S2, Ep. 4 – The Engineering-to-Manufacturing Revolution: PBC Linear’s Journey to Automated Excellence

Inside PBC Linear's Configurator: 126,000 Bearing Variations, Automated End to End
The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — with Jeff Brickler and Scott Brickler (CADTALK), and Jonathan and Ethan of PBC Linear

Jeff: Welcome back to The Integrate Intelligently Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Brickler, joined as always by Scott Brickler, founder and CEO of CADTALK Software. Today is a special one — the engineering and manufacturing revolution. We have guests from PBC Linear, and we're going to talk about their journey to automated excellence. Welcome, Jonathan and Ethan.

Ethan and I have known each other for a few years now. It's been a minute — my beard is grayer and I'm balder. Jonathan, I don't think we've spoken much, so good to meet you.

Let's start with the groundwork: tell us about PBC Linear, what the business does, what kind of products you make.

From Pacific Bearing to PBC Linear
Jonathan: PBC Linear has been in business since 1982. Originally the business was called Pacific Bearing Company, and we changed the name around 2008 to do business as PBC Linear.

When the business was founded in the early '80s, the Midwest was in a recession. Rockford, Illinois, where we're based, had 26 percent unemployment — the highest in the nation for three or four months of the year. The rest of the year, some plant in Michigan or Ohio would shut down and effectively destroy a town, with unemployment around 40 percent. The Rust Belt was not doing well. But California and the Pacific region were doing great. So we named ourselves Pacific Bearing to lead Americans to believe we were located out in California and therefore much more stable.

Fast forward to the 2000s and we'd become a much more global nation, with a lot of competitors importing product from China that didn't have great reliability. We'd also expanded our portfolio — from making individual bearings to linear motion solutions, actuators, assemblies, full systems, some contract assembly. So we adjusted the name to PBC Linear to better match what we were doing.

Today we make individual bearings, linear slides and linear motion components, complete actuators, and full custom assemblies. We have around 225,000 square feet of manufacturing space in northern Illinois, a wholly owned subsidiary in Germany serving European and EMEA markets, and a joint venture with the largest stepper motor manufacturer in China.

The Founding Vision: Never Be a Slave to One Industry
Jeff: Every company starts with a founder's vision. Can you talk about that vision and the values behind it?

Jonathan: My dad and grandfather started the business in the late '70s and early '80s. They were running a machine shop for a group of investors and then took it over — and pretty much right after that, there was a giant recession. Our contract business was primarily servicing John Deere, International Harvester, and companies like that, and they all went on strike. Our business went from very profitable, a great investment, to something they probably wished they hadn't done. Everything dried up overnight.

Coming out of that, my dad and grandfather decided we had to have standard products to sell, not just contract parts we made for other companies. By the way, 45 years later we're still making some of those exact same parts for some of those exact same customers. But we needed a standard product. So they invented the Simplicity bearing.

A few years after that, my grandfather had a series of heart attacks, and his doctor and his wife forced him into retirement. From there on out it was pretty much my dad. I technically joined the business when I got my first paycheck at ten, working in our factory — that's frowned on now, I'm told I can't put my kid to work in the factory anymore. I joined full-time after college, left for a few years to work for a Fortune 500 company, and came back a little over a decade ago.

One thing that makes us unique is that we're one of the largest still privately owned linear motion companies in the world, and we make a diverse range of products across categories. In our industry, companies typically make one type of bearing or another. We make products across multiple categories, because after that early trouble, we decided we did not want to be a slave to any one industry. We didn't want any single customer to represent more than 20 percent of our overall business.

Look at the last couple of recessions — COVID and the one before it. We fared better than average because we serve medical applications, which always do well. When the housing bubble burst, we had only a small amount of business tied to that industry. When automotive shifts up and down, automotive is one of only two applications we don't sell into. We don't sell any parts that go onto cars; we sell parts that make cars, and equipment that makes cars, but nothing in the cars themselves. The other thing we don't sell, purely for insurance reasons, is flight-critical systems for commercial airplanes. We sell to companies that make business class seats, sliding tray tables, pocket doors, all kinds of parts on the plane — just nothing flight-critical.

