U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

29–593 WASHINGTON : 2018

DISRUPTER SERIES: THE INTERNET OF THINGS, 

MANUFACTURING AND INNOVATION 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON DIGITAL COMMERCE AND 

CONSUMER PROTECTION 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND 

COMMERCE 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

JANUARY 18, 2018 

Serial No. 115–91 

( 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce 

energycommerce.house.gov 

(II) 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE 

GREG WALDEN, Oregon 

Chairman 

JOE BARTON, Texas 

Vice Chairman 

FRED UPTON, Michigan 

JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

STEVE SCALISE, Louisiana 

ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio 

CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS, Washington 

GREGG HARPER, Mississippi 

LEONARD LANCE, New Jersey 

BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky 

PETE OLSON, Texas 

DAVID B. MCKINLEY, West Virginia 

ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois 

H. MORGAN GRIFFITH, Virginia 

GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida 

BILL JOHNSON, Ohio 

BILLY LONG, Missouri 

LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana 

BILL FLORES, Texas 

SUSAN W. BROOKS, Indiana 

MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma 

RICHARD HUDSON, North Carolina 

CHRIS COLLINS, New York 

KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota 

TIM WALBERG, Michigan 

MIMI WALTERS, California 

RYAN A. COSTELLO, Pennsylvania 

EARL L. ‘‘BUDDY’’ CARTER, Georgia 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey 

Ranking Member 

BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois 

ANNA G. ESHOO, California 

ELIoT L. ENGEL, New York 

GENE GREEN, Texas 

DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado 

MICHAEL F. DOYLE, Pennsylvania 

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

G.K. BUTTERFIELD, North Carolina 

DORIS O. MATSUI, California 

KATHY CASTOR, Florida 

JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

PETER WELCH, Vermont 

BEN RAY LUJA ́ N, New Mexico 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

YVETTE D. CLARKE, New York 

DAVID LOEBSACK, Iowa 

KURT SCHRADER, Oregon 

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, III, Massachusetts 

TONY CA ́ RDENAS, California 

RAUL RUIZ, California 

SCOTT H. PETERS, California 

DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON DIGITAL COMMERCE AND CONSUMER PROTECTION

ROBERT E. LATTA, Ohio 

Chairman 

GREGG HARPER, Mississippi 

Vice Chairman 

FRED UPTON, Michigan 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

LEONARD LANCE, New Jersey 

BRETT GUTHRIE, Kentucky 

DAVID B. MCKINLEY, West Virgina 

ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois 

GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida 

LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana 

MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma 

MIMI WALTERS, California 

RYAN A. COSTELLO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

GREG WALDEN, Oregon (ex officio) 

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

Ranking Member 

BEN RAY LUJA ́ N, New Mexico 

YVETTE D. CLARKE, New York 

TONY CA ́ RDENAS, California 

DEBBIE DINGELL, Michigan 

DORIS O. MATSUI, California 

PETER WELCH, Vermont 

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, III, Massachusetts 

GENE GREEN, Texas 

FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey (ex 

officio) 

(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hon. Hon. Robert E. Latta, a Representative in Congress from the State 

of Ohio, opening statement ................................................................................. 1 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 3 

Hon. Janice D. Schakowsky, a Representative in Congress from the State 

of Illinois opening statement ............................................................................... 3 

Hon. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Representative in Congress from the State of 

New Jersey, prepared statement ........................................................................ 5 

Hon. Greg Walden, a Representative in Congress from the State of Oregon, 

prepared statement .............................................................................................. 68 

WITNESSES

Rodney Masney, Vice President, Technology Service Delivery, Information 

Technology, Owens-Illinois .................................................................................. 7 

Prepared statement ..........................................................................................

Thomas D. Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer, Zebra Technologies Corporation ........................................................................................................................ 16

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 18 

Thomas R. Kurfess, Professor and Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control, 

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute 

of Technology ........................................................................................................ 27 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 30 

Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer, VMWare ............................................... 36 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 38 

SUBMITTED MATERIAL

Statement of the Electronic Privacy Information Center ..................................... 70 

(1) 

DISRUPTER SERIES: THE INTERNET OF 

THINGS, MANUFACTURING AND INNOVATION 

THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 2018 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON DIGITAL COMMERCE AND CONSUMER

PROTECTION, 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE, 

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:04 a.m., in room 

2123 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Robert Latta (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Members present: Representatives Latta, Kinzinger, Burgess, 

Upton, Lance, Guthrie, Bilirakis, Bucshon, Walters, Costello, Duncan, Schakowsky, Clarke, Ca ́ rdenas, Dingell, Matsui, Welch, Kennedy, Green, and Pallone (ex officio). 

