Episode 27. Optimizing Manufacturing Workflows with Next Plus & AI

Jeremy Boren: Jeremy Boren, Hey everybody, Jeremy Boren with Gray Matter here. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Empower Up podcast. It's good to have everybody today. I want to bring in a new partner of ours at Gray Matter, NextPlus, and Mickey is joining us for our podcast today.

Mickey, it's good to see you. Thanks for being on.

Mickey Shaposhnik: Jeremy, thanks a lot for inviting me here. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Boren: Good to have you. you. Do you want to start off by just introducing yourself and just telling us a little bit about your role at Nextplus?

Mickey Shaposhnik: Cool. So again, thank you very much for having me here. So I'm Miki Sapochnik. I'm a co-CEO of Nextplus.

We're a new breed of type of MES software, and I guess we'll talk about that a bit later. My role is more like half technical, half sales. I'm on the customer That's my thing at Nextplus and trying to like intertwine like the technical like speak with the customer needs. That's my thing.

Jeremy Boren: Absolutely. And I wanted to ask you about something right off the bat that I noticed on your site when I was learning about Nextplus is it's a new term for me, H-I-O-T, Human Internet of Things. And I think that goes along with what you just said about being on the customer side. side.

Kind of take me through the thinking there on that on the on human internet of things. I know IoT, but what's the H part, I guess?

Mickey Shaposhnik: I love it. It's the first time because we actually invented it. Thank you, Chad, for helping us with that.

Jeremy Boren: Then I'm comforted by that. Because if you invented it, that may explain why I didn't encounter it elsewhere. I don't know.

Mickey Shaposhnik: But it means we need to work harder in like, getting into everyone's heads, right?

Jeremy Boren: That's why we're here today. Yeah. Yeah.

Mickey Shaposhnik: Awesome. So we're doing a great job. So the way we see the world in like industrial connectivity is that everybody's talking about how to quickly connect your CNC machine or your equipment or your test equipment or your tools around the employee. And that's like, for me, it's pretty much the obvious.

And of course we have solutions for that, but we tend to forget that of course in 2025, and as we see like the next 50 years, it's not like human beings are are going to be replaced totally by robots, at least I hope so, but who knows what will happen. And as we see the future, yeah, and as we see the future, so we need to find ways to, in a pretty much frictionless way, connect human beings with all those processes. And this is how we got into like the HIOT, the human internal things of connecting machines and people together to do better jobs.

Jeremy Boren: For sure, that makes total sense to me. Yeah, and I think that's a huge point that I want folks to take away from today is that the H part, it's up front for a reason. The human element is in everything that we're talking about today. It's like, yes, there's more automation and plants.

Yes, there's AI and we're going to be talking about AI today. But the folks that are actually running these facilities are as important, if not more important than ever. And what NextPlus does is really to help them do the best job that they can possibly do and to empower them, which is something that we say a lot at Craymatter. But so let's get into it a little bit.

You know, I'm always looking for like the next button on web forms and, you know, on installation packets and stuff like that. How does that actually, how does the name of NextPlus actually incorporate into, you know, what the user interface is and how people use your tool?

Mickey Shaposhnik: That's a great question. And I think like the motive that we'll get back into in this talk is friction. right we want to reduce friction as much as we can and it's right when we're talking about ai and we'll speak about that more later but how can we reduce friction from the employees to get more done right so when we're thinking about the next button and the the name next plus came out from we want the employee at the shop floor to have one button as much as possible and next button at the back end everything will happen right it will talk to the erp it will get the data from the machine, it will get the data from the cameras, everything will be consolidated and sent back and forth like to 10 different IED systems. But the employee himself clicks next and everything is happening for him.

That's the plus. The plus is for him to make it happen.

Jeremy Boren: Right. And so this is for employees who are new to a company and they're learning a process. This is for maybe there's a new process involved that existing employees are getting familiarized with. Kind of who are the the users that you see actually benefiting from Nextplus?