From a diversity standpoint, we have bearings in outer space and bearings that have gone to the bottom of the ocean. We have parts used in clean rooms and parts used in foundries. The cleanest application on Earth to the dirtiest, the bottom of the ocean to outer space, and pretty much everywhere in between.

Products You've Used Without Knowing It
Jonathan: For listeners who aren't familiar with us — most people have been through an airport. We do some very high-end precision applications and some lower-end ones. In an airport you've probably walked past one of those Pepsi machines where a little robot goes up, grabs the bottle, and drops it sideways through a slot. Our company designed the current generation of that machine. There's other equipment like that too — higher-end automated retail, the Best Buy kiosk, cosmetics kiosks, where a conveyor goes up and down and product gets dispensed. That's basically a two-axis robot, and you'll typically find our products on it.

Scott: I came from the packaging industry years ago, before I started the company — R.A Jones, which made the machines that put bags of cereal into cartons and bottles of Budweiser into packaging. We used a lot of linear actuators and bearings. Probably a customer of yours.

Jonathan: Probably. We have these little red bearing stress reliever samples that are on most engineers' desks throughout the US. In Europe they're blue, and in Japan they're green. A lot of engineers are familiar with us.

Jeff: That's what I find interesting talking to companies like PBC Linear — regular consumers don't know you exist, but they interact with your products every day. You're not the big name brand like Ford, but all those second- and third-tier companies in the manufacturing process know exactly who you are.

Jonathan: The engineers at Ford definitely know us, because our products are used on the assembly line.

A Critical Business During COVID
Jonathan: Speaking of that — during COVID, I remember being in our factory right when the governor of Illinois announced they were shutting everything down. A couple of days later the health inspector came to our factory and told us we had to shut down, and we basically told them no. We had time-sensitive government contracts, and parts that had to get made. You go tell the military and the DoD they're not getting their parts. They told us that if we don't deliver, guys with machine guns show up and make us make the parts.

And by the way, the centrifuge equipment and automated systems being used to test for COVID — we were critical in making those. So if you want that equipment, we should stay open so you can buy more of it. When things got really scary and they were splitting respirators, we have something like a subsidiary that makes 3D printers, and we were making parts to split respirators.

We were definitely a critical business that stayed open. We did all the things to protect our employees, work from home for anyone who could — but at the end of the day, like a lot of manufacturers, somebody's got to be there to push the button on the machine.

Scott: It's truly the definition of a critical business. People often don't understand how the supply chain works — that these things are tied together and you can't shut down sections of it with no effect. We did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about supply chains, about how one electronic chip kept trucks from shipping out of Cincinnati, where we are. There was literally a racetrack full of trucks waiting on a single chip that had to be plugged in for them to drive off, because the chip manufacturer got shut down during COVID.

Jonathan: A lot of that comes from China, and having a subsidiary over there, we maybe have a better understanding of how it works. The government didn't care whether you were a necessary company — they shut you down. And those silicon refineries don't just turn back on. A giant furnace doesn't get back up to temperature quickly.

120,000 Variations of a Single Bearing
Jeff: Ethan, let's get into engineering. What were your challenges, and what was the lightbulb moment that brought you to us?

Ethan: A little history — I started at the company 11 years ago, and it was because of the dream of Bob, our owner. He wanted every bearing engineered by the engineering department and sent to the shop floor to happen automatically.

That little red bearing Jonathan mentioned has about 120,000 combinations: size, color, O-rings, mounting options, lubrication. Every time you add a new feature, it grows exponentially.

When I was hired, the ask was really simple — and I've come to find out that the simpler the ask, the harder the challenge. The ask was: I want a simple interface an engineer can go to and configure this product. That sounds pretty simple. I figured we could do it. It took about six years of work to get it off the ground to the point where the entire factory was using it.

But now any of our products can go through our configurator, get configured, and produce correct engineered models and prints. The models look and act like an engineer actually created them, along with production prints and inspection sheets, and they get sent to the shop floor within about ten minutes of the configurator running. All of that is years of putting puzzle pieces in place.