Staff present: Karen Christian, General Counsel; Margaret Tucker Fogarty, Staff Assistant; Adam Fromm, Director of Outreach 

and Coalitions; Ali Fulling, Legislative Clerk, Oversight & Investigations, Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection; Elena Hernandez, Press Secretary; Bijan Koohmaraie, Counsel, Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection; Katie McKeogh, Press Assistant; 

Alex Miller, Video Production Aide and Press Assistant; Madeline 

Vey, Policy Coordinator, Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection; Hamlin Wade, Special Advisor, External Affairs; Everett 

Winnick, Director of Information Technology; Greg Zerzan, Counsel, Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection; Michelle Ash, Minority Chief Counsel, Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection; 

Evan Gilbert, Minority Press Assistant; Lisa Goldman, Minority 

Counsel; Caroline Paris-Behr, Minority Policy Analyst; Michelle 

Rusk, Minority FTC Detailee; and C.J. Young, Minority Press Secretary. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT E. LATTA, A 

REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO 

Mr. LATTA. Well, good morning. 

I’d like to call the Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection to order. The chair now recognizes himself for 5 

minutes for an opening statement. 

And, again, good morning and welcome to the first Disrupter Series hearing in 2018. Today, we are continuing the subcommittee’s 

efforts to examine new and innovative technologies while learning 

directly from companies about what opportunities they see 5 to 10 

years in the future. 

2 

I’d like to thank all of our witnesses for being with us today and 

highlight that Owens-Illinois is headquartered in my district in 

Perrysburg, Ohio and I’ve been—we have held two roundtables on 

IoT and cybersecurity issues with local businesses at your headquarters and I appreciate that. 

Last summer, this subcommittee hosted a showcase with IoT 

companies for many of our member districts. We also held a hearing about how the IoT and interconnected network of physical objects embedded with sensors and communication devices that exchange information can improve productivity, increase response 

times, drive down costs, and benefit consumers. Today, we will discuss how IoT is making American manufacturing more competitive 

and how innovation is improving the lives of Americans. We will 

also learn about barriers to the continued expansion of IoT and 

what policy makers should keep in mind as the use of IoT expands. 

The ability of devices to communicate with other devices is revolutionizing industrial practices both in the United States and 

abroad. Already there are examples of smart components sending 

data about their performance and condition to workers who can 

monitor the equipment and if necessary replace it before it breaks 

down. Municipal water systems embedded with sensors can relay 

information about blockages or leaks that would help ensure that 

the water keeps flowing. Another example is how electricity providers can monitor electrical grids embedded with sensors and relays that can identify outages or surges, locate alternative pathways, and ensure that electrons keep flowing. 

Looking forward, the potential to further improve manufacturing 

processes through the combination of new technologies stretches 

the imagination. Utilizing IoT and other emerging technologies like 

augmented reality, workers will be able to virtually make adjustments to industrial systems to understand how to improve efficiency and then implement necessary changes without interrupting 

the manufacturing processes. IoT-connected factories will be able to 

monitor their need for raw materials and then order those materials from IoT-connected warehouses. IoT-connected transportation 

service providers will then deliver necessary products without the 

intervention of the human. These and other opportunities allow 

IoT-connected manufacturing centers the ability to devise their own 

ways to run more smoothly. 

Expansion-smart industrial processes will continue to create historic changes in how American companies build and deliver products. More efficient factories means that consumers will have more 

choices for the goods they purchase while being able to retain them 

at a lower cost. At the same time, like all new technologies, IoT 

will create disruption in the manufacturing economy. This disruption will create the need for new ways of educating and preparing 

our workforce both now and in the future. 

In addition, cybersecurity issues remain an ever present concern 

for an internet-connected service and the IoT is no different. Constant vigilance and improved coordination will be required to ensure that bad actors don’t take advantage of the weaknesses in IT 

security policies. 

Today, we look forward to our witnesses describing how IoT is 

being leveraged in their facilities to improve manufacturing procVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:49 May 30, 2018 Jkt 037690 PO 00000 Frm 00006 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 I:\MY DOCS\HEARINGS 115\HEARINGS\115-91 CHRIS
3 

esses, how to address concerns around cybersecurity, how this technology is likely to develop in the future, and what policymakers can 

do to help promote continued innovation in American manufacturing. 

And with that, I will yield back the balance of my time and now 

recognize the gentlelady from Illinois, the ranking member of the 

subcommittee, for 5 minutes for an opening statement. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Latta follows:] 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT E. LATTA

Good Morning, and welcome to the first Disrupter Series hearing in 2018. Today, 

we are continuing this Subcommittee’s efforts to examine new and innovative technologies, while learning directly from companies about what opportunities they see 

5 to 10 years in the future. 

