Simplifying Collaborative Robots Through Webinars

Good morning. So I'm going to talk to you about robots. I'm the least marketeering person that's talking today, I think. I'm more of an engineering person, so I'm going to focus more on what we've presented with the webinars and how we've built them rather than the big how and why questions and tell you a bit about that. So I'm part of the UR Global Confidence Centre. We're a technical team under the sales part of the company, so we kind of do all of the technical stuff that's not in the R&D department. Well, I assume UR is more well-known amongst non-robot people in Denmark than it is in the rest of the world. I know at least within TwentyThree we're a nice case study. But we're a Danish company. We're headquartered in Odense. I'm actually based in our office in Singapore. I get to come through here fairly often and I've been doing technical communications this year. So I've been actually living in Asia for about ten years and learning to speak slowly and clearly to the people around me, which has kind of helped me with doing this webinar stuff this year. So I'll give you a little bit of background about our company, what we build, what we do, why we're using webinars and how we're doing it. And hopefully this is going to take twenty minutes or less. We'll see. Okay, so I've cut down our sort of history timeline to fit on one slide here. It was considerably larger than this, but this is basically our major product releases. We started in 2005. Three guys span out of SDU, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Sat in a dark room for three years building their first robot, which was released in 2008. And we've then added more products in the following years there. And up until 2015 we're a privately owned Danish company. We're now part of the Teradyne Group, who are based in Boston. They do a lot of kind of electronics testing. They're one of the biggest companies for that, and so our products kind of merge together quite well. And just this year we have launched a new generation of our products. And I'll tell you a bit more about what they are and what they do in a second. So we have a pretty big global presence now, expanded out of Denmark over the last ten years. So we have not necessarily our own offices, but we have partners in all of these different countries. And then we have offices in all of these locations, so clustered in North America, in Europe, and then around Asia. So I'm currently based in this one down here. So it's a bit of a flight, but this is nice and close to my home over here. So it's a short hop. Much easier to go from here to here than it is from here to here. And in the last month or so we've installed our 27,000th robot. So if you compare this to some of the other robots more traditional industrial robot companies, this is still a reasonably small number. But we've got in our type of robot, in our particular collaborative robot area, we have got more robots installed than all of the competition put together. So we've got a bit of a head start on that, and we intend to keep it that way. So a few stats about the company. We have offices in 16 countries, 23 of them in total. Over 30, possibly close to 40, and nationalities in the company now. So it's a pretty multicultural environment to work in. 600 plus employees, that's grown very sharply in the last couple of years since we've joined the Pterodine group. And we have that 60% market share. So the majority of collaborative robots that are out there working in factories around the world were built by us in Denmark. And what are we building? It's one of these, this arm that you can see here. It is a robot for industrial purposes, but we like to think they're a bit more friendly than your traditional robots. So generally, you might imagine that a robot cell looks like this, absolutely giant metal monster that's caged off from the rest of his colleagues in the factory, when in fact our robots more often than not work like this. Directly alongside people, much smaller, less powerful robot that can collaborate with people. So you can do work, you can do jobs together with people, and that kind of opens up a whole new range of what you can do with a robot. And we want it to kind of be used as a tool, so not a separate area of the factory that is a no-go for humans. It's something that the workers use to increase their efficiency. This slide shows differences between what we call the titles in this very much. We consider ours to be industrial as well, we'll make traditional industrial robots and collaborative industrial robots. And the main thing here is this difficult setup. Everyone considers robots to be hard to use. You need to have a degree in robotics or engineering in order to get started with it. That is not the case with ours. We pride ourselves on the ease of use. We want small companies that are not experienced in robotics at all to be able to pick up our product and start using it. And so we need to be able to access them and tell them what the product is and what they can do with it in order to achieve that. So what differentiates our products from competitors? Very fast to just kind of screw into place and get started programming it. Because they're very lightweight, the smaller one that you can see in the pictures here is only 11 kilograms. So you can kind of pick it up, walk to the other side of the factory and screw it down again. So you don't have to buy it and have it doing one thing for its whole lifetime. We expect companies that have kind of high mix production, they change what they're making very often, smaller but then the challenge is through the marketing to actually reach them and let them know that this is possible because when we go to trade shows, I talk to so many people that just think that this is not for them. We're not big enough for robots and we're trying to tell them that they are. The easy programming, so anyone can pick it up and use it. And then the safety aspects, we have a very comprehensive safety