John Barnhart

The users are the ones that have to know how to do it, know how to use it. But they’re also the ones who have to sign off on and say, yeah, this is right. This is going to be able to help me do my job better, or it’s going to help me replace this antiquated product we’ve been using for 20 years. So if you can do that really well, I think it can be successful.

Sam Donaghey

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped thousands of growing businesses build scalable systems on the Salesforce and HubSpot platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and joining me for today’s conversation is FSM’s Director of Growth Michael Johnson.

Michael, it’s great to have you here today.

Michael Johnson

Always great to be here, Sam. Excited about today’s podcast.

Sam Donaghey

Same here. And in today’s episode, we’re diving into one of the hottest topics in manufacturing, which is technology. So whether it’s driving efficiency or unlocking innovation or adapting to the latest trends, technology has really become a cornerstone for staying competitive in the manufacturing industry.

Our guest today is John Barnhart. John is the Chief Information Officer at American Cast Iron Pipe Company, and he’s got a few decades of experience at the company. John has spearheaded the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, helping American Cast Iron Pipe remain a leader in its field. So, John, we’re absolutely thrilled to have you here today on the podcast.

John Barnhart

Thank you, Sam, and thank you, Michael. Really look forward to the opportunity.

Sam Donaghey

So, John, let’s start with your journey. You’ve been at American Cast Iron Pipe Company for quite some time now. Can you tell us a little bit about your career path and how you actually became a CIO?

John Barnhart

Sure, Sam. So I began my career here at American in 1996 as an entry-level programmer analyst, not too far removed from Auburn. And my expectation was that I would get a few years of experience and move on to bigger and better things. But I really found a lot of great opportunity here at American. We were going up against Y2K at the time, and I was afforded the opportunity to travel to subsidiary locations in Texas and Minnesota. Got to work on software implementations and migrations there. Got to meet a lot of great people and understand their processes.

As we were wrapping that effort up in 1999, we announced the creation of a new division, American SpiralWeld Pipe Company. And that first plant was being built in South Carolina. I had the opportunity to meet the business systems project lead and spent a year and a half installing our ERP system over in South Carolina.

I came back to Birmingham — there had been some faces that changed, some retired, some new. They didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who they were. But I went into an application development manager role, and in 2008 became manager of the department. In 2012 I became director and had basically played that role since then. My responsibilities really haven’t changed, but in 2021 I made the change to CIO. So it’s been a good run so far.

Sam Donaghey

Can you give us a brief overview — who is American Cast Iron Pipe Company? What do you guys do?

John Barnhart

Absolutely. So we’re a large industrial manufacturer. We were founded in 1905 by John Eagan. At the time, the idea of a cast iron pipe company was brought forward by an individual named Charlotte Blair. And as you can imagine, back then females really didn’t start large companies. So Charlotte got with Mr. Eagan and several other investors and started American Cast Iron Pipe Company, and we produced and shipped our first pipe into Atlanta, Georgia, in late 1905. And ever since then, we’ve been growing in the infrastructure industry.

In the 60s, we bought our first valve and hydrant company, American Valve and Hydrant, based in Beaumont, Texas. We also acquired a company just south of Birmingham — Specification Rubber Products — they produced all of our rubber gaskets that we shipped with our ductile iron pipe. And we further expanded, putting our first steel pipe mill — which serves the oil and natural gas industries — in the 1960s. Expanded to a second mill in the 1980s. In the late 80s, we bought a second valve and hydrant company called Waters Company up in South Saint Paul, Minnesota. And as I mentioned earlier, in the late 90s we created American SpiralWeld Pipe Company, which now has three plants — the initial plant in Columbia, South Carolina, one in Michigan, and our latest and greatest plant in Paris, Texas.

So we serve the water, wastewater, oil, natural gas, and firefighting industries and have been doing so for quite some time.

Michael Johnson

You’ve just talked about a tremendous amount of vertical integration and also a lot of variance in products. So there’s a lot of different things being manufactured and a significant supply chain aspect as well. Could you talk a little bit about some of the unique challenges in a company that is that large, that vertically integrated, and that has that wide a breadth of product? From a technology perspective, what are some of the considerations and strategies you’ve had to employ to make sure you guys continue to be successful?

John Barnhart

Yeah. So if you kind of look at our roadmap over the years, we’ve traditionally grown through acquisition, and our management team’s philosophy has been to identify companies that complement our products and make us more diverse. And in most cases, we are not the experts in those products — but the companies that we acquire are. It has been our leadership team’s philosophy and strategy to leave those companies kind of alone. Let them do what they’re good at.

