Expert Interview: How Thomas Flude Is Disrupting Manufacturing with Engineers Insight

British manufacturing has a reputation for being behind the times when it comes to technology, Engineers Insight is here to change that.Launched in 2023, the app is “a central point for product launches, documentation, forums, FAQs and direct access to the world’s largest industrial manufacturers.” Thomas Flude, Co-Founder of Engineers Insight, has spent years taking the app from an idea to a resource hub, working with the likes of Siemen, KUKA and SMC.We had the opportunity to talk to Tom about the growth of Engineers Insight, bringing robots into classrooms and the three words he lives by.

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How did you get into engineering in the first place?

My family were all engineers, my nan, grandad, my dad and my uncle. They were machine tool fitters so they would take apart machine tools, service them and fit them back together.It was very heavy, oily and dirty work. Even now, my dad’s 60 and he still stinks of oil. The thought that was always ingrained in my mind as a child was that I didn’t really want to smell like oil. They always told me that there’s no money in mechanical engineering so if I’m going to do it then it’s better to go into electrical.I left school and I didn’t want to do A Levels, I was sick of school so I just worked part-time.  I thought that I was going to go and work behind a bar in Tenerife, that was going to be my life.

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My godparent, a close friend of my dad, worked for Schneider Electric and they were taking on their first apprentices. He brought a demo case home from work and showed me what Schneider does.I thought, “All right, I’ll give that a go,” and I got the apprenticeship. I ended up working at Schneider as an application engineer and they paid for me to do a HNC.

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Image courtesy of Tom Flude.

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So what made you fall in love with the industry?

I did a BTEC Level 3 before I joined Schneider, which was a bit of a gap fill before I went into engineering. But at college, you don’t really see any products or anything, it was very “theory” so that didn’t entice me. It was only when I got to Schneider and saw how cool the products are and how amazing manufacturing is as an industry that I thought, “Yeah, this is probably my fit.”

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I was in a lucky position that there was only one senior guy left so he took me under his wing in the drives department. I was out on the road every day, I was commissioning drives and delivering training courses so I was in the deep end very quickly.

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Then I was stuck, I was hooked.

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Why you take the leap and establish Engineers Insight?

I left Schneider and I had a very brief spell at one of Schneider’s biggest distributors, BPX, and that was my first move into sales.

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Then I was approached to work for a company called Yasakawa which is a global robotics company. I was there for four years and whilst I was there I saw an invoice from one of the magazines for £10,000 and I thought, “Who reads this?”

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I couldn’t find digital marketing options out there for us to spend our budget on, so I came up with this concept for a free mobile app and got together with a school friend of mine who’s a software developer.

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That was 2019 – it took a long time to develop, trying to work out what this thing would do and look like. It got to a point where I had the interest of Siemens, KUKA, Festo, SMC and all these big names that I had told that I was doing this. I was still in the day job so I had engineers on shop floors that I was telling about this and they were giving me their feedback on what they wanted it to do.

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Then it got to this tipping point where people started paying us to do it and then we thought, “Okay, we really need to make this possible now.”

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At the end of my tenure at Yasakawa, I jumped to Cognex, believing that Engineers Insight was going to happen. Through the year at Cognex, it started to gain some momentum to the point where I needed to tell Cognex about it because I needed to speak to their competitors.

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I went full-time in Engineers Insight in November 2022 and we didn’t do our beta testing until May 2023.

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From idea to now it’s been five long years and we’ve only been in the market for a year. It feels like we’ve been around forever but no one knows about us yet.

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How would you describe Engineers Insight to someone who doesn’t know anything about it?

Firstly, it’s a free mobile app but what we’re creating is a central platform for industry for both sides of the market.

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The first side is the manufacturer of products or services. We want those companies to be able to take that product or service to market and not have to rely on printed media anymore. They can post a product on a newsfeed that is there forever, the documents are attached.We give you live analytics about how many people view it, how many people watch the video content, download manuals or send enquiries. If you want to launch a product, we can push notify everyone’s phones which, in every other industry, happened years ago but we just seem to be way behind the curve.

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On the other hand, for the user, or anyone in manufacturing, you can have everything in one place.

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If you want to learn about the latest products you have to subscribe to five different magazines or you rely on salespeople to be knocking on your door every day in a world where you don’t have the time. Now engineers can go to one place where they can find the latest products, watch the videos, bookmark products and essentially aggregate documents per machine.

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Engineers were telling us that documents were a big issue because they update them so often so as soon as you save them they’re obsolete.

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Even if you’re an avid Siemens user, for example, Siemens’s mall is that big that you’re never going to find what you’re looking for. If Siemens’s employees struggle then an engineer on the shop floor that’s under pressure is going to struggle, so that was an issue that we were trying to fix.

