Welcome back to The Automation Podcast, the world's
number one industrial automation product and technology show,
thanks to you,
our audience of highly skilled automation professionals.
Now if you're new to the show, my
name is Sean Tierney from Insights, and I
wanna thank you and all of our audience
for tuning back in this week. And this
week on the show, I have an awesome
interview I did with Kareem
Cosman from Schneider Electric. I actually rerecorded this
interview at the Innovation Summit a couple of
months ago, and so I think you guys
will really enjoy this. And, you know, Kareem
is a controls engineer who works with motion
and PLCs and all kinds of high stakes
the high-tech stuff. The high-tech stuff we talk
about all the time on the show. But
before we get to that, we got a
couple of quick announcements. The first is we
wanna thank Schneider Electric for sponsoring this episode
so we could release it ad free across
all platforms.
We really appreciate what vendors,
sponsor our content and coverage of their products
and shows as it helps underwrite our course
and allows us to keep bringing you new
content. Now the second announcement is from the
good folks over at the Automation Museum. This
is a public service announcement. They wanted us
to let you know that they have just
released
their latest episode of the History of Automation
on YouTube.
And this is the episode in which or
the first of two episodes in which the
team interviews one of the people who actually
worked on developing, creating
the original many consider the original PLC, the
Modicon o 84.
And as someone who was on the interview
team, I gotta say, I really think you
guys will enjoy this.
We interviewed Chuck Schallberg,
and, he did the software or the what
we'd call today, the firmware
for the Modicon o 84, and he just
shares so much information about that. It was
great to look back and see how it
all got started. So in any case, check
that out over at youtube.com/@automationmuseum.
That is episode seven. Episode eight will release
next Monday. So with that said, let's go
ahead and jump into this week's episode in
which I interview
Kareem Cosman from Schneider Electric.
Kareem, thank you for coming on the show.
It's so great. We've already talked so much
on the plant floor on the show floor.
I'm just plant floor. On the show floor.
So, hey. Thank you for agreeing to this
interview. I'm excited to talk about, you know,
the questions we, kinda rehearse beforehand
and also this awesome piece of equipment you
were telling me about on the show floor.
But before we get to that, since this
is your first time on the show,
can you introduce yourself to our audience? Tell
them a little bit about, like, you know,
what your background is and, you know, what
your job is today. Okay. First of all,
thank you for having me on the show.
My name is Kareem Cosman.
The first thing, I am a fan of
the show. So I follow the show very
closely, and I advise everybody who wants to
learn about automation to just
to just follow you, to understand the history,
where we where we we are and what
we're doing right now and what's the future.
Because without history, we don't know what's going
on.
The second thing, I am an electrical engineer,
with a degree. I'm also a project manager
with a with a certification and a scrum
master,
from Safe Agile.
And I'm currently doing as an offer manager
in Schneider Electric,
for machine solutions,
motion, robotics,
HVAC,
and pumping.
And what does an offer
manager do?
So the offer manager, it's different a little
bit different than a product manager.
The offer manager looks,
to
the products of the of a company or
the solutions
from
two perspectives,
the technical perspective, how the customers look at
it, not how the com company looks at
it, how the customers benefit from the features
and,
specifications
and how the market reacts towards that,
especially if it is something new coming to
the market and the commercial side of it.
So all the go to market strategies,
all the marketing,
campaigns,
all the market analysis and numbers and
requirements of, you know, how to increase your
sales, how to,
create promotions, how to,
control the pricing, and so on. That's very
interesting.
And you have that electric, electrical engineering background.
You get your history, which is which is,
pretty,
quite,
filled out there.
And you've been with Schneider for how long
now?
So I have started being an automation engineer
in 2008.
Yeah. So quite a way. And then I
was with Infenses,
happened, to be acquired with Schneider.
And I was really, lucky to be within,
customers
at the delivery section in the big oil
wells, big, oil rigs in the middle of
nowhere,
and also with all the r and d
teams for, either the DCS,
Foxborough, Triconics,
energy management for motion control and now with
industrial automation. So,
I kind of captured between customer requirements, r
and d requirements,
and problems, and also the market strategies, sales
strategies.
And I love being within automation. I don't
like to be away from automation for the
rest of my life. Yeah. Well, I and
I me too. And I probably should say
Gary says hi. So I wanna make he's
a cohost of one of the shows I
do. So I know you guys know each
other. And, you know, I I wanted to
talk to you about
your observations.
Right?
You know, what challenges are you seeing out
there these days? Like,
from all the customers you're interacting and all
the product people you're interacting with, what are
some of the
challenges that you are seeing out there that
are facing our industry
today?
So our customers are basically we divide them
into three sections,
distributors,
OEM machine builders,
and end users.