We decide from a corporate perspective how integrated we want to be with those companies. With some of them, we’re very, very integrated. For example, the ductile iron pipe product that we produce here in Birmingham and the valve and hydrant products that we produce in Beaumont, Texas, and South Saint Paul, Minnesota — those both serve our waterworks customers. So there’s a good reason to integrate those so we can share information, share product demand, and see what’s coming down the pipeline from a Salesforce perspective.

But on the flip side — a good example is American Castings. They’re based in Oklahoma and they produce commercial castings for the agriculture industry, for the John Deeres and Caterpillars of the world. And there’s really not a whole lot of need to heavily integrate between corporate and American Castings. They kind of sit outside and do what they’re good at.

So we take a very close look at what industries they serve and whether we can benefit from any type of integration. If so, we certainly address it and take it on. If not, we just leave them alone and let them continue to do what they do best.

Sam Donaghey

John, you touched on some interesting points around integrating related businesses. If someone’s listening to this and was maybe on the fence about whether they should bring data sets together or create visibility across two platforms, what are some of the considerations for return on that kind of effort that they should think about?

John Barnhart

I think one of the first things you really need to think about — depending on the size of the organization, and I’m thinking about some smaller acquisitions we’ve had even recently — is do you want to add that additional overhead to that company? I have tended to take a very conservative approach to that, and others maybe not so much. But you really have to think about it. How many employees do they have? What are they doing on the shop floor? How many folks do they have in their office environments? Are they running their business well with the systems they have in place today? Or do we need to inject some of the technology we have into their business to improve their efficiencies?

That’s one of the things I really like to focus in on. I don’t think it’s just an arbitrary yes — we just acquired someone and we need to build them into our systems. You need to be really, really careful about that from an employee morale perspective. And the overhead perspective is very important.

Michael Johnson

In your mind, is there one piece of tech that you think every company you acquire should typically adopt? One standout piece?

John Barnhart

Absolutely — our security posture. Cybersecurity is just — golly, the bad actors are two steps ahead of us almost all the time. Generally, we’re acquiring smaller companies, and they have not had quite the investment in security tools, whether that’s software, hardware, or third-party services. So that’s one of the first things I look at and generally put in place very, very quickly.

Sam Donaghey

I think cybersecurity has been a big shift in the industry in the past couple of years. And going back, I can think of other big shifts too — e-commerce in the early 2000s, data security and so on. But John, you’ve been in your position for 28 years. You’ve seen a good bit. What are some of the major shifts in technology that have been milestones for you?

John Barnhart

It’s been a lot. From an IT perspective — we just talked about cybersecurity, and that’s obviously a significant change for all businesses over the last handful of years. But I’ve also seen a significant amount of technology and robotics put on the shop floor, which has significantly helped maintain production consistency while also reducing costs. And we have more goals in the future to continue doing that. You can imagine it’s fairly challenging to attract young, talented labor that wants to work in a very, very harsh and laborious environment. So robotics helps complement that, and we certainly want to incorporate technology wherever we can.

Another thing — we’ve been engaged with our sales and logistics teams for a number of years now to create systems that generate competitive advantage. If you look back 20-plus years, that just didn’t exist. And I think that’s really a testament to not only our IT team, but also the business leaders over those groups who understand the value of IT and how it can contribute to overall customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, that’s who we need to satisfy — our end customer. And if we’re not doing that, then we need to reset.

Michael Johnson

That’s fantastic, John. So you’ve spoken about technology creating return and adding real value to the organization — both from a consistency and quality standpoint in production automation, but also in terms of competitive advantage. Can you talk more about how technology can create measurable returns within a manufacturing organization?

John Barnhart

A lot of it has to do with efficiency improvements, and those can lead to significant cost reduction — specifically, how we can take on higher demand for our products without increasing headcount, which obviously increases costs. Our division leaders are hyper-focused on just that, and we partner with them to set expectations for our software, hardware, and integration partners.

For example, we were on a call just in the last ten days or so with a group we’re working with to roll out a new CPQ system for our ductile iron pipe product line. Our director of sales and our director of project management for that group were laying out their expectations, and everybody is on the same page. So when we get to a point where we want to review what they’ve delivered, they already know that if it doesn’t meet X, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board.