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Now Engineers Insight is starting to grow. It was going to be a marketing tool because that was my issue, how we were getting products to market seemed obsolete. Now, because we’re starting to grow and we’re getting feedback all the time it’s developing into a resource hub.

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Product, videos, documents… We’ll have exclusivity by two big recruiters so Engineers Insight will be the only place that they can post their jobs. That will push all of their candidate databases into the app so it will help us grow our user base which is fantastic.

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But also, for the users of the app, it’s more engagement in terms of things to use it for.After that, there will be a distributor feature where a user can find a product but also go through to the certified distributors and then add that product to a basket and purchase it.

Image courtesy of Thomas Flude.

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So it seems like the product has really changed since you came up with the idea five years ago. Have you always known that the product was going to grow and evolve?

It’s just happened organically. Honestly, five years ago I didn’t know what it was or what it would be. I thought, this marketing thing, I’d make a little bit of money out of it instead of spending the money on this magazine and spending it with us but actually it’s not about that.

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It’s about creating this central place that needs to exist, it should have existed a long time ago. Too many people sat on their laurels I think and now I’m upsetting a lot of people because I’m disrupting that.

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Oh really? You’re upsetting people?

Oh yeah, of course. There are people who have been in the industry for twenty or thirty years that have always made their money this way and now there’s a new kid on the block with something different.

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And people don’t like change, that’s a big issue with automation, that’s a big issue with what we’re doing.

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And you’re here to change things so naturally, there’s a bit of friction there.

Yes, so the product itself has grown but the brand is developing into its own thing as well.

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We kind of found ourselves in this education world where young people are not truly linked to manufacturing - universities and colleges aren’t really connected to industry.

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If the students have the app and they have access to industry then they can see the products and the brands they’re expected to know about and ask questions through the app. Then they’ve got a head-start before they get their jobs.I got introduced to this guy who was very very high up at a very very big brand that said to me, “It wouldn’t work for me, Tom, because I already know every engineer in the UK.” And I had to bite my tongue and say, “Oh yeah, no worries.”

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I went home that evening, I emailed every college and university that does engineering courses and said, “We’re building a free app, that gives your students access to industry. I’ll come in, I’ll do tech talks, we’ll bring our partners in we’ll show you products.”

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We’ve done college events and sixth forms and we sponsor the engineering society at Warwick University. We’ve taken robots and speakers from companies like Siemens, Yaskawa, and Igus. The students can relate to what they’re learning about instead of just videos or a lecturer in a lecture hall just telling them what it is.

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We would like every young person who comes into industry to know Engineers Insight, they’ll have used it for something to learn about industry before they get the job.

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Then also, we’ve got to get actual engineers to download it and use it as well that’s a challenge in itself.

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British manufacturing has a reputation for being slow to adopt new technology, do you think that’s why engineers might be slow to start using the App?

Yeah, it is.

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We’ve been trying to do a lot of work around credibility because when you are the new kid on the block and you’re just sending out cold messages asking people to download something, people don’t, which is understandable.

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We’re in the process of signing a partnership with Automate UK to endorse us to the market as a central resource platform, that gives us the credibility we’re looking for.

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The brands we’re working with, the likes of Siemens, give us some credibility but we also need these third-party organisations to back what we’re doing.

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You must be really plugged into conversations happening around the industry what for you are themes that keep coming up?

Skill shortage, it’s in every conversation that I’m in.

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I get passionate about things very easily which is probably to my detriment because it takes attention off of what I should be doing but it’s the reason that I got involved in education. I was fed up with being at all these talks and watching old people talk about what young people want. There’s nothing worse. What they should be doing is asking young people about what young people want.

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I was at an event where they had multiple panels throughout the day and I know at that place they have hundreds of apprentices. There wasn’t a single apprentice on any of those panels.

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They could have saved the whole day, all these twenty-odd people talking for hours, by just asking an apprentice, “Why did you choose to be an engineer? Why did your friends not choose to be an engineer?”

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The audience would have got more out of that than they would from people in their fifties and sixties talking about what an eighteen-year-old wants to do with their life.

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Two weeks ago I organised an event at Arden Academy, for Years 9 and 10. I took four partners with us and we had different classrooms and they all did different “show and tell” sort of workshops.

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In the morning, I did an assembly to 300 Year 7s about how cool manufacturing is.

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I don’t get anything out of that for Engineers Insight but someone needs to do something different. We need more people talking to kids about how cool this industry is. We don’t need more panels talking to people who are already in industry, talking about how cool it is.

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Image courtesy of Thomas Flude.

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What have young people said to you about what they think of manufacturing?