We use Infor CPQ as our configurator software. It handles the front end and a lot of the back end work to create the models. But there was a missing link to get from our engineered model state into our ERP system and out to the shop floor. That's where a random email came out about CADTALK and its ability to push SOLIDWORKS information from the model up into the ERP. Our CEO saw it and said, take a look at this. That's where you and I started talking, and we kicked it off — first setting it up for engineers to use manually, then once the bugs were worked out, moving it to an automated process that happens in the background.

Twenty Years of Groundwork
Jonathan: Stepping back further from where Ethan started: in the 1990s we had a company called Design Automation Associates create a configurator for us for the Simplicity bearings. It was hardcoded. It generated the prints, the BOM, and the routing on paper, because back in the '90s it was a more paper-based system — we were on the predecessor to SyteLine at that point.

It was a phenomenal system, but because it was all hardcoded, none of our employees could maintain it. After about ten years we had all kinds of new equipment, our manufacturing processes had changed, we had new variations — and the system was no longer as usable as it once was.

In the early 2000s, my dad and I were talking, and he was focused on automating the engineering process, because that's what we were used to. I said no, that's not what we need to be doing. We need to automate the entire process from customer to shop floor with no human interaction. That's the genesis of this.

In the mid-2000s we had a brilliant programmer, and he and I mapped out how the configurator would work. He started programming basically what Infor CPQ does, with interactions to SyteLine and SOLIDWORKS. Before we had him do that, we'd looked at Infor CPQ under its predecessor's name and at other configuration software, and we went this route because none of them would do what we wanted — none could take it the entire way.

He got about two years into the project and then left with it maybe 90 percent done. He's a great guy, we're still friends. He was moving back to Ohio to start a family, and it was the right choice for him. He ended up getting hired by Infor to work on their CPQ product, basically because of what he'd been doing for us.

At that point we decided to use commercial software rather than build everything from scratch. And still, there's nothing out there that does everything. Ethan is the brilliant person who put this all together — I had the idea, he made it work.

The Goal: Website to Shop Floor, No Humans
Jonathan: The end goal has always been to go from a customer on the website, self-servicing. That's a cost saving for us, but more importantly, generations are changing. And I can say this because my teenagers just pointed out that I'm the old fart they're making fun of on TikTok now.

Jeff: Right there with you, brother.

Jonathan: These kids grew up in the Amazon generation, where they go to their phone, push some buttons, and whatever they want is delivered the same day, or tomorrow at worst. That self-service and immediate resolution is worth more than whatever the company saves by not interacting with humans.

Our goal is to go from that self-service portal, giving the customer the immediate solution they want, all the way through our factory to job packet printing on the floor. My goal is to have absolutely everything automated.

The one interaction we're still going to allow for a human is this: someone configures something on our website, and instead of buying it with a credit card, they hand it off to a buyer, or to their boss, who hands it to somebody else, who hands it to a distributor to place the order. There are too many broken links there other than maybe a part number that happens to match. There's a configuration ID that may or may not get passed along in the right field. So we let a customer service person go into the back end of the configurator, link the configuration ID to the SyteLine customer order number, push a button, and the rest is done. There may be a short interaction with customer service, or if a credit card doesn't process properly — but the normal flow is website to job packet printing on the shop floor with zero human interaction.

We've proven we can do that in 10 to 15 minutes of processing time, and primarily that's just queue time on the server. We don't want our servers pushing everything through immediately; it's better to let them queue. At the end of the day, 60 seconds versus 15 minutes has no bearing on our ability to satisfy customers, so batching makes things easier.

Why Make the Investment?
Jeff: This was a multi-year investment. Stepping back — what was the driver? What did you see for your business that made this the right thing to do?

Jonathan: Based on my original notes in a little red and black book stashed away somewhere from 2008, we're talking 15, really 20 years ago for the genesis of this.

Think about what was on the internet back then. Configurators were just starting to be a thing, and they were used in two big industries: cars, where you could begin to select what you wanted, and computers. I'm an engineer by degree and a big nerd, and I liked configuring computers. I took that experience as a customer, and I knew we had a configurator internally for engineering automation, because that's what they were focused on at the time. And I said, this is where we really want to go.