Automating repeatable, mundane processes also helps with these efficiency gains — you can remove manual interventions and obviously the mistakes that go along with them.

I would also say getting the right information to the right people is very critical. We have not mastered this yet by any stretch, but we have really intelligent users and leaders who know what they need. We just have to work with them to determine the best mechanism to deliver that. Is it a dashboard delivered in Salesforce? Is it an automated email that pops up first thing in the morning? Or does it need to have some drill-down capability so someone seeing a number can dig into it a little more?

We’ve had a data warehouse for many years, but one of our goals next year is to develop a long-range plan for our data analytics journey and how best to accommodate all areas of the business.

Michael Johnson

You and I have talked before about when to look for a partner and when to rely on in-house expertise. What value can the right partner bring to an implementation or technology investment effort within your organization?

John Barnhart

So we obviously have been partners for a long time with Fast Slow Motion, and I’ll just use that as an example. We don’t have unlimited human capital or human resources. It has been my strategy to identify the right third-party partners and integrators to complement our team. And that’s just what we did in 2017. We were evaluating a couple of new CRM packages — we’d had what I would just say were not complete failures, but they just didn’t totally meet our end user sales expectations.

So in 2017, we said, you know what, we’re going to look at Salesforce and we’re going to look at Oracle CRM. We’re an Oracle shop, so we looked at their CRM package. And as you know, Salesforce and Fast Slow Motion came out on top. You all have been a very, very good business partner for a long time.

When identifying a partner like Fast Slow Motion, we lean very, very heavily on our other business partners who have had experience in this area. We reached out to a local business partner — we knew they were using Salesforce but did not know they were partners with Fast Slow Motion. Went to visit them, heard the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that’s when I first heard about Fast Slow Motion.

We’ve been engaged with your team ever since, and we work on a lot of really good things. We don’t have the expertise that Fast Slow Motion provides, so we lean very heavily on them to complement that human resource requirement. And we expect a very good partnership moving forward.

Sam Donaghey

Do you see any particular trends or innovations now or in the future that are making a big difference?

John Barnhart

I do, Sam. Beyond robotics, I think the latest buzzwords these days are AI and ML. We started our AI and machine learning journey actually this year and are starting to see some positive benefits from that. We wanted to start kind of small and have some projects we could actually get our hands around. And knowing what we didn’t know, we actually came up with some fairly complex projects.

We started a couple of those and realized they were probably a little more than we could bite off at the time. So we put those on the sideline, had some other ideas and opportunities come from the user community, delivered on those, and now we’ve picked some of those more complex opportunities back up and are identifying a partner. We’ve identified AWS — Amazon — as a really, really good partner for our AI and ML journey. They’ve been with us step by step. Our data scientist meets with them every week on the initiatives he’s working on.

We just did a demo of an automation project for our valve and hydrant sales group about a week ago, and they’re very, very encouraged. It’s essentially an automation to evaluate what we have configured to put on order for a customer versus what they actually specified. So it’s reading through a PDF document that we generally receive by email from the customer, or we have an output of our configuration from our CPQ system for that product line. The algorithm reviews and compares those and highlights areas that may be incorrect.

We’ve already identified one situation where that could have prevented producing some product we ultimately couldn’t sell to a customer because it was configured incorrectly. So there’s a lot of opportunity for AI for us — and obviously for others — moving into the future.

Michael Johnson

How do you typically help your team adapt to those bigger shifts in the technology that you adopt?

John Barnhart

That’s a challenge, Sam. We really try to focus on change management, and as you all know, change is hard — it’s really, really hard. We’re change agents. We’re the ones out there in these user departments talking to them about how technology can help them.

Sometimes a division leader says, we need something to help us do X. So we create a team, go out, identify a product, bring it in — and then guess what? Even some of those team members in that division, even when the leader said we’re going to make this change, they’re not 100% on board. Because it’s hard.

So I’m not saying we’re experts at it, but change management is extremely important. From a communication standpoint, ensuring that the end users understand what the expectation is and getting them involved early is critical. And it seems to me that in the past, a lot of folks get caught up in design and development and don’t leave enough time at the end of a project to do sufficient training and user acceptance testing.

That’s really what I’m talking about — the training and user acceptance testing. The users are the ones that have to know how to use it. But they’re also the ones who have to sign off and say, yeah, this is right. This is going to help me do my job better, or it’s going to help me replace this antiquated product we’ve been using for 20 years. So if you can do that really well, I think you can be successful.

