oems

This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu. This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure.

Today, we're taking a slightly different spin. Instead of focusing on what it'll take to electrify homes, as we've heard in past episodes, we're talking about why it's currently not working as well as it should and the key barriers preventing us from moving faster on the home decarb adoption curve.

Many of you know our guest as Nate "the House Whisperer.” Nate Adams is a longtime HVAC insulation and sealing contractor who lives in West Virginia and describes himself as "a bit unusual in the climate community," coming from the right side of the political spectrum. And he is one of home electrification's fiercest and most consistent advocates.

Yin and Nate cover a lot of ground in this episode, including the dangers of positioning policy rebates and savings to consumers at the beginning of their purchase journey. We uncover that OEMs can convert most air conditioners in factories and warehouses into heat pumps, addressing the current market supply shortage, along with exploring the reasons behind the hesitation to do so. Finally, we discuss how going all-electric is not the solution that gets us to scale and that hybrid systems are the actual silver bullet. There are some controversial and counterintuitive bits coming up and if you want to ask Nate more questions after you listen, stay tuned for an upcoming AMA session with him on the MCJ Slack.

In this episode, we cover: 

• [04:01]: Nate's background and how he became "the House Whisperer"
• [06:58]: Issues with oversized furnace design and sizing
• [10:55]: The concept of definite optimism and indefinite optimism in relation to the future of electrification
• [13:12]: Friction between conservative contractors and climate-focused homeowners
• [16:32]: The importance of positioning policy rebates and savings to consumers
• [24:46] How IRA performance requirements disqualify 80-85% of equipment models
• [29:18]: Overview of the biggest barriers to electrifying homes
• [32:06]: Upstream vs. midstream and potential of converting all ACs to heat pumps
• [34:36]: Mandated heat pumps in Vancouver, BC
• [38:31]: Psychology as a barrier to electrification
• [41:02]: How hybrid systems can reduce fear of heat pumps for both contractors and homeowners
• [47:26]: Nate's HVAC 2.0 business model improves contractor and homeowner experience
• [49:57]: The launch of Nate's air sealing course and Home Comfort Book

Get connected: 

• Nate Adams X / LinkedIn
• Yin X / LinkedIn
• MCJ Podcast / Collective / Instagram

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on Sep 13, 2023 (Published on Nov 15, 2023)

Get connected with MCJ: 

• Jason Jacobs X / LinkedIn
• Cody Simms X / LinkedIn
• MCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube

*If you liked this episode, please consider giving us a review! You can also reach us via email at content@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Wiktor Dotter, Chief Executive Officer at ZeBeyond, a global SaaS company. 

Wiktor has a corporate development background in original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier 1 and 2 businesses where he has facilitated decision making for boards of directors of both listed and privately held companies. The ever-changing amount of input parameters (e.g., sustainability, investment capex, profitability, electrification) driven by an increasingly volatile investment environment led Wiktor to develop tools such as ZeBeyond's ePOP technologies, which enable instant change of assumptions and turn large-scale investments into footprint or platform developments.

He and Ted discuss his background, growing up in Southern Germany, attending university in Italy, and moving to Sweden ten years ago to pursue his career. In his current role as Chief Executive Officer at ZeByeond, a new global company leading the way in providing innovative and reliable system level simulation software, Wiktor and his team are providing manufacturers with an innovative, reliable, and cost-effective set of tools they can trust for their products, ensuring reductions in R&D time while supporting their sustainability commitments. 

ZeBeyond has established a broad set of relationships with multiple partners and collaborators including automotive OEMs, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, as well as sustainability life cycle centers and universities. Through these partnerships, the software company has had the opportunity to help embed sustainability into their early research and development efforts and ensure greener solutions for their systems. Wiktor shares that his vision is grounded in a commitment to engineering beyond net zero.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is the theme of this week’s epsiode of What the Duck?! Sarah Scudder, is joined by Emily French, otherwise known as “The Bulldog,” where they chat all about working with competitors to secure supply. You heard that right. Emily is an estimator Shermco Industries in Irving, Texas. She started out as a temp to help with inventory cleanup and was not promised a position. Through hard work and dedication, she showed she wanted to work at Shermco. 