I tried to get a patent on it, and the patent office rejected it because somebody else had a completely unassociated patent the examiner thought was an exact copy — it was nothing like it. But I digress. The patent was for a configurator that would configure a multi-axis system, where a customer puts in their application data.

The reason was that I'd designed a system for a customer, and the first one took me — someone who knows this industry — over 40 hours. I had to identify our products, identify the associated accessories. We make the actuators, but we don't make the motors. So I had to get quotes and spec out a couple of motor options, get pricing, find what was most cost effective, then do the coupling, the gearbox, the drive shaft, the cable carriers, the sensors, a bunch of brackets. Over 40 hours, and I thought: this is painful. If this is what customers go through, we have to come up with something better.

We looked for commercial software, and nothing did everything we wanted. So we said, let's find whatever does the biggest piece of it and get as much bang for the buck as we can. That's where we settled on Infor CPQ.

"Our Product Is Too Specialized"
Jonathan: There was a lot of distrust from our engineering team about how this would work. The engineers all said, this software is never going to know everything I know from 40 years of doing this. Our application engineers still say it today.

Scott: I hear the same thing. I was at the SUN conference talking with people who said their product is too specialized. I'd say, show me what you're talking about — and I'd look at it and think, that can absolutely be configured. And they'd say, well, there's this one-off option where we did something for a military contractor. Okay, what percent of your business is that? One or two orders a year. Fine.

Jonathan: What we realized over time is that we're not looking for the configurator to do everything. Our goal is 90 to 95 percent. The remaining 5 to 10 percent of configurations actually turns into 20 to 30 percent of overall sales, because those are the customized ones.

We make standard product that's a single catalog SKU. Then we have customizable products — a lot of our actuators come with multiple screw leads and multiple length options. We sell by the millimeter. So if an actuator has three drive options and you can buy it anywhere from 0 to 6 meters, that's 6,000 length variations times three drive options, so 18,000. Add another option and you're at 36,000. It goes on and on, to the point where that little red bearing that looks so simple in our catalog has 126,000 possible derivations.

That's a nightmare to create, and an even bigger nightmare to maintain — which turned out to be an unexpected benefit for us.

From Tabular Drawings to Rules
Ethan: When I first started, we had the bearing drawings as tabular drawings. You'd take a generic print with a table of dimensions, and depending on the option you wanted, you'd substitute the right dimension from the table. Imagine being an operator on the shop floor with a print packet and basically a decoder ring to figure out the dimensions for the part you're making.

We wanted to get away from that. The first couple of years were spent combing through decades of prints and data — 120,000 options — and putting it into a standardized, uniform method to drive the configurator.

To Jonathan's point, maintaining things now is as easy as opening a spreadsheet. You make a change, not just to a value but to an equation controlling values, and everything updates from that point forward. You're not updating one print, you're updating a whole family of prints.

Jonathan: We used to have an entire large room in our factory filled with nothing but file cabinets holding master prints. Whenever we created a job, production control would go in, find the master, photocopy it — the prints, the BOM, the routing, the inspection sheets — and release that to the shop. That's all gone now. We still have a little of it for really old custom parts, but even those we've scanned to PDF.

A few years ago we were AS-certified, right before COVID, and then we realized we didn't have to go through all the bureaucratic hurdles of maintaining the registration — we kept the quality systems in place and that was good enough for our customers. But this is a huge benefit for any company that's ISO or AS certified, because every time you generate a new print packet for the floor, you're automatically pulling the latest revision.

Getting Custom Work to 90 Percent Automatically
Ethan: To Jonathan's earlier comment about getting 90 percent of the way there for custom applications — here's something unique about how we set ours up. Most CPQ software, when you buy it, is a quoting tool. It gives you a nice price and a list of line items, but all the engineering work still has to be done.

We set ours up so that when you configure something, even something custom, it gets you to that 90 percent mark. The engineer takes the model — an engineered model — adds the features, and pushes it up through CADTALK. They don't start over from scratch. They take what's close enough to the end application, make the modification, and push it up.