system. That means that you can actually run this robot right next to this person without having a kind of safety nightmare on your hands. So we do three different sizes of robot, three kilogram, five kilogram and ten kilogram, two different generations and they're used across a huge range of applications. Mainly different types of manufacturing, a lot of just putting a hand on the end of it, picking something up, taking it from one position into the next process is most common. But screw driving, gluing, welding, all different sorts of things. Basically your imagination is the limit of what you can stick on the end of this and get it to do. So how do webinars come into this? So we take a different approach to some of our competitors that have been around for a longer time that don't necessarily put that much information online. We need to get this out to people and let them know that this is for you. You're a small company, you don't have an automation team, you can still automate some of your processes. So we need to try to reach as many people and be as open as we can and share as much information to try to convince them that this is possible for them. So we've already got a few very well received tools on our website. Universal Robotics Academy is an e-learning program that we've put on here and it teaches people, steps, walks them through with a kind of interactive process of taking the robot out of the box all the way through to programming it and installing it. This is all completely free of charge on the website so we're again sharing as much information as we can to show people just how easy this is. Universal Robots Plus is kind of like our app store. We have collaborated with a lot of different third party robot companies who build plugins for our software to allow you to kind of plug and play their equipment together with ours. So it kind of takes the challenges out of the deployment and the integration of the product. And again, we give that API for developing those plugins out for free to those companies as well. Webinars really fit in with this. We want to give out as much information as we can to show people that this is an option for them. So our products, we really believe that they are very, very easy to use. You might not believe me having not used a robot before but I'm pretty sure that every single one of you in this room could very easily program a simple task with our robots. It's a case of pushing a button and pulling it from one place to another. It is very, very easy and we want to make more people believe that. So the more information we can share, the more open we can be about it, the more it helps. And webinars are a good way of doing that, trying to take something that seems complex and explain it in such a way that people believe they can do it. On the production of the webinars, so we've been doing this since the start of this year using the 23 platform. So we have done 10, number 11 is tomorrow morning, webinars this year. We selected the topics at the start of the year based on input from our sales team and technical team across the company, around the world. We are aiming pretty much all of these at first time users, so not requiring a huge amount of prior knowledge. So we really need to break down all of these topics as much as we can and make it just as easy to digest as possible. So we have done webinars on our technical resources, so those products on the website that I've shown you a second ago. I'll go through those in a bit more detail and kind of show how you sign up and how you use them, how you can maybe install some of those products to work together with our system. Safety is not necessarily the most straightforward. That's possibly the most challenging part of installing a robot that's not behind a safety cage. You need to be very, very sure that it's not going to injure people. So we've kind of talked a bit about how you do risk assessments and how you can get around that and how you can make sure that your system is safe. I've done a few explaining the new features. We do a couple of software releases a year. So we talk about what we've added in there and how to use those features. We've done a few sessions focusing on applications. I've been involved in building this application builder tool on our website this year, which is another kind of open tool that we have on the website. We've talked a bit about the different applications that you can build through that. I have been mainly the person doing most of the webinar stuff this year. I'm hoping that I'm going to get a bit more support on that next year. But I'm going to hand it over to the marketing people to manage it. I've kind of been the guinea pig this year, essentially, but it's been good. I think we've got some very positive feedback about what we've managed to share. So I've put together the content. I'll show you how I do that in a second. But with, for example, on the safety areas, I've talked to, found the people in our company that know more about it than I do and talked to them about it. What do I do when I'm building one of these webinars? I started off by standing in front of a white screen and recording a couple of generic intro sequences so they know who it is that's going to be talking to them for the next half an hour. So I copy those into each one of the webinars. I bought a compressor microphone for kind of podcast usage sort of thing. It's good enough. It's better than the sort of office headsets that we used before. That cuts out enough of the noise and makes it sound good enough. And I use kind of standard screen capture tools. A lot of what I present is either in our software user interface or coming straight from our website. So I normally just kind of capture what I'm doing on the screen and then add voiceover to it to explain what is happening. And the best tool that I could find to do it was actually PowerPoint. So we already have a very nice, clean, professional-looking set of PowerPoint slide templates. And so I just took those and added my content