Interview with Girish Juneja, Chief Digital Officer, Dover Corp

Whereas a diversified global industrial manufacturer, we build equipment, components, specialty systems, software, and digital systems for various markets. We operate in three major segments: fluids, engineered systems, and refrigeration and food equipment. Through these segments, we serve customers in markets like retail fueling, refrigeration, waste hauling, waste compaction, marking and coating, and various other markets. We've been around now for 60 years; we were founded in 1947 and have been a public company since 1955. About $7 billion in revenue and 26,000 employees.

We continue to expand our R&D operations in various businesses, and we have also started a new initiative around digital. So those two aspects — the R&D office of one of our businesses called Markem-Imaje and Dover Digital — those are the two offices we are opening here in Watertown, Massachusetts. Our objective, of course, is to take advantage of the talent that exists in the region and bring the capabilities that we need to do the digital transformation of our business, to create new innovative digital solutions, and to expand the R&D of this particular business unit which operates globally. Markem-Imaje operates globally and has five other R&D centers as well in New Hampshire, Keene. So the area itself is not new to us.

Dover has had a presence in the Northeast, so we are familiar with the talent pools, we are familiar with what is possible in this region. But when you look at the ecosystem, there are a lot of digital industrial enterprises around us, there are a lot of sensor companies around us, there are a lot of robotics and AI companies around us. So that provides us the opportunity to network with the ecosystem and to take some collaborative efforts with some of these other players and accelerate our time to market in terms of some of the opportunities we want to develop.

As I said, we are fairly diversified; we play in many different markets all the way from retail fueling to waste hauling to auto service repair equipment manufacturing. As you look at that, there are different kinds of sensors, different kinds of digitization opportunities, different kinds of machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that can be used to upgrade the kind of service that we offer through our product to our customers. So I would say these are the capabilities — the sensing, the AI and machine learning, and some of the capabilities around cloud services — that we want to bring together and offer new solutions. So those would be exciting areas for us.

The industrial transformation using digital technologies is in its second or third inning. There's really a long transformation that is going to happen across the industry in various manufacturing organizations. As companies like ours go through that, we have both the opportunity and the need to expand our talent pool, to have more digital native employees, to have more digital ecosystem. So companies like ours will tend to gravitate towards places where such networks exist, such talent exists, and it's easier to pick the right partners, it's easier to move forward quickly in those transformations. So I expect this to continue for a while.

Daily life, you knowingly or unknowingly are touching many of our products. So to give you an example: you get up in the morning, you're putting on a jogging t-shirt that's likely printed on a digital textile printer that one of our companies produces — digital textile printing. Then you're taking your car out and maybe the car needs service; you're likely driving it into an auto repair shop that has some of our lifts and tire rotation equipment. Then you're stopping by to get fuel; likely you're going to a fuel station that is equipped with equipment that we provide. And then you might be stopping by for grocery, and in many cases you might be taking out of a refrigerated case some of the food products — those refrigerated cases we provide. So there are many such products that as a consumer you and I touch every day which Dover manufactures.

We have started down on the digital side in the journey towards creating digital solutions around our industrial equipment for the last few years. To give you an example, some of those have been organic, some of them have been acquisitions. To give you an example of an acquisition: we acquired a company, Third Eye, in the Austin area, which provides vision-based monitoring systems for driver safety, and we coupled that with our waste equipment hauling and compaction company. Now, as a result, many of the waste equipment that we sell comes pre-configured with these cameras which enable driver safety and security. That's one example. Another example: we are fairly big in retail fueling — gas station equipment — and we have had a digital offering around our retail fueling solution that allows for remote monitoring of pumps and issues around pumps and underground levels of fuels in these gas stations, providing the fuel station operator a bird's-eye view of the health of their business. And those are the kind of capabilities that we look forward to expanding around our other industrial components.

We have been a little bit ahead and fortunate in having on board a few employees in this area even though currently they're working from home office. So this first of all gives them a place to congregate. This office will be in Watertown; it's actually an older industrial building where we are putting this environment, upgrading it. We expect to hire about 30 to 35 people over the course of the next 12 to 18 months as Markem-Imaje sets up their R&D center and Dover Digital staffs up. From that point on, we will expand further. Many of these will be R&D engineering type positions, whether that be in cloud, AI, machine learning type environments, or as it relates to the product, it may be in various marking and coding specific R&D technologies that we are investing in, such as laser and other capabilities. So we would build R&D capabilities both on digital and product development side.

I think there are a few things that Dover brings to the table for a prospective employee which are rather unique. One: we are an industrial digital company, so the kind of experiences someone can have in this market in the areas where the physical and cyber come together are something unique to us amongst a few other players in this region. That's one thing. Second: the marking and coding business that I talked about — we develop systems that help in product identification and traceability for a whole variety of products that you and I consume every day. And those technologies are evolving rapidly. So as we look at laser technologies, the R&D center will invest in product development around laser. The R&D engineers that have that background now have a unique opportunity to be part of that change, and there are relatively fewer opportunities in those areas in this region. So those would be unique things that we bring as we look for prospective talent in the region.

We mix them both. We obviously will bring experience and expertise in our products from other geographies where relevant, but we are also looking to hire a lot of new talent here as we expand areas where we have not traditionally been in before. Dover historically has been a big part of every community we have been to. To give you a little bit of background, we are currently headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, and we participate in various community organizations in that region, in many cases as a charter member, helping move the agenda of those community organizations forward and bring more involvement from the community. Similarly, we look forward to opportunities in this region. We started by becoming a MassTLC member because we thought that's one place to network and to find out what community opportunities are available. But we look forward to contributing to those.