And here's the benefit of using CADTALK that a lot of engineers will recognize as a struggle. You go into the ERP system, find the closest thing to what you're looking for, copy and paste it, and make your changes. When you do that, you're also copying and pasting any errors that existed there, and you compound errors over time. By pushing the model straight into the system with CADTALK, we avoid that. You're creating a brand new component, but you're not spending hours on clerical work — you're using the rules in place to do it for you. That saves our engineers a lot of hours.

Model-Based Enterprise and Lights-Out Manufacturing
Scott: Just so I understand — does CPQ actually drive design tables in SOLIDWORKS to generate the models?

Ethan: To a point. When we bought CPQ, it would generate a model and a generic drawing. We added functionality and programming to create a print that looks identical to what an engineer would produce, along with the inspection sheets. That's the development we did in-house those first couple of years: get it to where, looking at a print packet, you can't tell whether it came from a person or a machine.

Because if you want to grow the business, there are two ways to scale — with people or with automation. We know scaling with people isn't sustainable, so we had to scale with automation.

Our methodology is called MBE, model-based enterprise. We're working toward your SOLIDWORKS model being the master: master for your drawing, for your ERP system, for your CAM system. You're not creating copies and modifying them. At the end of the day we want the configurator to drive not just the prints but all the way to the machines, so that if everything's set up properly, the machine queues up and starts producing the parts needed. You don't even need an operator to press the button. It would run lights out.

Scott: At some point you don't even need the drawings anymore, except for inspection. I remember talking about this years ago — you're getting closer and closer to that world, because drawings and print packages are really a remnant of a human being involved to read them.

A Print for Every Operation
Jonathan: And the prints our configurator makes are different from what I saw at the Fortune 500 company I worked for, where design engineering made a finished inspection print and the engineers said, I don't care how manufacturing makes it, I just want this part.

For us, we do both inspection prints and operational prints. For the Simplicity bearing, we start with bar stock, so our first operational drawing is a 12-foot aluminum extrusion bar — that's our raw material print. From there we go to op 10, op 20, op 30, op 40, and there's a matching CAD model with exact dimensions down to ten-thousandths of an inch for every single process, plus a relevant inspection sheet for every process. All of that is generated for the shop floor by the system.

Scott: Doing that manually would be unbelievable. Nobody would bother to do every step. A drawing for each step, for the inspection?

Jonathan: An exact drawing for each step. And sometimes where it's critical — you put a part on a mill and have to flip from side A to side B, and there's a dimension that has to be inspected midway through — we'll have a side A print, side B print, side C, side D, all the way up through six sides that need machining.

Scott: So you'd have to know the operations during the configuration stage. You know the first operation is cutting bar stock, the next is a mill, and which features are being built at each machine.

Ethan: Correct. All of this is built from templates. As it goes through, it knows which operations to remove or add, which drawing views to remove or add, what layers to hide or unhide, what dimensions to hide or unhide. It does all that work as it goes, so you're producing the print you need or the part you need. And it's not a single page — it's multiple operations that used to be multiple tabular print operation sheets. All those layers of complexity are gone, which makes it much easier for the operator.

Scott: How long does it take to set up a completely new product in the configurator?

Ethan: At this point, maybe two to three weeks. That's working with engineering to get the prints in, get the testing done, get the dimensions into the tables, do user interface testing, do the marketing images and catalogs, and set it up in our pricing system.

Scott: I was expecting you to say months.

Jonathan: It's months of work for engineering to develop the new product. But once the product is ready to go, implementation into the configurator isn't that long — there's just a decent amount of testing.

Keeping R&D Out of the System
Jonathan: Different companies do this differently. Some companies with SyteLine have a rule that nothing goes to the shop floor, nothing leaves the office area, unless it's in SyteLine. For us, so we don't muck up our system with things that won't go into production and won't be maintained long term, we keep all our R&D outside SyteLine and outside the configurator.