into those. So you can still see even if I'm doing something that doesn't, on this side, that doesn't directly show that it's a UR product, then we've always got the kind of the branding on the screen at all times as well alongside it. So I go through and put those in. And it's actually very easy to generate. So I do all of this in advance to try to cut out as many of the ums and ahs. And it's actually very easy to just put all of these videos into the slides and then you can export the whole video together as one MP4 file, which you then just drag into the 23 platform and broadcast that as the webinar with a Q&A session kind of on the end of it. I think maybe as I have got more used to the format, I could potentially look at doing them live as well. But this has worked pretty well this year. And then they stand alone as not, it doesn't just sound like a recording of a session that kind of was a bit all over the place. It's actually, it stands up on its own afterwards as a video that people are going to watch, not necessarily as part of the interactive session. So these are generally 25 minutes long. We've made them between 20 and 30 depending on how much content. And people tend to have a long enough attention span for that to be okay. So once I've exported the video, I can go to upload the new video in there and just drag it into the browser. And that will get that up online and then you can link it once you've created your event under the webinars menu here. It's very straightforward to create the event. Give it a name, give it a date. And then once you've done that, put a bit of information in about the speakers and description of what you're going to be talking about. Give it an event image. And then it also makes it very easy to automate all of the emails that you're going to send out to everyone that signs up. So I don't need to learn to use any separate tools for that. So it automatically will send an email once someone signs up to an event or send, you can schedule these reminders beforehand. So send one a day before, send one 15 minutes, half an hour before the event. So make sure as many of those people that have signed up will actually remember and come and tune in. And then the recordings after are automatically generated. I generally just use the video that I've exported. And then the page that people come and watch the webinar on, once it's completed, it becomes a page where they can watch the recording. But they get one link and if they miss it, they come back and they watch the recording instead. So I can publish my video to that event very, very easily. So handling all of that has been pretty straightforward. I've made a few promo videos for each of the sessions to try to get as many people to sign up as well. And my digital marketing colleague kind of promotes these to all the different social networks to try and get people involved and try to kind of show the friendliness of the product in these videos as well. So we've done one of those for most of the sessions we've done this year. And then as I said, the recordings, very easy to manage and publish but we have a, I think I forgot to put a screen capture in here, but we have like a webinar hub that allows you to view all of the previous sessions. And I think when someone finds this, they often do go through all of those sessions to try to absorb as much as they can. And then the analytics, very useful as well to kind of allow us to see how many people signed up. So what the conversion rate, how many people actually attended those sessions. And it ranks all of the sessions that we've done this year. At the start of the year, I was trying to do two sessions, one for Europe in the morning and then America's session in the evening. There weren't really enough questions to justify that. So I've kind of rolled it all into one. And so for the Q&A sessions, you can submit those questions directly through the portal when you're watching the webinar, or we leave a mailbox open after the session so anyone can submit any questions they have about any of the content anytime afterwards. We had some good ones this year. I'd hope that we can continue to promote this through our regional teams and increase these numbers throughout next year. But the ranking here allows us to see this is both the number of people that signed up for the original event and viewed it live, but also the people who've come in and watched the recording afterwards as well. So we can see, get an idea of what interests people the most and what we should be building more on next year. So that's been pretty handy. For next year, we are planning to roll this out to all of our regional marketing teams. So we've got marketing managers in pretty much all of our regions, so North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, China, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and India. So we're going to make their own webinar hub for each of those so they can translate either the content that we've already done or make sessions on topics that are more relevant in their particular region. And we're going to have not just my voice, so we're going to have more speakers and people who know more about different subject matter than I do so we can make it a bit more varied and potentially have someone, one person curating and different people presenting the different sessions throughout the year. And that's about the end of it. This is something from our application builder, a Christmas edition. I think we're going to use this a bit over the next month to wish we... Oh, there's a soundtrack as well. I muted that. This is a very expensive cookie cutter this is using here. That is essentially what we have been doing this year and I think we can build a lot more on this in the next year. I hope to get more people involved in this within our company and let them know just how much they can do with it. But it's been very positive. It's been a good journey this year and I look forward to making more of them next year. Thank you for getting up and coming.