John discusses trends and opportunities within the manufacturing shop floor. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as L2L.

John Davagian: I’m the CEO at L2L. I’ve been the CEO for just about six months. I’ve spent 20 plus years in the SaaS industry, primarily on the go-to-market side, and most recently, in significantly scaling a business called Salsify. L2L is a leading SaaS platform built for global manufacturers. At its core, we deliver a pragmatic, innovative, and transformative solution.

What that does is it enables manufacturers to achieve world-class performance. Think about this from the shop floor or the plant floor. What’s required is to digitally unify people, processes, and machines. That is what L2L has been doing. We’ve got a couple of hundred customers around the world. We’ve got millions of dispatches every year. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of users on our platform. As a business, we continue to scale. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down one level. Let’s do some use cases. When you say manufacturing SaaS from the shop floor, could you go a bit more in detail and show us some use cases to understand this better?

John Davagian: One is our ability to reduce unplanned downtime. When you think about downtime in a manufacturing facility, that could be catastrophic. Our solution enables maintenance teams, in some regard, to be more proactive and not get stuck in reactive mode. How do you perform, and when do you perform preventative maintenance so you’re not constantly in reactive mode?

Manufacturers that are able to break that cycle become infinitely more efficient and more productive. When they become more productive, their operating efficiency goes up, margins go up. That’s one use case. A second use case would be our ability to simplify the complexity around work order management. A lot of what happens on a plant floor within a manufacturing organization is driven by work orders.

You may have seen this if you’ve been on a manufacturing floor. There are whiteboards and clipboards. A lot of the work orders are very paper-driven. Paper-driven processes are error-prone and inefficient. We’re essentially digitizing that process. It incorporates a mobile aspect. Think of technologies that are critical to driving efficiencies. We all have mobile phones, but what about the tablets that are available on the shop floor? How does moving to the cloud enable you to take better advantage of somebody’s mobile technologies?

A third use case is how we break down the friction and silos among the departments that are on the plant floor. You’ve got your operators, your maintenance tech, and engineering. How do we break down the barriers and unify the shop floor with a standard dataset? Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is create a problem-solving culture across these different departments so they’re continually improving.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that you are providing the work order management software for shop floors?

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