Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode explores how to blend predictive tools with decades of shop floor know-how.

Trae Mazza and his team at RMC Global this year found and reported hidden cyber risk in common Siemens industrial networking devices. Mazza wrote for Smart Industry about the flaws, which Siemens has patched, and joins the Great Question podcast to review the investigation and chat about how exposed OT really is to intrusion.

We're about a week away from Halloween, and what could be scarier than the technologies that are disrupting manufacturing—artificial intelligence and connected-worker technologies. The 4th Annual Connected Worker Manufacturing summit in the Chicago suburbs this month gathered tech leaders from dozens of large manufacturers to discuss the impacts of data tools, wearable technology, tablets and other connected devices.

What does that have to do with Halloween? Well, there were a lot of food people there, including digital transformation executives at Hershey and Nestle, and we spoke to them about their efforts.

Participating on this podcast are:

• Robert Schoenberger, editor-in-chief at IndustryWeek
• Logan McNear, digital manufacturing program lead for The Hershey Company's Lean Production System
• Mike Brauckman, head of focused improvement for Nestle

This episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast was recorded live at the 2025 SMRP Annual Conference, in Fort Worth, Texas. In this episode Brian Hronchek, principal trainer and consultant for Eruditio, talks with Plant Services chief editor Tom Wilk discuss how companies are using PM optimization to achieve quick, measurable improvements in both reliability and safety.

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, discover how unconventional innovations from UMass Amherst, Bluewater, and the Italian Institute of Technology are redefining sustainability across energy, water, and waste.

New York-based Arc Public Benefit Corp. bought 3D printing pioneer Desktop Metal last month out of bankruptcy. The purchased followed about two years of merger-and-acquisition mania that shifted from assigning billion-dollar valuations on equipment makers to pushing some of the same companies through bankruptcy.

Bryan Wisk, CEO of Arc, says the path to future success is clear -- focusing on running the company instead of getting caught up in the buy-sell drama of corporate mergers.

“There’s only one word at DM right now internally; it’s focus,” Wisk says. “We’re not a distressed debt investor or private equity. We’re really deep-growth investors, and we’re looking to focus on the core technologies that we bought.”

This Great Question episode features a conversation between Wisk and IndustryWeek Editor-in-Chief Robert Schoenberger

Mike Jones, president of Discover Leadership Training, explains why sometimes the best thing you can do to protect workers is take more risks. He explains how safety professionals can go beyond "best practices" to "next practices." And he offers a preview of his upcoming keynote presentation, "Playing It Safe," which he'll deliver at Safety Leadership Conference 2025, held October 20-22, 2025, in Glendale (Phoenix), Ariz.

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. In this episode, Joe how to tackle reliability and maintenance as a new manager.