All of them are bound by system integrators
or control engineers.
So
the system integrator is the backbone
of,
linking what the distributor have, what the OEM
can work on and build, and what the
end users will need in the end of
the story so for a product to work.
We serve these four sections equally or with
different strategies,
but the most challenge I see is currently
with the system integrators or the control engineers.
And that's because,
couple of years ago and before COVID,
we had this,
new,
terminology. We called it industry four point o.
Industry four point o came with a very
big promise of connecting
or creating a terminology called IoT or Internet
of Things,
which is now becoming IT slash OT. And,
I didn't mean to just, give terminologies as
much as it is really separated.
The control engineers
had to,
rocket speed learn
IT
to be IT engineers as well
as OT to do the control on the
floor plan and the and the and the
facilities out there and the conveyors and the
the pumps over there.
So the knowledge of the process
became not enough, and they need to learn
more
since they go into a field and the
end user,
deal with them as they know how to
launch a rocket
for a mission on Mars and then how
to extract minerals from the middle of the
from the bottom of the Earth. So
they had to embark on this journey, which
was too tough because there were no enough
technology to support them back before COVID. And
then when COVID hit, it became
a necessity.
And then we discovered later also that,
our talents and our newer,
kids out of school, our newer students out
of technical colleges,
they are not really so interested in control
engineering,
which created another gap for control engineers need
to learn, and they need also to fill
in the gaps.
And, yeah, I really,
see the suffer that they are in. I
really see the need that they need always
training, and training means also waste of of
resources and especially time.
The other thing is the emerging
technologies that's nonstop right now. So you can
see now in our, innovation summit, we have
a big room just for technology, newer technologies,
not the existing ones at all,
and probably also other vendors doing the same
thing today. That's why we can,
be in a very big venues and fill
it with too many products because there are
too many things coming out. And my gosh,
like, should I know all these together as
a control engineer? Definitely.
That is too hard, especially all the students
like to know Python,
JSON,
the visual c, but no. Don't don't give
me letter diagrams or a PLC. I don't
wanna do
this. So it is a bit a bit
challenging today in the market, and,
we need to have tools, better tools. With
the emerging of artificial intelligence, our r and
d
are required to provide more facilitation for
our control engineers
to make their life easier on the OT
and help them to know IT. You know,
I think that's so true. There's so many
things that the control engineer today has to
learn
that
really wasn't part of their job back in
the day. I remember having to explain to
control engineers what IGMP snooping and querying was.
Right?
And that was painful and, for all of
us. And, today, now they have to a
lot of times, they have to get that
command line interface out. They have to connect
in. They have to be an expert on
switches. They have to be an expert on
VPNs. They gotta be an expert on firewalls.
It's it is really difficult for
today's engineer, and they're usually handling more than
they did ten years ago because
a lot of their older colleagues
have just said I'm retiring. It's like, you
know, a lot of people have worked into
that retirement age prior to COVID, and when
COVID hit, they're like, you mean I gotta
put on three masks to go to work?
I have to go and retire. This is
that reason I've been waiting for. Right? And
so I know so many people who did
that, and that just puts a burden. And
like you said, the younger kids that that
the and I have two teenage,
grandchildren.
Their interest
is not
in legacy technology.
Right? Just like a lot of people going
into, you know, who wanna work on cars
today, wanna work on electric cars. They don't
wanna work on the the old stuff that
there's already a bunch of people that already
know that. Right? And so it's very understandable,
but this is an exciting
this isn't a I think it's a very
exciting industry. And and, you know, when you
go out there on the show floor and
you're looking at all the robots and machines
moving and doing things, I mean, it's exciting.
It's exciting to see. You know, I just
take any kid into a potato chip factory
or a bottling plant, and there's just so
much going on, so much moving. Maybe not
as exciting in a paper mill or a
rock quarry, Right? Or on a, oil rig.
But, in any case, I still think that,
there are a lot of makers out there
who wanna
make on a real scale, not just in
their bedroom making things for their friends and
parents.
So, there's hope for the industry, I think.
And I've had a lot of people say,
you know, JavaScript or or or c sharp
or, you know, Python, that it's gonna replace
six eleven thirty one. And I'm like,
you know,
I I don't think I don't think so
because and and maybe you can give me
your opinion on that because I think we
think the same on this. You know, real
time languages that can be deployed
based on what the application requires,
that can be edited on the fly, can
do online changes or runtime downloads.
You're not gonna get that with a compiled
language,
and
there's just shortcomings in those web based technologies
that don't address
mission critical applications that have to run. Right?