Mickey Shaposhnik: Yes, so we see like three main, it's a Venn diagram of three places in the organization that use Nextplus the most. The first one is the ops people, of course, and I'm talking like shop floor until top floor, right? So everybody use it, whether it's to get insights or to use it to get digital work instructions or do your root card or connect your machines. The second one is the quality people.

Again, shop floor to top floor, whether it's doing the inspection or the QC to getting insight on your quality. And the third one is engineering department. So how do we build those processes, again, with the least amount of friction possible to get them from the ideas of our R&D people or engineers to the shop floor, getting things out of our factories and getting value to our customers and money inside our factories, right?

Jeremy Boren: Right. And so just to set the scene for folks. So this is, you know, a technology where somebody might be using a tablet or other smart device, right, to actually see, you know, a process, how it's supposed to look, you know, whether it's tightening bolts, you know, or putting a piece of, you know, technology into a device. What are some of the examples kind of like of how somebody is using it, you know, in a facility setting, you know, to do what they're supposed to do?

Mickey Shaposhnik: So we'll see this from two facets. First of all, we're fully agnostic to the hardware, right? So it could be a tablet, a smartphone, a PC, whatever. And you need or smart glasses, right?

We need to choose our hardware depending on how is the physical setting around us. So we have customers that build like really big machines for semiconductors. sorry and they have like doctor carts like they have in hospitals right so they have all the tools and next was in front of them and we have customers that build airplanes and uavs so they use tablets because that makes more sense when you do small assemblies they use computers on the shop floor so it really differs and we have customers by the way that have like continuous manufacturing chemical or pharmaceuticals and things like that that they go with their phones through different stations and get the info digitized while they're doing it right um so these are like the different types of of uh um like hardware that we use

Jeremy Boren: and on the

Mickey Shaposhnik: same notes the facet is which type of use cases so it could be just digital work instructions for assembly just like you said or it could be maintenance or it could be startup of a machine or whatever or or electronic batch records whether you're talking chemicals and pharmaceuticals all over the place there are humans so we can and get data from humans.

Jeremy Boren: Right. And the one that comes out to me is definitely that training element, reminding what somebody is supposed to be doing, but also like there's an element of, Next Plus can actually gather information about what has been done, right? And feed that back into the system so that if there's something that needs to be gone back over, checked again, whether it's a safety thing or whatever, whatever, that's part of the technology as well. Is that correct?

Mickey Shaposhnik: No, I'm always really surprised that I get into new customer sites, right? And they have, let's say they're even digital, right? So they have one system to show them what to do. It's mainly like paper or PDF, right?

Or 3D CAD, whatever. And a different system to tell what they just did. And I'm always shocked at how no one ever thought about combining them. So while showing what to do, get the data that you want.

And this is our core value that we give. It sounds really simplistic, but that's enormous value that you can get to the customers really fast.

Jeremy Boren: Right. And that creates kind of this virtuous loop where if it's the same system that's giving the instructions and also kind of taking in how those have been followed, you can make a lot of insights from it and make some recommendations to either the person that's performed the action or to their supervisors so that they can maybe get some corrective advice on it too. do. But so so if a client is interested in this, you know, two things, I'm always interested about how, you know, a manufacturer, like, what's the big motivator usually for them to look like look for a solution like this?

And then kind of how do they how do they set it up and you know, get it get it, you know, going in their facility?

Mickey Shaposhnik: So great question. I'll go back to like to the Venn diagram of who uses NextBus. So we get customers like let's say 33.3 percent from each one of those and they have different motivators and depends on who met us first you'll get this motivator to run the software inside the the customers like plant right so the classics are um an audit so let's say you're a pharmaceutical and you need to have like fda cfr 21 part 11 and the audit went not that good so you're looking for digital solutions to get those audits better that's like from the quality perspective or the RA perspective. And when the ops people say, listen, our machines have a lot of downtime or first-person yield is really low or things that hurt us and on the cost side.

So this will be a different motivator. And one of the motivators that we get more and more is from the engineering departments that, and that's a really niche part of what we do, but it drives a lot of value is, let's say I'm building something. And in most cases, our engineering departments departments waste a lot of time on writing word documents, right? Like writing digital work instructions or manual work instructions.