Engineering iterates on the design, sends things to our tool room for prototype parts, assembles, tests, repeats. Once that's done and we move from R&D into deployment, Ethan's team gets a nice tidy package. By that time manufacturing engineering has already been involved, because we very much believe design engineering and manufacturing engineering go hand in hand. Depending on which statistic you read, something like 90 percent of cost is engineered in, and by the time the part goes to production there's only so much engineers can do to reduce cost. So we want the most efficient process possible up front.

Scott: Configure-to-order is so interesting. I came from engineer-to-order as an industrial engineer, and in that world manufacturing engineering was almost an afterthought — people were just trying to get designs done fast enough. In configure-to-order or make-to-order, manufacturing engineering is far more critical, because that's where all the cost is. In engineer-to-order it's more like, we're only making one of these, so I don't really care how we manufacture it. The optimization problem is different.

Jonathan: I remember reading a case study in grad school about why Japanese automotive outperformed US automotive twenty years ago, and it came back to the design process. American automotive started with a clay model, designed the body and the shape, and then engineers had to fit everything into the shape they were given. In Japan they started from the frame and worked outward, then made the body look as good as they could. Their process was far more efficient, because they didn't have to make trade-offs on the most effective way to manufacture the car — they put the gas tank where they wanted it, the fuel port where they wanted it, choosing the safest, strongest, most cost-effective option. In American cars, if you ever wonder why a button is where it is, it's usually not because a human wants to touch it there. It's because that's where it fit.

Scott: Every engineering problem starts with the constraints you apply at the beginning, and if you change the constraints, you change the entire design.

The Payoff: Six to Eight Engineers' Worth of Work
Jeff: How long have you had the end-to-end system?

Ethan: We finalized the end-to-end system last year, where you can go from configurator all the way through to the shop floor. We put puzzle pieces in as we go — we're not going to build the entire solution at once, we get it to the point where it handles the biggest need at the time.

For the first couple of years developing the configurator, the need was taking work off the shoulders of the engineers. They were drowning. Engineers would come in and spend their entire day working on standard products, making prints to get them out the door, rather than the custom work — the fun things they actually want to work on.

We did an evaluation of the configurator last year. It did the equivalent amount of work of six to eight full-time engineers — around $2 million worth of salaries and benefits, just running in the background. That enables engineers to work on new product development and truly custom applications instead of coming in to work on a bearing that should be standardized and never touched.

The only time we really get in and modify the system now is for process enhancements: this machine is no longer being used, we're using a better one, how do we improve the process? Those changes no longer take weeks, because you're not touching hundreds of prints. You can do it in an afternoon.

Jonathan: A great example: a few years ago we released a new liner for the Simplicity bearing called Frelon W. W for white. It happens to be an FDA-certified material for indirect food contact — careful language there.

If we'd done that the manual way, taking those 126,000 variations and making the liner available across all of them — even though not all are in SyteLine, there are maybe 15,000 variations in there — we'd have had to go back and do an engineering change on all of it. Months and months of work for our engineering team. Now we go into the configurator and add a new feature that gets populated automatically. Ethan, what is that, a day?

Ethan: A day, maybe a couple of hours. Most of that is testing and making sure you put the change in the right place.

Scott: And when it gets generated through the configurator for a particular customer, it's given a unique number, because it's effectively a new part. That's how you avoid the engineering change — you're just creating a new thing.

Jonathan: The same applies if we want to make a raw material change, which has happened quite a bit. During COVID there were all kinds of supply chain issues and we had to change raw material from one to another. Maybe it's minor — you go from 6063 to 6065 T6 aluminum, where the material properties are basically the same and for our application it doesn't matter at all. A change like that would have been terrible to make the old way. Now we go into CPQ, make the change, have CADTALK push it out immediately.

Ethan: We had a situation a couple of years back where we had to do a batch change like that to a couple thousand parts. We made the updates in the configurator, then wrote an automation where we dumped in a bunch of part numbers, it configured everything automatically, and pushed all of them through CADTALK. Thousands of items in our ERP got updated overnight, instead of needing a group of people dedicated full-time to the change. Give me a few hours, we'll make the change, run a script, and it's ready in the morning.

Ethan: In the past, changes like this would have resulted in a lot of red lines until everything was updated, and a lot of validation.

