It's Good to Talk

Thoughts after attending the two day Manufacturing & Engineering Expo

Thankfully in person events are now recovering

Last Wednesday and Thursday saw the Manufacturing & Engineering Show 2023 held at the Birmingham NEC here in the UK.

This is local to me as it’s only a ten minute train journey from Coventry to the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) so if I’m available then I always attend to see if there’s anything new in the industry and catch up with my connections.

The last couple of years have been disrupted, 2022 saw the Maintec (maintenance technology) part of the show not very well attended as people had fell out of attending in person events. This year, especially the first day was really very busy from 10am until I left at 3pm, apparently I wasn’t the only one leaving as someone I spoke to on day two said the place became very quiet after three o’clock.

The thing I love about in person events is connecting with new people I may have a synergy with, finding out about new hardware, sensors or software, but mainly just talking to people on stands or attendees about what they see going on in business. You can gain so many insights from talking to lots of people that experiences are different from your own day to day.

This event has four distinct areas that were co-located in the same Hall 4, Maintec aimed at Maintenance, Smart Factory Expo at connected technology, Drives & Controls, and the Design & Engineering Expo. Most of my interest is around Maintec and the Smart Factory especially when it comes to connected devices and Condition Monitoring.

It was great to catch up with some old friends and collaborators from Senseye who have now been part of Siemens for just over a year as they were acquired back last year. Good to see their excellent predictive platform being supported and built into the Siemens ecosystem. Rob Russell CTO of Senseye now a Siemens company below.

I have many connections on LinkedIn along with some new ones that I reconnect with in person, ask them how they are doing, what do they think is new, you can pick up so many great ideas from talking face to face that you miss in a Zoom or Teams call. I was able to connect a few people to others that may help both parties out in the future, I believe this is invaluable to building strong relationships.

I never attend these events with an eye on looking out for business opportunities, I’m much more interested in learning something new or helping others expand their network. Someone I had recommended through LinkedIn a few months earlier was able to help out via that comment, it was good to hear that it solved their problem whilst providing my other connection with business.

Another business in the condition monitoring space I can highly recommend is RMS - Reliability Maintenance Solutions Ltd. They are the best in my opinion when it comes to training in all aspects of Vibration technology. The RDI technology shown above is a visual vibration device that can monitor or identify parts of structures that may be fractured but not visible to the naked eye.

I believe attending shows like this is a productive day out, if not for you then maybe for someone else… after all it’s good to talk 👏