And instead of being engineers, they're like more tech writers. And we have AI tools to help them like make it with a click. And we save like tens of percents of engineering time. And that's like the highest priced time in our customers operations.

So that's a cool thing.

Jeremy Boren: Yeah. If you can free up those resources, those human resources to do other there are higher value things. I can totally see the value immediately for that. But that's actually something else I wanted to ask about.

And so it sounds like there's definitely some inputting of experiences from employees. There isn't everything, but is there also a way that, maybe if you have an existing MES or ERP system that Nextplus can kind of pull from that and incorporate it into what it's doing? Is that part of the setup as well?

Mickey Shaposhnik: Yes, so we're looking at the world like with an open architecture, really 2025 type of architecture. And we have connectors for pretty much any ERP that is available, readily available. And even though that we don't, we have like generic connectors that can use with API and connect, and we have connectors to LabVIEW and we have a Python SDK. So pretty much any customer can interconnect his own tech stack.

And that's a big thing because if like you throw a stone, you'll hit a different tech stack when you go in our field. And we're trying to be as agnostic as possible. to give a solution that will interconnect to anything.

Jeremy Boren: Right. And same here on the gray matter side. I mean, we're agnostic about technology as well. We work with a ton of different platforms and partners because that's just the way things are today.

There's no one dominant one and you find so many different examples in the field. So we promise we talk about it, but where does AI come in when we're talking about Next Quest and what you guys do?

Mickey Shaposhnik: I think we messed it up. We should have said like AI every three sentences.

Jeremy Boren: Well, I wanted to suspend the belief for a minute just so that we didn't get too deep into AI right off the bat. But I do want to talk about it and hear your perspective.

Mickey Shaposhnik: I want to take it to a different place. So today, if you don't say AI, you're out of context, right? Everything needs to have AI in it. And on one hand, I love it because we sell it inside a product.

So it's a sales driver. Awesome. But I hate it because a lot of people say, put some AI in it, but it doesn't mean anything. Right.

And we're always trying to think through like the value that it can bring to our customers through real value, like practical value. And let's step away from the word AI and think about what are the things that AI can help us do in those types of systems. So we see that in two main domains. The first one is reducing friction.

friction. And I think that's the core thing that AI can help us all. And it could be from different angles, right? So it could be reducing friction when I build work instructions, like we said earlier.

So I can take, for an example, a video and automatically create work instruction out of it. Really cool use case for AI. And it could be reducing friction in analytics. So instead of getting like data scientists to build charts, I can ask questions for my LLM, like what's the voltage distribution?

Get an answer, done, right? So I cut on friction there. It could be reducing reducing friction for let's say employees at the shop floor need to enter data so they just can speak or take an image and it will automatically take from the image the data so all of those places and and much more of reducing friction and the other side that I think AI is extremely practical of course inside next class but generally as well is helping things to be more global so one work instructions with the click of a button and next class can be in English Spanish Arabic Arabic, Hebrew, whatever, 162 languages automatically translated in a really human-like way that you can tell the automatic translator how to translate which industry are you from and make local operations global in a second. And I think those are two places that we can drive a lot of value using AI and not just talking about AI is important, right?

Jeremy Boren: Right, right, exactly. And it comes down to that simple thing of just reducing friction.

Mickey Shaposhnik: And that's what it can help employees do.

Jeremy Boren: No, I love that example. I think that works. So what are some just good examples of results that you've seen clients get? You know, one of the things is certainly you've mentioned reducing training time or reducing the amount of time that engineers have to write Word documents with work instructions.

But what are some of the results that you've seen, you know, clients get?

Mickey Shaposhnik: So great question. And it's always like when we do demos and we get the question a lot. So we have like use cases and case studies from other customers. And we have quite a few customers that start building their digital work instructions with AI, like literally taking a video of their best shopper engineer, a shopper employee, take a video, click a button, get like 85% of the work instructions done automatically.