Jonathan: Our manufacturing engineers go through a lot fewer red pens than they used to.

Pricing Uniformity and Explainability
Jeff: Scott and I had a conversation a few weeks back about how integration helps with supply chain disruption. You've experienced that in real life — whether it's COVID or tariffs, when things need to change you can realize those changes immediately.

Jonathan: I'll give you a real-world example, and something we haven't touched on. I'm making this up, because our Simplicity bearings are made in the USA and aren't subject to tariffs. But say we had a product we were buying and reselling, and we had to account for a new tariff in our cost structure. Say that product had 12,000 SKUs in SyteLine that needed pricing updated.

Going back through and doing that manually in SyteLine is painful. There are tools that let you do pricing updates as percentages, but then you don't end up with nice round numbers, and over time you get this copy-and-paste effect where things stop lining up. Customers notice. They'll ask: if I want to add a seal to this bearing, how come it's $5 over here, $6 over here, $3 over there, and $20 over there? That's because some human in our company made an unintentional mistake over time, or rounded to the fourth decimal place in one place and the fifth in another.

Now, instead of dealing with 12,000 SKUs in SyteLine, we go back to the configurator and make a change in one spreadsheet. Ethan's routine recalculates all the prices and pushes them to SyteLine overnight. We have exact uniformity. Everything is neat, clean, and explainable. Customers don't have to figure out whether one seal option is somehow cheaper than another in certain scenarios, because they know exactly what it is. That alone saves us a ton of time on every pricing update.

Ethan: Jonathan's key word there is explainability. Because all our systems are rules-based, we can go back and explain why that dimension is the way it is, and why that price structure is the way it is.

A couple of years back, an operator came up and said, I want to change this dimension to make it easier for me to manufacture. We pulled up the rules and said, all right — if we make this change here, we need to change all of these values as well, because it's rules-based and it drives these effects downstream. Are you sure you want to make that change? And it came down to: no, if I make that change it'll negatively affect everybody else downstream.

In the previous life we would have said sure, we can make that change, spent a lot of time making it, and not known about the effects until they showed up downstream — and then we'd have had to revert it. Now we can test it live, check it, and decide. Our engineers don't have to play the scavenger hunt game of looking for all the derivative products of that parent part, because if we make the change in the configurator, the parent part changes and so do all the derivatives.

Scott: You keep going back to the original source — the rules-based engine that drives everything — instead of chasing all the derivatives. It's a brilliant solution.

Jonathan: The real impact on our business is in sustaining engineering. The people who do the ECs, the engineering changes, used to be nine or ten people. Now we're down to two and a half. And those two and a half get to do other things, like new product work, which keeps them entertained — because engineering changes are not the most joyful thing engineers do.

Scott: Years ago at R.A Jones, I wrote the system that automated most of the engineering changes, because I hated doing them. CADTALK exists because there was a job I hated. So I'm very keen on getting rid of the things nobody likes to do.

Advice for Manufacturers Who Feel Behind
Jeff: Mindful of time, a couple more questions. A lot of what you're describing is what we tell customers — time savings, rules-based engines, consistency, repeatable processes — and hearing it from you is the best evidence there is.

But say I'm a manufacturing company that isn't doing integration at all, not connecting models to ERP. This conversation might feel overwhelming, because PBC Linear is light years ahead. What do you say to other manufacturers about what you've learned and how that investment pays off — especially as an American manufacturer, which is very much in the conversation right now?

Jonathan: As an American manufacturer, I feel invested in helping other manufacturers, especially since we sell parts to a lot of them. As long as you're not one of my direct competitors — and there aren't many — I'm happy to help. I try to just let people ask questions, because I have background on the business side, the manufacturing side, and the engineering side, so I can answer intelligently enough that people don't glaze over.

The biggest objection is always, my product is too specialized. I don't sell CAD software, I don't sell CPQ, I don't sell CADTALK, but I'm happy to have the conversation. And it boils down to this: if your company has a catalog with SKUs in it, your product can probably benefit from something like CPQ and CADTALK.

