August 11, 2026

In a recent episode of The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek, host Matt Susi sat down with Sam Russem, Vice President of Business Development at Kanoa. Manufacturing has spent the last decade chasing a single promise: connect the plant floor to the business, and everything gets better. Fewer surprises. Faster decisions. Real visibility into what is actually happening on the line instead of what a report says happened yesterday.

That promise is the throughline of a recent episode of The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek, featuring Sam Russem, Vice President of Business Development at Kanoa. Russem has spent more than 16 years working across PLC and SCADA based control systems, data historians, IoT devices, and MES platforms in industries ranging from food and beverage to pharmaceuticals to renewable energy.

For North American manufacturers, the conversation lands at a practical moment. Plants are under pressure to do more with the same headcount, meet tightening compliance requirements, and prove that new technology investments actually pay off. Russem’s perspective is that Smart Manufacturing is not about chasing the newest platform. It is about making sure data moves cleanly between the equipment on the floor and the systems that plan, track, and report on production. Get that foundation wrong, and every dashboard built on top of it is just a nicer looking version of bad information.

That foundation is where MES fits in. Rather than treating a Manufacturing Execution System as a shelf product, Russem’s work points toward MES as connective tissue, something that ties historians, control systems, and business platforms together so operators, quality teams, and leadership are all looking at the same truth. Done well, this reduces the manual reconciliation that eats up so many hours on a typical production floor, and it gives plant managers the kind of real time OEE and quality data that lets them fix problems while they are still small.

None of this happens by accident. It takes a clear plan for what data matters, which systems need to talk to each other, and how a plant intends to grow into more advanced analytics over time. That is true whether a company is standing up a greenfield facility or modernizing an existing one.

For manufacturers weighing where to start, the message is straightforward. Build the data foundation first. The advanced tools built on top of it, from predictive maintenance to AI driven insights, only deliver value once that groundwork is solid.

Listen to the full conversation with Sam Russem on The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.