Michael Johnson

John, do you find that involving the team in that process helps create buy-in and adoption?

John Barnhart

I think it does for some. I mean, you have some users that are just stubborn and they say, anything you bring to me is not going to work. But you’ve got to find the ones that are good change agents who will support you. Those are the folks that say, hey, what I’m doing today just doesn’t make sense. It made sense ten years ago, but our business has changed, our customer demand has changed, and new technologies have come out. So you’ve got to find those individuals that will assist you and help you along the way, and you have to get them involved early.

From a Salesforce perspective, we went through several months of configuration for our different sales divisions to make the platform work the way they needed it to serve their customers. I still think you need to train them fairly early, even on a base out-of-the-box package, just so they can start to see what the screens look like, what the field names are, what they have to get accustomed to and learn. And then they can help you build and configure what they need the system to do for them. At the end of the day, I think you’re going to have a much more successful rollout.

Sam Donaghey

You mentioned AI earlier. Looking forward at a macro level — especially in manufacturing — where do you see it having the biggest impact?

John Barnhart

Right now, I see it automating manual, repeatable tasks and allowing users to ask for internal information and get results much more efficiently than a manual search.

One of the applications we rolled out this year basically scans all of our historical customer dissatisfaction reports — what we call CDRs. We don’t like to admit it, but sometimes we let a product out that shouldn’t have been shipped. So we get a call from a customer saying, hey, I’ve got a leak in a 24-inch fast joint. We bring that product back, do our analysis on it, and always take care of the customer and the need in the field. But we have all of this information that was previously stored in SharePoint and Word docs. SharePoint has an okay search, but not the best.

So we fed all of those documents into Amazon, and it’s basically a ChatGPT-like prompt. Anyone in the technical services group can ask: where have all my 24-inch fast joint leak issues been in the past, and what were the results of our analysis? And within seconds they have links to all the individual documents, a few summary sentences from each document, and can dive into more detail. Just that alone saves an incredible amount of time and makes these folks much more efficient.

Long term — and this is selfish for me because it’s what I want to see — I’m very hopeful that AI can assist in very complex planning for the shop floor to meet customer demand and meet it on time. This is especially relevant for our engineer-to-order products, managing multiple customer demands simultaneously, multiple jobs going through the shop floor at the same time, ensuring they meet quality expectations, and having those products ready to ship when the customer wants them. We have planning tools today, but I feel like they’re kind of holding us back — we’re not as efficient as we need to be and as we can be. I fully expect some of the larger software companies to start incorporating AI into their planning tools, and I look forward to seeing that.

Michael Johnson

What would you say are the biggest challenges in bringing AI into manufacturing?

John Barnhart

Well, I think — and this is probably broader than manufacturing — you certainly have to educate your users on what AI is, what acceptable use is, and what is not. The first thing we did when ChatGPT hit the streets was create an acceptable use policy around AI. And another piece of that was we identified some training in our learning management system and required every employee, every user to take that video course.

It basically explained the difference between private and public AI. And if you’re using a public open AI chatbot like ChatGPT or whatever tool you want to use, you’ve got to be really, really careful about what you put in that prompt. I can see it would be very enticing to say, hey, I’ve got this trade show coming up next week and we’ve got this new joint coming out, and I need to create a presentation and I’m out of time — so I’m going to feed a lot of knowledge and IP on that joint into ChatGPT to create a PowerPoint. Well, that’s very, very dangerous, because now all that information is out in the wild. That’s very important to understand — the risks associated with AI.

But I also don’t want to be a deterrent to using AI, because it can be very, very incredibly powerful in reducing inefficiencies. So — education. And if you can create a private internal ChatGPT that’s internal to your business, that’s great. You can mine all your information no matter what system it’s in, and you can take extreme advantage of that.

Sam Donaghey

If someone’s just going down the journey of leveraging AI, what advice would you give them on just getting started?

John Barnhart

Well, I kind of mentioned it a few minutes ago, but I do think the most important thing is ensuring that your internal users understand the AI boundaries — what is acceptable and what’s not. And once you go down that route, you still have to continue to educate your employees. We want to make sure they understand, hey, you need to be very, very careful about how you use these tools, particularly with company information. That would probably be the first thing I would suggest anybody do — just be informative with your users. Our acceptable use policy has a clause in it that if you don’t follow it, it can result in termination. We haven’t had to do that yet and we don’t intend to. But you’ve got to make sure users know this can be pretty dangerous.