If you're a design house where every project is totally unique — you're packaging cheese one day and electronics the next, and the BOM is completely different — then probably not. But even then, if you're designing an assembly line, you could save yourself a lot of time by designing modular cells in 80/20 or Bosch-style or item T-slot aluminum extrusion and fitting equipment inside each cell. Even they could benefit.

But if you make bicycles or gearboxes or chain, and you sell a product with a configurable SKU in your catalog, a smart part number, your product could benefit from a configurator. Once people buy into that — even if they buy in with disbelief — you've opened the door to keep the conversation going. Let's play pretend and say I'm a consultant: tell me about your product and I'll tell you how I think it could be configured.

Jeff: Where else should they go? What resources would you recommend?

Jonathan: Google. That's where we all start nowadays.

Ethan: I'd say look at model-based enterprise and think about how you develop toward that, and more or less toward a rules-based enterprise. The other resource — and this is a word out for my type of people — is to find a developer and bring them in. Somebody keen to automate processes. You'll be surprised what they find that can be turned into a rules-based process and automated.

Jonathan: That's one of the key secrets to our success, and it's not really a secret because I'm telling you: our configuration team is a combination of IT and engineering. Ethan is unique because he started in engineering and moved into IT, so he has that ability built in. For most companies you'll have two parts — the IT side that handles automation, programming, and the database, and engineering, which is in charge of populating the rules. Think of it like a website: a developer builds the framework, and the marketing team loads the products in. Generally you're not going to have one person who does the whole thing.

The other thing is that there are different types of configuration software depending on what you want. Some will do just the configuring and quoting side. Some will do just the engineering side. You have to decide what you want — but remember that usually it's either the salesperson or the engineering person making that decision for the business, sometimes without regard for the other department. Look at it holistically.

We're privately held, so whether things come out of our left pocket or our right pocket, it's still coming out of our pants. When I worked for a public company it was: sales better not spend engineering's budget, engineering better not spend sales' budget. Look at it holistically, because I guarantee that once you get into it, even if you're automating engineering, sales is going to say, I want some of that too.

And probably the worst thing you could do is put in two configuration systems. They'll fight each other. If sales has their own and engineering has their own, you no longer have one master of truth.

Jonathan: On the complexity question — when we looked at Design Automation Associates again in the early 2000s, they showed me where they'd automated the design of an entire grain silo: elevators, weldments, engineering calculations. The most complex project they'd ever done was design automation for an oil platform. If you can automate the design of an oil platform, where you put in variables and it produces all the equipment — we'd call that AI today. But that's been around for over 25 years. It just isn't widely discussed. So even if you think your product is too complex, do some searching, call the people who sell the software, and get a demo.

The other thing is to make sure it integrates with the systems you already use. Make sure it integrates with your CAD system, make sure it integrates with your ERP. Beyond that, pretty much everything has APIs. But try to find something that natively works out of the box with CAD. I'd say CAD matters more than ERP, because ERP these days is all SQL and APIs, and you can push things back and forth far more easily than you can push things into SOLIDWORKS. But I'm just the guy with the big ideas. Ethan, is that about right?

Ethan: My philosophy is that you can automate anything given enough time and coffee. If you run into an issue, you can figure out a way around it.

Closing Thoughts
Jeff: Thank you both for the time — I really enjoyed this, and I'd love to do more of these with manufacturing companies. Any final thoughts, and where can people find you?

Jonathan: Ethan and I are both on LinkedIn, or you can reach out through our company website, pbclinear.com. My final thought: if you're a manufacturer thinking about doing this, you probably should, because your competitor probably did it yesterday.

Jeff: That's a good point. It's what Amazon did — get products to you faster — and it's solutions like this that let them do it. And I just realized: it's probably us old farts making these decisions now, and we have to recognize we may not be in tune with how the kids coming out of college want to work and want to experience things. You can fight it for a while, but if you keep fighting it, maybe you go work for Blockbuster, because they liked doing things their way too.

Thank you, Jonathan and Ethan. Subscribe to The Integrate Intelligently Podcast, connect with Jonathan or Ethan on LinkedIn, visit their website, and of course visit cadtalk.com to learn more about what we do. We'll catch you next time.