So we I mean, one example is the
people at Facebook locked themselves in and out
of their building a few years ago, and,
nobody could get in and nobody could get
out. And for me, the scariest thing is
not being able to get out of a
building. That's not supposed to be able to
happen. Right? So,
you know, we need systems that could be
modified on the fly, especially mission critical systems
that can can't go down. And so what
are your thoughts on that too? You think
I see six eleven thirty one dash three
has a future? Yeah. Now before we hear
from Kareem on that, I do wanna take
a moment here to thank Schneider Electric
for sponsoring this episode and my trip out
to their innovation summit. Now this may not
be intuitive if you work for a big
corporation, but when you're self employed
as a content creator and instructor like I
am, there's no big corporation behind you that
can foot $34,000
worth of travel expenses
and interview and publishing expenses
to pull these things off. And that's why
we really appreciate vendors like Schneider Electric who
value the content we create
and value the coverage we do on their
products and events
when they, you know, sponsor our episodes and,
you know, set up these interviews. So I
really just wanted to step in here and
really thank our sponsors, all of our sponsors,
including Schneider Electric who sponsored this week's episode
for really,
supporting the work we do here at Insights
and Automation.
And with that said, let's go ahead and
jump back into this week's interview with Karim
Kosman.
Yeah. So first of all, as an advice,
if you wanna convince kids to work on
automation, don't take them to paper mills. It's
the nastiest,
dirtiest, smelliest place on the whole Earth. Okay.
Yeah. And add to this too. The second
thing is the these students today that I
have met more of them on all trade
shows,
they have their own,
data center and AI model
in their backyard, in their garage.
They have already are excelling on these type
of knowledges.
So when you tell them go and
your job is just to control this PLC
and to do a couple of motion and
robotics here and there, it won't be that
interesting.
There has to be some sort of newer
technology that comes to the market
with their gadgets, the gadget that they know,
like artificial intelligence,
like,
open software defined automation, something that,
they rely on.
And as we have, launched, or talk we've
been talking about, open software defined automation,
which is basically saying to mister customer,
you can replace
the PLC that is from any vendor that
you probably don't know what are the components
of the PLC
with a PC that you know that it
is an Intel based
or NVIDIA GPU.
So these are famous. These are very well
known robust. And I think as you have
seen on the shop floor today,
Intel has an in interest into industrial automation,
which makes the excitement
more for our newer talents to jump on
this type of industry, to use this power
for resources,
to make our robotics, our conveyor works,
and, to sustain
our,
CPG,
pharmaceuticals.
These industries require this type of knowledge.
But today, we have more power
that we are introducing to the market, and
we are so glad that our newer,
talents are understanding this because it's
still some sort of hard to understand by
the
control engineers like our age
that used to do
letter diagrams
overnight just to make, you know, one, sole
machine work, on a CNC machine or g
code. Oh my god. G code.
So the the the tools
and, and the opportunities that this big manufacturer
starts to do, I meant I I I
mentioned Intel, NVIDIA.
Now, if you go on Copilot and, on
on your chat and ask it to create
logic for you,
it will create the logic and say that
in collaboration with the PLC vendors, we are
doing that right now in a structured text
format.
So all these big tech companies now looking
into industry,
which is, I think, that's the industry now
four point o that we've been talking about.
That is where the IT world takes care
of the OT world. We create one harmony
that we call it IoT, which was really
an understandable
terminology back then. Yeah. And, you know, I
I just feel like I have to throw
caution to people. Right? So we've heard the
horror stories, how somebody plugs their phone into
the charger at the airport, and it gets
hacked because somebody came in or replaced the
charger with a with a, like, a, you
know, an intelligent device that can hack their
phones. And then they bring it to the
plant, and that that's a a vector in
for the viruses and for the ransomware and
whatnot. And so, you know, I think as
an industry, we're getting that word out very
well. We're gonna you know, people have to
know that every device they have that has
electronics in it, any microprocessor
based device is a vector for, security breach
in their facility, and they're gonna be cognizant
of
that. The other thing, though, I think is
we're hearing stories we heard a lot,
this week at the show about, you know,
AI is not perfect.
Okay? So we've had stories about lawyers getting
in trouble because they're the the the court
documents they filed were not only not correct,
but they were AI generated
and and bogus.
Right? And and lawyers are getting reprimanded for
that. I mean, we're talking grown adults.
And,
the other thing I think too is
that, we had somebody talking about financial. He
was asking AI for some financial rights, then
they went into their spreadsheet and did it.
And they're like, it didn't work. And then
they asked the AI, hey,
why didn't it work? Is this your story?
Why don't you give me the give me
give us give us the end of that
story? So,
yeah, I was, trying to ask the AI
on a couple of,
shares and with and cryptocurrency
to start working with and how they are,
reflecting with my taxes.