Secondly, I would say you have to keep security in the forefront. So anything that you start to look at automating with AI or ML and you’re going to deploy it in some form or fashion — you’ve got to make sure it’s secure. Get your security team involved early and keep them engaged often, and I think you’ll be okay.

Michael Johnson

John, we’ve talked about security, integrating related businesses, automating in production, and getting data to the right people. If you had to sum up your technology strategy in three takeaways for other business leaders, what would that be?

John Barnhart

Oh gosh. So our vision here at American within IT is to support and grow the business of American by providing quality information technology systems. There are several components to an overall strategy, but I would say the top three are:

First, a cloud-first mentality. Our goal over time is to push as much technology as we can outside of our walls — either to a true cloud provider or a hosted environment. We do a lot of both, and we’ve made a lot of great strides in that area over the last 10 to 15 years. This really helps us support our business, particularly our sales divisions, as they desire a single pane of glass to manage partnerships with customers. As you know, Michael, we have Salesforce for all of our front-end opportunities, contacts, and high-level quoting. But we also pull a lot of our ERP and other business data back into Salesforce so that our folks in the field aren’t just looking at future opportunities — they also have visibility into current orders and any outstanding dissatisfaction reports they need to be aware of before they talk to a customer. That’s a big win for us.

Second, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Like I said, we initiated that journey this year and we’re beginning to see results. I’m very excited about seeing what we can do in the future. It will play a key role in further enhancing our user experiences and minimizing inefficient processes.

And lastly, scalability and flexibility to meet changing business demands. We aren’t there yet. I think our cloud-first mentality can help us get there, but we have several projects going on right now that will continue to move us in that direction. It’s a long journey and we’re not done yet — and never will be. But those are probably the top three.

Sam Donaghey

How do you ensure you’ve got really accurate and reliable data across a company that old?

John Barnhart

Oh, Sam, that is a good question. We have some product drawings that probably date back to the 1960s. They’re in paper form. If it’s for a product we no longer produce, it’s not that big a deal. But for some products we still produce, we’ve got to be able to support our customers and their needs in the field. So if a customer calls us and says, hey, I’ve got a hydrant in the ground and it needs this part, and it was manufactured in 1972 — well, we’ve got to understand the build structure for that hydrant from 1972, because the parts we’re making today for our new hydrants may not work or fit. So it’s a massive challenge.

For that particular example, we have drawing systems. We’re now into 3D CAD, and you can tie those old drawings in — you can scan them in and convert them into a more upgraded format that can be maintained going forward. We do that.

From a business systems perspective, we still use a legacy ERP system for a few of our divisions. We obviously have purge policies associated with that — we don’t want to keep anything we don’t have to — but we still keep a fair amount of information. We’re on a journey to move to JD Edwards from Oracle for ERP. We have three divisions on that now, and we’re working on optimizing one of those divisions because it’s not as efficient as it should be. Hopefully we’ll see marked improvement in that in 2025, and then we’ll start to look at some of the other divisions as well.

So we’ve got ERP business data in Oracle, some in an AS/400 DB2 database, we have Salesforce information, and we have all these other business systems — and that’s actually part of the data analytics effort I mentioned earlier that will start next year. We have so much data in so many places. We do a fair job today and have the tools available to pull information from multiple sources and present it. But to be as efficient as we can and accommodate as many users as we can, we’ve got to get not only sales, manufacturing, and finance involved — we need to get human resources involved, technical services involved, and our operational excellence team involved, because they all need access to that data. So that’s going to be a fun project. It’s not going to be easy, but I look forward to seeing the results.

Sam Donaghey

John, thank you so much for sharing your insights on technology, manufacturing, and what’s ahead for the industry. Before we wrap up, we always like to ask our guests for a piece of advice or a quote that’s inspired their journey. Do you have one you’d like to share with our listeners today?

John Barnhart

Yes. And my girls know this one too. I’m a big fan of Tom Petty, and in one of his songs — “Crawling Back to You” — one of the lines is: most things I worry about never happen anyway.

Sam Donaghey

That wraps up today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. A massive thank you to John Barnhart for sharing his wisdom and expertise. If you’d like to learn more about American Cast Iron Pipe Company and the incredible work that they’re doing, visit american-usa.com.

And as always, thank you for listening to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. Remember to subscribe on your favorite platform and check out past episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast. And if you’ve got a topic or a question you’d like us to cover, you can reach out at fastslowmotion.com/podcastfeedback.