[Podcast] The Fitness Tracker for Your Machines: How FourJaw Is Rewiring Factory Productivity

Building in IoT is never a straight line. Welcome back to What to Expect When You’re Connecting, the Soracom podcast where we pull back the curtain on the challenges and triumphs of IoT innovation.

I’m Ryan Carlson, and for our fifth season, we’re bringing you the raw stories behind the solutions. We’re talking to the founders, creators, and engineers who are navigating the complexities of global connectivity to build things that actually matter. If you’ve ever wondered how the world’s most ambitious IoT projects actually get off the ground (and stay there) you’re in the right place. New season, new stories. Let’s dive in.

You can find all of our past episodes on Apple Podcast, Buzzsprout, and Spotify, or by clicking this link.

Episode Title: The Fitness Tracker for Your Machines: How FourJaw Is Rewiring Factory Productivity

In this episode, we sit down with Chris Iveson, CEO and co-founder of FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics, to talk about a deceptively simple idea: that the fastest way to help a factory get more productive isn’t to instrument every machine with every sensor imaginable, but to measure the one signal that actually predicts whether a machine is making money – its power draw.

Iveson traces FourJaw’s path from an ambitious, control-system-level integration (the kind that stalls at “that machine’s too old” or “that one’s Japanese, we haven’t done that before”) to a plug-and-play current clamp and tablet that a factory maintenance team can install itself in minutes, and explains why that shift from ‘technically impressive’ to ‘actually adopted’ has been the difference-maker for FourJaw’s customers.

Listeners get a candid look at what happens after the hardware goes live: the recurring moment, described by Iveson as somewhere between an “aha” and an “oh no,” when a manufacturer sees their real utilization data for the first time and discovers they’re running at 20% of available time instead of the 50% they assumed. The conversation also digs into FourJaw’s early connectivity struggles, and how switching to independent cellular connectivity solved a problem FourJaw hadn’t set out to become an expert in.

This episode is ideal for plant operations and continuous-improvement leaders evaluating whether machine monitoring is worth the disruption it’s often assumed to require; for IoT and connectivity practitioners curious how a hardware-plus-SaaS company handles device reliability at scale across customers on three continents; and for founders navigating the tension between building the most technically capable product and building the one customers will actually install.

“Soracom is a huge pain reliever to us – without Soracom we can’t reliably connect our devices to the cloud, and if they don’t connect reliably, we’re not providing the value we need to our customers.” — Chris Iveson, CEO & Co-Founder, FourJaw

If You Like Our Podcast, Check Out Our Other Media Projects

The podcast is one of several projects run by the Soracom Media Lab. An initiative with a mandate to create relevant educational and inspirational audio and video content and make it available on the platforms that people already go to get exposure to new ideas about connectivity. Check out long-form videos on our YouTube channel, short-form videos on Instagram, social media platforms like LinkedIn, and how-to videos on various technical forums.

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