I asked the year sevens to shout out words that they associate with being an engineer and it was “toolbox” and “overalls” and “dirty” and “engines” so it’s a perception thing, we need to change perceptions.

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When we do the college and sixth form work, we take in a robot, it’s programmed on a laptop and you can do that remotely. These kids realise, “It’s not dirty, it’s quite cool, intuitive, interesting and easy to use.” Getting that across to a mass audience is the challenge but we need to do it.

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There was an event at the NEC run by Engineering UK. I went along this year and I think they got 20,000 schoolkids in one week. I walked around and there was no real engineering there.It was STEM but it was very loose engineering, lots of Play-Doh and lolly sticks.

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Marshmallows and Spaghetti?

Yeah, things like that.

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I said to the organiser, “Where’s the engineering? How are we exciting kids about manufacturing?”

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I’m waiting on a quote for the biggest stand that they do and we’ll do an Engineers Insight stand. We’ll just get all of our partners to split the cost and they can all bring robots and AGVs and things that move.

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We can all talk to kids and say that actually, this industry is f****ing cool.

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As I said, we want every young person to know Engineers Insight as a brand. Even if the people we talk to are too young to download it, even if they become an engineer in five to ten year’s time, they’ll remember that that’s where they got the inspiration from and that’s pretty cool.

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What keeps you going with Engineers Insight?

Accountability keeps you going as an entrepreneur. You get to a point where you have to tell people what you’re doing. And I’m always chasing the next thing to tell the person when they ask me.

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It got to a point a few years ago when obviously my wife and a few close friends knew but then my friends knew and my family knew about it so every time you’d see them they were like, “How’s Engineers Insight? What are you doing now? Are you rich? Are you a millionaire?”

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That accountability keeps you on the right track. When you get some harsh nos that’s rough.

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I write newsletters every week and it’s about how sh*t my week’s been and it’s really authentic. Some of them are really to the bone. And I got feedback from a potential customer that my tone of voice doesn’t suit their brand so they no longer want to move forward with working with me.

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Stuff like that hits hard. That’s the point where you think… “What’s the point? Why am I trying to do this?”

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It took a while but then I started asking my customers why they work with me. The feedback was, they bought in before this product existed because they believed that I was the right person to deliver on it.

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You need to have some sort of feedback loop that keeps you on track that’s not a close friend or your wife saying, “This is amazing” because they’re not in it. Things like that keep you motivated or stop you from throwing the towel in I should say because you get very close to throwing the towel in sometimes.

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Image courtesy of Thomas Flude.

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How do you encourage young people to get excited about manufacturing? What about it is exciting to you that you want to pass on?

With a career in manufacturing, you are at the forefront of technology. The reality is that it’s never been a better time to become an engineer. The skill shortage is driving salaries, manufacturing pays above the average wage in the UK anyway.

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We are so in demand that there’s a market for us now as workers and that’s only going to get stronger because of skills shortages. We need to automate quicker but with that comes more technical jobs and possibilities.

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The more robots we sell, the more people we need to integrate them and service them.

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In that Year 7 assembly, I said that manufacturing pays well and technology’s fantastic VR, AR, AI whatever you’re interested in, manufacturing has it. It’s not dirty anymore, you need to change your perception of what manufacturing is now.

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I asked the kids if they had any questions and this little hand went up and he said, “How much can I earn?”

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I said, “How much do you want to earn?”

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And he said, “100k!” and he was laughing to his mate.

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I said, “Yeah, there is more than the possibility that you will earn 100k. There are that many jobs in manufacturing that you could potentially earn 100k a year.”

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As soon as I said yeah, they were like, “Oh okay.” It’s just opening their eyes to the fact that you could be anything.

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At Warwick University we did a Tech-Talk with Siemens and I took a product manager to talk about a product line, a graduate to talk about her career development and a sales manager. The sales manager spoke about how being an engineer doesn’t mean that you’re just an engineer. You could work at Siemens and have 1 of 200 job titles that all do completely different things.

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Even if you think that you’re going into manufacturing you could still work in marketing or you could work in finance or you could be a leader of people.

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You need to get that across to whatever age group you’re talking to because even the uni students still don’t understand what jobs are out there and they’re going into industry in the next couple of years.

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I can’t do that messaging all on my own but I’m connected to a lot of people that do it so that makes it easier.

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What are some of the most important things that you’ve learned either over your career in manufacturing or through setting up Engineers Insight?

There are three words that I abide by.

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Curious - Not just being curious in your job but being curious about people because what will make you successful is the connections and network that you build.

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Authentic - You’ve got to be authentic. People buy from people.

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Inspire - I try and explain to young engineers that they’re in the best position in the market to go and talk to young people because they’re the closest to being relatable.