And it looks like magic for the first time. And the interesting part is that they're saying they're cutting 50 to 80% of engineering time. So cutting 50 to 80%, it's not like a marginal addition, right? That's like game changing.

It is changing what engineers do in the business, right? Totally in a 180% way. And those are numbers that are not, we think they are, they're like actually customers are saying those are the numbers. And for us, that's awesome.

Like we love it that we can drive so much value with real change in the industry.

Jeremy Boren: Can you talk a little bit about NextPlus' sort of origin story and why you wanted to get in this particular space, you know, with your technology?

Mickey Shaposhnik: That's actually an interesting story I didn't think we'll talk about, but I'll go for it. Actually, NextPlus is not that new. We're almost 10 years old. We'll be 10 years in five months.

That's really cool. We're a spin-off of a services company that I had the pleasure of being a CEO for 18 years. We started as a tech writing company, right? And in about 10 years ago, we said, okay, let's add some digitization to those words we're like pumping out with like thousands of those a month, right?

And it started as a small add-on to our things. And then the IP grew and grew and grew. And suddenly we understood that like the services side is not that interesting. And we want to empower our customers to build them, build it themselves.

We exited the services side. We actually sold the company and we started a tech only company. And that's the backstory. So we're actually rooted in manufacturing on both sides as customers, as advisors, and now as software like vendors.

Jeremy Boren: I love it. That gives you a great perspective on what the real problems are. And now you have a ton of customers. If anybody wants to check it out, you can see it on your website and you have a lot of great use cases like the ones that we talked about today.

So if you want to explore those, they're there. It's obviously made that a priority to show exactly, not only what it does, what it can do, but also what the ROI is. So, Mickey, if you wanted to add to that and anything else that people should know, this is a great time to do it.

Mickey Shaposhnik: I think one more thing that I think is important to add. We talked about like reducing friction all the time, right? And I think reducing friction, so using technology for that, we talked about it, right? We use AI for that.

We use a great UI for that, right? It should be easy for people to use. And I think one of the, another like way to reduce friction is getting it easy to buy, right? So most of software in our field is always like high check on the first day.

and even though we can get higher ROI, all solutions are great, but the risk you're taking for this not to work is an enormous risk. And we look at this as something way, way easier. We want our customers to buy two users. We have no minimum, right?

So you can buy two users, check it out for yourself, try it out and quickly fail or succeed. You'll probably succeed. That's what we're building, right? But even if you fail, you fail without risking a lot.

And the barrier to entry should be really, really easy. We're in 2025. It's software is easy now. It's not like it's like 10 years ago.

That's how we see the world again. Right.

Jeremy Boren: So you could, you can start it with one or two workstations, for example, on a specific process, see how it works, see if it improves productivity efficiency, you know, training times and then scale from there is essentially what you're saying.

Mickey Shaposhnik: Exactly. And we actually have like multinationals with thousands of users that started literally with like three users bought with a credit card. Right. And then they're good to be like enormous customers.

Jeremy Boren: The bot with a credit card part is really cool to me because you just don't see that a lot in the manufacturing space. And the barrier to entry is pretty high.

Mickey Shaposhnik: And, you know, it has to be a whole contract negotiation and like ins and outs and everything.

Jeremy Boren: This should be SaaS, right?

Mickey Shaposhnik: You can go there. We have like managers that actually bought it on like the personal cards, trying it out, loved it, went into like the whole via Dolorosa of the legal department and things like that. But it should be secondary to getting value, not first, right?

Jeremy Boren: I love it. No, that's fantastic. Well, Mickey, I appreciate you taking time to join us on the podcast and kind of go through what NextPlus is all about and the partnership with Brain Matter. If you want to learn more, check out NextPlus online.

I'll post that in the show notes. It's easy to find. And also you can check us out at greymattersystems.com. Mickey, thanks for being on the podcast today.

Really appreciate it.

Mickey Shaposhnik: Jeremy, thank you so much for inviting us. And we're so excited about this new partnership. I think it will be awesome. We're excited to start working together.

I agree. We're excited too. Thanks. Thank you.