Show Highlights 

Starting off as a buyer

Graduating preschool to procurement 

Shermco: not a cookie-cutter shop 

Differences between estimators and buyers

Lack of lubricants

Getting products from competitors 

Finding alternative suppliers

MOMENTS TO DUCK AROUND

EMILY: Working with Competitors 

“We’re all here to make money. We're all here to have a productive business, and the relationship with this particular vendor was actually already in place through the previous estimator that was here, and they had worked together for years, and I built a relationship with him as well. And there will be times that he reaches out to me because he needs a drive-in slinger that goes into the bearing compartment, and I'll have them manufactured, I'll ship it to him, and he'll pay it. I'll reach out to him and say, "Hey, I need this encoder like yesterday. Do you have it?" Because apparently, we're six months out. And because they're a bigger outfit than we are, so they have a larger inventory facility. He'll sell it to me. I mean, like I said, we're all out here to have a business that's thriving.”

EMILY: Why the shortage in supply chain?

“The short answer, and my favorite, is supply chain issues. So, I hate that phrase at this point. They're saying they just don't have the materials, and I guess these people that we found, nobody really knew about them. But now, we've, you know, our entire company uses them now, and they're perfect. I even have had to tell one of my bearing vendors once to say, "Hey, you know, these people are your competition when it comes to that." Some of the materials that go into the lubricant, the manufacturers are having trouble getting, so they don't even have a product to be able to produce enough to meet the demand. That's how it is coming across.”

Connect with Emily and learn what she’s been duckin’ around with:

LinkedIn |Shermco Industries

Connect with Sarah and find out more about what the duck she’s up to

LinkedIn |Twitter |SourceDay |SourceDay.com

Had fun with the podcast? Leave us a like, share our content, and subscribe! See you soon on the next episode of What The Duck?!

The Lithium-Ion battery is central to energy transition. However, the key components within it come with a heavy environmental toll and are captive in an opaque supply chain dominated by a handful of Chinese companies. Western OEMs are now scrambling to meet demand for batteries while navigating these trade-offs. Governments are reacting to how the core components – Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt and Copper – are strategic resources and that Western miners alone cannot meet the demand. In this episode, explore the new book, Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, with its author Henry Sanderson – an award winning journalist and now executive editor at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

To find out more about HC and our talent advisory services in the energy & commodities sector visit www.hcgroup.global/hc-insider

To connect with our host Paul Chapman, you can find him at www.linkedin.com/in/paulchapmanhc/

In this episode, Eric Cesa is joined by ETAS colleagues, Tim Weber and Jason Simon to talk about the impact the software-defined vehicle will have on OEMs in the automotive industry, and what OEMs will (and should) expect from other industry players to help bring software-defined vehicles to the market. It's a big change for the auto industry - basing vehicles on software rather than hardware - and this conversation brings to light what we can expect during the transition.

Thanks for listening!

• Email us at: contact.us@etas.com
• Learn more about ETAS on our website
• Follow us on LinkedIn: @ETAS

In the last two episodes of this podcast, we spoke more broadly about the causes of the current chip shortages. In today's episode, we are diving more deeply into it, focussing on one of the industries most deeply affected - the Automotive Industry.

I invited Randy Kobat (@RandyKobat on Twitter) to come on the podcast to discuss this. Randy is a Senior Vice President at Cox Automotive, so he's supremely qualified to talk on this topic.

We had a great conversation discussing the impact of the chip shortages on automotive prices, steps the manufacturers are taking, and the future shape of the automotive industry.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

If you want to learn more about supply chain semiconductor shortages, don't forget to check out SAP's recently published Point of View paper on the topic, as well as my podcast with the author of the paper Jeff Howell.

And don't forget to also check out the 2021 MPI research on Industry 4.0 to find out how to increase productivity, revenues, and profitability for your operations. This global study examines the extent to which manufacturers deploy Industry 4.0 in their business and the benefits it brings.

And if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane! 

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I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
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• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
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Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.