But, unfortunately, I did it on the day
that AWS,
went off the grid,
and I got hilarious
advices, which I thought it was,
kinda risky or crazy
to make me, like, one of the Fortune
500 in a couple of seconds, but this
doesn't work.
But as you said about security, it is
we are living in that world today. If
our main data centers and,
our main suppliers of technology
are down,
we as users
are harmed very much.
My day my kids at day care, I
couldn't know anything about them when AWS went
down.
So energy
and,
sustainability of this energy is a real core
now of our life.
And if we're gonna talk about cybersecurity,
I think we are harmed by too many
attacks on
oil pipelines
and water supplies or,
controllers
in the middle of nowhere just doing water
pumping and lifting to all the residents in
a small city.
These things
gives us a very big warning
that there are hackers and there are people
out there that like to mess up with
our industrial automation
installed base.
That's why there are so many measures has
been applied.
The IEC six two four four three is
a great standard for encryption. It's very important
now. And as a European country,
CRA has been on our radar. We have
been creating products that is compliant with the
CRA or,
cyber resiliency act,
which is clear that all the vendors has
to
follow
this,
act
before, December 2027. Otherwise, they cannot create,
connected products.
So cybersecurity has become
too important now in our industry,
which wasn't the same thing again before COVID.
Now it became so famous. You can see
cyberattacks
news on the news daily on daily basis.
You know, our, crew has given us the
flag. We kind of delayed starting because we
are having so much fun in the preshow.
But in any case, we're gonna have to
do this again, Kareem. But before we go,
I want you to tease up this awesome
product you were telling me about that you
have on the table here. Tell us a
little bit about this product. Alright. So,
the Modicon m six
sixty, as we are the Schneider company, we
own the Modicon
brand. Modicon m six sixty is our new
high performance controller.
It is not an IPC. It's not a
PLC. It's both together.
So you can go with your,
with your software,
which is called Machine Expert, EcoStruxure Machine Expert.
You configure it as a normal controller to,
to control your robots, control your motion, your
IOs here and there.
And also it has
an operating system by choice, either Windows or
Linux as default, where you can apply your
virtual PLCs through orchestration
on a container.
So you have a machine controller and also
you have a virtual controller,
multiple virtual controllers as well.
And it's all backboned by the OPC UAFX
protocol
that makes this of this controller goes up
to 300 axis of synchronized motion, which basically
equal to 70 robots on the, on the
shop floor. So it's really rugged. It's really
so powerful. It is, powered by Intel chips,
and it goes up to Intel I seven.
So you get great power out of it.
In addition, it has PCI free PCIe slots,
so you can expand it to have your
GPU, your Wi Fi card,
your five g card.
So now it doesn't become only,
a controller or an IPC. It becomes also
a data a small data center. That's why,
you see the big heat sink over there.
And it has a display port, so you
can connect it to a touch screen HMI.
You don't need to have an HMI with
with it, just a touch screen.
And you have your own,
SCADA, your own HMI on it with different
soft, softwares we have, like Wonderware.
So it is a multi
multipurpose controller. It is very
fast controller as well because of the intel,
and it is very robust, very futuristic.
We are opening up for field trials. Too
many customers like to try it today. And
in addition, we provided an artificial intelligence
with it on the software side of it,
so to help all our
control engineers
to rest a little bit of writing too
many codes or at least deciphering old codes.
And,
yep, we have all these offers that we
can launch to help, again,
our control engineers to boost to the industry
four point zero error. I have so many
questions on this, but I'm getting the hook.
I hope you'll, take my invitation to come
back on the show maybe via m MS
Teams,
in in a few weeks and give us
the full skinny on that. But for now,
I wanna thank you, Karim, for coming on
the show. It's been a blast meeting you
and talking to you here at the innovation
summit. Thank you. Thank you so much, and
I'm so happy to be on the show.
Appreciate that.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.
I was great rewatching that interview I did
with Kareem. I he's just such a great
guy. So if you ever meet him in
person, please say hi for me. And, hopefully,
we'll get him on the show again in
the near future. But with that said, please,
if you have any questions for him, reach
out directly to him. He's just a very
approachable person, very knowledgeable too. So with that
said, I also wanna take a moment here
to thank Schneider who sponsored this episode so
we could release it to you on all
platforms ad free.
We really appreciate it when, vendors like Schneider
support our coverage of their products and shows,
and just wanted to say thank you again
to Schneider Electric for their support.
And with that, I wanna thank you for
tuning back in this week. There would be
no reason to have the show if we
didn't have an audience, and you guys are
the best audience out there in podcast land,
so in YouTube land. So really appreciate you
all, even those of you listening and watching
over at the automationblog.com,
which I know many of you do, hundreds
of you do as well. So with that
said, I wanna wish you all good health
and happiness. And until next time, my friends,
peace.