Human–machine interface

yeah no absolutely i mean i understand that thought and that concept but i feel like as an integrator especially as a person within the integrator if you're not the one selling the job and the opportunity in the project you can go offer thoughts and advice and everything else.

But at the end of the day, if I'm like, Vlad, I want to pay you for five dashboards and I want them to be on this ugly six inch HMI that's been living at my facility for 15 years and is all black and gray or green and brown.

at some point you're like okay this is the job this is what they want i don't not gonna go sell them all on brand new touch screen thick clients and go put a new software on and go do all of this at some point they want the six screens and at some point you need to go provide them with what they want now hopefully there's the opportunity to go walk them through that and then from that point go perhaps expand what the offering looks like.

But it's really difficult to go blame the integrator who kind of lives in the middle of the technical and operations people at an end user manufacturer who are like, we want all of these things.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I guess maybe as you're bringing this up in terms of our own positioning, right, like as maybe Dave and Vlad, I think it's important also to realize as you get into your own business as a systems integrator, as Dave mentioned, you have multiple choices because you can fall anywhere on that spectrum and i guess also everywhere on the spectrum if that's your cup of tea but ultimately at least in my opinion you need to pick and choose where do you draw that metaphorical line right and so for me as i you know i told my story up until the point that i started to work for a systems integrator i certainly considered what would i be doing and how I would be making money if I were to start my own business, right? And so the ideas or the options, I wouldn't say that they're completely unlimited, right? But you can do anything from building paddles all the way up to just handling cloud infrastructure, right? And anything in between.

But for me, ultimately, what truly I would say my expertise up until that point was really PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, and MES, right? What I saw the opportunity of is, again, as we've discussed a little bit earlier, was that there just isn't enough consulting, so to speak, and advising for manufacturers specifically.

But also, again, I am, I would say nowadays, more interested in more complex problems, right? I think that in my early career, I was more than happy to plug away at a standalone PLC and figure out what's going on with that specific skid.

On top of that, we're launching Dalton Automation as a brand.

sort of machine automation instrumentation, sort of SCADA and HMI, which is kind of the, you know, the operator interface to the machines controlling these things.

I suppose when you see Dalton Electrical, it doesn't necessarily explain that side of the business sort of coherently in the name, although we've done that and we've got a team of 30-odd engineers doing automation all day, every day.

Without that name, I think it wasn't really clear to the market.

Let's go ahead and just kind of parlay that into control systems integration.

And we kind of spun that up as well to be, and I'll just call it a traditional system control systems integrator, anywhere from starting from field instrumentation to PLC, to HMI, to SCADA, and then kind of bridging into MES a little bit.

That's what I had up as far as, you know, business partnership goes, that's the part I had up.

And then my partner, Robert, he does more of still like the plant engineering level stuff.

I'm from the Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota, my stomping grounds, original stomping grounds.

So I wanted to get back home, took a job with a, um, and equipment manufacturer for the semiconductor industry, you know, building, you know, wafer processing tools and chemical management tools and things of that nature.

And that was my first ball into not really true systems integration, but getting exposed to PLCs, HMIs, SCADA systems, because they built tools or machines and those machines got networked and they got the data got collected, the data got concentrated, and it rolled up to a SCADA system.

So it was my, you know, right out of the gate, you're kind of mimicking your typical, you know, plant structure for control systems, right? So it did that for a while and, you know, ended up working for, after that worked for a manufacturer of automation components.