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WEST Session: Moderated by an industry veteran (George Barnych), this panel will discuss the importance of security in driving the ever-connected organization and supply chain. From the simple best practices of the small shop owner to the NIST and Cybersecurity Defense CMMC 2.0 requirements, this team has the history and experience to enlighten you on your journey. Join us for an engaging presentation and follow-up Q&A session that will leave you glad you took the time to hear best practices, mistakes to avoid, questions to ask, and how to position your shop to be safe well into the future. From the Top Floor to the Shop Floor - manufacturers cannot remain competitive without connectivity and transparency. Keeping you protected, connected, and systemized with process will lead to efficiency, consistency, and scalability. It is the system and service provider's job to keep you safe so you can produce good parts on time and make a profit - join us for some valuable dialog!

WEST Session: We don’t lose deals because we’re not working hard enough. We lose them because we’re working on the wrong things. In manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution, sales teams are moving faster than ever—yet growth feels stuck. Why? Noise. Endless updates. Unreliable forecasts. Chasing the wrong deals. We’ve accepted it as the cost of doing business. But what if it’s actually killing your momentum?This 20-minute talk is a call to rethink how sales teams operate—with more clarity. You’ll learn: Why noise—disguised as intuition—is wrecking your forecast How bad data and busywork eats into your selling time What top sales teams are doing to cut through the noise and stay laser-focused And you’ll see real-world proof: 44% growth at Creative Foam.This isn’t a product pitch. It’s a shift in perspective. If your team’s putting in the effort but still falling short, this is the rethink you’ve been waiting for.

Speaker at WEST: John Carpenter, Founder, Owner, President, Excellerant

WEST Session: Manufacturers from fabricators to assembly shops are all challenged with workforce woes, the need to boost productivity and the endless quest for quality. Knowing automation is the answer is one thing, but actually finding real success with technology investments can feel challenging and risky. How do you know what will truly bring value to the organization? How do you determine the return? And now with the hype of Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemingly on every product, how do manufacturing leaders determine the right places to invest limited time and capital budgets? In this session, we will delve into the ever-evolving landscape of automation & AI in the factory and take a look at technologies that are having a real impact today across the shop floor. Then we will stare into the crystal ball to look forward at technologies that are on the near horizon that manufacturing leaders should be keeping an eye on. Covering important topics like human-robot collaboration, automated equipment tending, data-driven insights, cobot welding, predictive maintenance, robot guided vision, bin picking, collaborative automation, quality inspections, and much more, attendees should leave this session ready to make value-creating technology investments in their business. Join us as we explore how AI is reshaping the factory floor — one algorithm at a time.

Speaker at WEST: Billy Bogue, President, Matsuura Machinery USA

WEST Session: AI promises to transform manufacturing and service operations, but for most teams the challenge is not algorithms—it’s integration and adoption. This session will be co-presented by industry experts who will share real-world lessons from deploying AI-powered workflows at an e-recycling facility and in design-for-manufacture (DfM) and quoting. Attendees will learn a practical framework for deciding when to use deterministic software workflows, when to embed AI as an enabler, and when—if ever—to rely on autonomous AI “agents.” Using concrete metrics, we’ll show how hybrid approaches reduce cost, latency, and risk while delivering measurable gains. We will also describe the importance of human feedback in improving accuracy metrics. This is an inside look at what’s working (and what isn’t) as we automate inspections, quoting, and compliance tasks across the physical and digital sides of manufacturing. You’ll leave with a decision surface you can apply immediately to your own operations.

WEST Session: Manufacturing is undergoing rapid digital transformation—driven by predictive maintenance, AI-driven insights, and smart factories. Yet IT/OT convergence is not achieved in strategy documents; it is lived daily through remote access, where people, vendors, and data cross into critical environments. This presentation explores the unique challenges CISOs and OT teams face—legacy patching debt, vendor access sprawl, ransomware pressure, and compliance demands—and why secure OT remote access is the essential bridge to efficiency, resilience, and productivity. Through industry case studies, we’ll examine how leaders are standardizing connectivity, reducing downtime costs, and enabling AI-driven operations—while ensuring security never falls behind transformation.

WEST Session: Things are changing quickly. Five years ago, we were telling welders to learn the code, now we're telling coders to learn to weld. How can manufacturers, who live and die by process reliability and scalability take advantage of tools that can't seem to do simple addition reliably. As the saying goes, 'there's no such thing as a bad tool, only the wrong tool for the job'. We're about to witness a step change in the adoption of true continuous improvement methodologies, and most people don't even see it coming.

Speaker at WEST: Chris Joco, Principal Solutions Architect, DSD Business Systems

Speaker at WEST: Anmol Singh, Founder and CEO, Fabriom