Week annually salutes manufacturing excellence across North America, and earlier in September we announced the winners for 2026 and there are four of them. We will be presenting them with their awards, which we call the Pinnacle Awards, during this conference. So I look forward to that, having been part of the Best Plans program for more than 20 years at this point, I'm almost sorry to say, only because it just speaks to how long I've been around. 

But I love the program. I think it's one of IW's finest and I look forward to seeing the winners in person. And not only will we be seeing them and you be seeing them for the awards presentation, but the IW Best Plants winners representing both the current class as well as past classes are also going to participate in what I call the IW Best Plants Winners Panel. It's an opportunity for the winning facilities to share some of the practices that help them excel and to talk about some of the lessons learned on their roads to excellence, because nobody's road goes perfectly smoothly and you learn as much from getting something wrong as getting something right. 

The panel is meant to be a conversation. So the more that the audience comes craving knowledge and coming with questions, the more valuable this winner's panel will be both for the panelists and for the attendees. It is what I would call best practices sharing at its finest. And if I don't make it clear that I love the Best Plants program with that, I don't know what else I can say.

Thomas Wilk: I'm going to add a whole lot of little heart overlays popping up on the podcast as you talk about this. It is my first year working with you in the program and it's a fascinating one and I only got to visit one of the four plants. We all divided those up, but just the one that I was at was really impressive in the way they had driven themselves to top performance and innovate wherever they could. So if that was one glimpse that I got, I can't imagine what you're seeing when you've got all four of these lined up for us.

Jill Jusko: What I see is that there's a lot of great manufacturing going on across North America, and any opportunity to provide glimpses into how to even improve those great running factories is something that I as an IW staffer is happy to do.

Thomas Wilk: Let's switch our focus for a while to the program itself, and I want to bring Scott back into the conversation. Scott's again the Head of Content for Smart Industry, which focuses on the day-to-day direction and implementation of software, hardware, and factory control systems to make factories smarter and more efficient. And Scott, you're moderating our technology track this year as well as some safety sessions.

Scott Achelpohl: I am. I will not fail to mention, however, that I'm going to also be leading one of the plant tours, so I'll be your tour guide. And I also don't want to fail to mention that the Operations Leadership summit, at least it was for me. The first one two years ago was a great opportunity for me to network and to do some professional development, and I would say that's a top five reason to come is just to take advantage of the networking and the knowledge and the professional development that does take place. It's a lot of fun.

The official name of the tracks is the technology adoption track, and that seems to implicate that some of the sessions are AI focused and they certainly are. But I will mention that there's a lot on digital transformation, which is our favorite topic at Smart Industry, as well as other technology adoption subjects like IoT, cobots, and even some 3D simulations. So there's going to be a little tinge of digital twins in the air during the sessions, which should be fascinating. I must admit, I don't entirely grasp digital twins fully, and I'm looking forward to hearing some of the discussions about what digital twins can do for digital transformation. 

But there are six total technology adoption track sessions. in addition to the sessions that Tom and Jill will lead. And I'll highlight one in particular on Wednesday at 4:00. It is an AI session, and it's called Blueprint for AI: Driving Adoption in Manufacturing. And it's going to be led by Marc Kermisch, who's the Chief Technology and AI Officer for Protolabs, and the session is really fascinating in that it's going to go over practical and pragmatic approaches to implementing AI tools. 

There's a lot of talk about, “well, I can use AI, what do I use it for? And more importantly, how do I cost effectively and logically implement it?” And Mark's going to be talking a lot about the three stages – implementing employee productivity tools. implementing process automation, and of course, figuring out whether you have data-driven AI. And as we all know, in manufacturing technology, the quality of your data is just about everything. But it's going to be a fun time. I'm looking forward to going. I'm looking forward to meeting all of all of you who attend and come and say hello at one of the six sessions for technology.

Thomas Wilk: And Jill, you're going to work the continuous improvement track. That's one of the beats that you work on in Industry Week besides the best plans, awards and other programs.

Jill Jusko: That is true. And like the technology adoption track, we have a pretty robust list of topics to cover as well as speakers. And I will just hit on a couple of the highlights. Sessions on building engagement, and I would venture to suggest that every manufacturer around there would admit to struggling in this area, at least sometimes, and for some, probably most of the time. We have content on building teams that will be presented from Robert Bosch, the big automotive supplier. That looks to be a very engaging session. That includes an interactive exercise. to give attendees a concrete framework to address change, so that should be interesting, I look forward to seeing that. 

And like Scott, I am going to kind of just focus on one that I actually have really dug down and looked into exactly what they're presenting, and that does go back to BMW. They are speaking in the continuous improvement track and I'm just going to give you the exact title of their presentation, which is Strategically Developing the Capabilities of Next Generation Leaders to Drive CI and Operational Excellence. I've seen some of the slides related to this presentation and I have to say it's probably the most robust development plan of this sort that I have ever seen. So it's very clear that BMW has given this topic a lot of thought and have kind of marched down a path that is working for them. So I look forward to that. 

Then I just want to mention this last one because it has a Best Plants tie to it. We also have joining us Ben Johnson from Sandvik Coromant. He is going to be speaking about building a culture of daily continuous improvement. And Sandvik Coromant was a Best Plants winner, just a couple of years ago. So, we have a lot of great continuous improvement content in the continuous improvement track. And I also want to just mention real quickly, I know that in the technology adoption track, we also have a session that really very directly ties continuous improvement and lean manufacturing with AI. And in the continuous improvement / Lean world, that's sort of a huge conversation going on right now. So there's a lot of great continuous improvement conversation going to be happening, and I look forward to being there for all of it.

Thomas Wilk: Now, I can't wait to hear it all too. And your point about the intersectionality of all these topics really stands. That's the way you described it to me from the 2024 event, which I was not able to attend. But additionally, we round out the program by talking about the safety side of it. We do have several safety presentations, and to cover a couple of verticals which weren't already mentioned, we have Missy Boedeker, who's an EHS Manager from Albany Engineered Composites, which works in aerospace; and also Josh Decktor, VP Global EHS&S at Teva Pharmaceuticals. And they're both going to talk about how safety culture is transformative across manufacturing when done correctly. 

I do want to mention also, there's two presentations that are going to focus on the reliability side of things. Two years ago, I did understand that there was a lot of talk about reliability, but no presenters who are focusing in on it. This year, we have two presentations, one from Jeff Shiver from People & Processes talking about the million dollar backslide, why reliability programs might backslide and how to keep that from happening. And also a presentation from Cummins and Roland Berger called Unlocking Enterprise Value Through MRO Transformation. And that's going to have an IT focus, I'm sorry, that's going to have a technology focus to it as well. 

I also want to thank the sponsors of our event this year. The COO Forum is an important key partner sponsor here. They'll be doing a presentation on how operational excellence is built in the gaps that no one owns, how to take advantage of those secret joins in between tasks and programs, and how to use those opportunities to drive continuous improvement. I'd also like to thank our other sponsors of the event. Other sponsors include Verizon, Lehigh Custom Fit managed PPE Programs, and Regents Recruiting, each of whom will be speaking at the conference. And also EnterpriseGro is a sponsor of ours, and the Women in Manufacturing organization, we're very proud to partner with them starting with this event, and I hope to continue partnering over future events. Their conference is in Las Vegas in about a week. But they also have a regional event in Milwaukee in early November, so if you can, please go ahead and explore the Women in Manufacturing website and check out those very excellent events, too.

With that, I think all that's left for us to do is to pack our bags in a couple of weeks, really, and hop on the plane, right? You’re going to drive, Jill?

Jill Jusko: I'm going to drive.

Scott Achelpohl: DC to South Carolina. I've ridden it on a motorcycle, but I had never flown there before.

Thomas Wilk: Well, with that, if you want more information on the summit itself, again, go to www.iwoperationssummit.com and I'll put that link in the speaker notes here. Thank you, Jill and Scott, for being here as part of the preview today.

Scott Achelpohl: It was a pleasure.

Jill Jusko: Yeah, it's great.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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