Last summer, this subcommittee hosted a showcase with IoT companies from 

many of our Members’ districts. We also held a hearing about how the IoT, an interconnected network of physical objects embedded with sensors and communications 

devices that exchange information, can improve productivity, increase response 

times, drive down costs, and benefit consumers. Today, we will discuss how the IoT 

has made American manufacturing more competitive and how innovation is improving the lives of Americans. We will also hear about barriers to continued expansion 

of the IoT, and what policymakers should keep in mind as use of the IoT expands. 

The ability of devices to communicate with other devices is revolutionizing industrial practices both in the U.S. and abroad. Already there are examples of smart 

components sending data about their performance and condition to workers, who 

can monitor the equipment and if necessary, replace it before it breaks down. Oil 

and gas pipelines, embedded with sensors, can relay information about bottlenecks 

or low pressure that will help ensure energy keeps flowing. Inventory and product 

is monitored in real time, finding more efficient routes and ensuring goods are delivered when and where they are needed. 

Looking forward, the potential to further improve manufacturing processes 

through the combination of new technologies stretches the imagination. Utilizing 

the IoT and other emerging technologies like augmented reality, workers will be 

able to virtually make adjustments to industrial systems to understand how to improve efficiency, and then implement necessary changes, without interrupting the 

manufacturing process. IoT connected factories will be able to monitor their need 

for raw materials, and then order those materials from IoT connected warehouses, 

which will communicate with IoT connected transportation service providers to deliver necessary products without the intervention of a human. IoT connected manufacturing centers will be able to devise their own ways to run more smoothly. 

The expansion of smart industrial processes will continue to create historic 

changes in how American companies build and deliver products. More efficient factories mean that consumers will have more choices for the goods they purchase, 

while being able to obtain them at lower cost. At the same time, like all new technologies the IoT will create disruption in the manufacturing economy. This disruption will create the need for new ways of educating and preparing our workforce, 

both now and for the future. 

In addition, cybersecurity issues will remain an ever present concern for any 

internet connected service, and the IoT is no different. Constant vigilance and improved coordination will be required to ensure that bad actors don’t take advantage 

of weaknesses in IT security policies. 

Today we look forward to our witnesses describing how the IoT is being leveraged 

at their companies to improve manufacturing processes, how to address concerns 

around cybersecurity, how this technology is likely to develop in the future, and 

what policymakers can do help promote continued innovation in American manufacturing. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, A 

REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

4 

The Internet of Things, of course, has tremendous potential to 

change manufacturing in the United States. Smart manufacturing 

can help businesses save resources, improve performance, and expand consumer choice. For example, a senior can remove the need 

for a human worker to physically check a machine. I didn’t mean 

a senior. I meant a sensor. A sensor can remove the need for a 

human worker to physical check a machine, assuming everything 

works correctly. That sensor makes the worker’s job easier and reduces the opportunity for human error. 

As the Internet of Things evolves, even more and more processes 

can be automated and this raises some familiar issues for subcommittee—privacy, cybersecurity, safety, and labor market impacts. Advanced manufacturing requires a different set of skills 

than the production line of previous generations and workers must 

be trained for these jobs, and we need to be responsive to the needs 

of workers who may be displaced by changes in manufacturing. 

We must also be mindful of accessibility. I think back to the autonomous vehicle legislation that the House passed last year that 

this committee worked on. Self-driving cars promise to open up 

new opportunities to those with disabilities. That’s great. But some 

of those vehicles need to be accessible for people in wheelchairs, for 

instance, so that we can fully realize the potential to improve mobility. The same goes for manufacturing workers. Depending on 

how the technology is designed and integrated, bringing the Internet of Things into manufacturing could either expand or limit job 

opportunities for those, for example, with visual impairments or 

physical disabilities. In addition, we must ensure that businesses 

can get the full benefit of smart manufacturing. Often, a prerequisite for businesses to integrate new technologies is the 

broadband to support it. 

Last year, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee 

unveiled a comprehensive infrastructure package—the LIFT America Act, which included a $40 billion investment in secure and reliable broadband. A serious infrastructure bill takes real dollars and 

I hope that we can work together to advance that type of job-creating legislation. 

I would also note that some of the advances we see in the manufacturing stem for research supported by the federal government. 

For example, President Obama established a national network for 

manufacturing innovation which included the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute in Chicago, which I have 

visited. The Trump budget eliminates funding for the Manufacturing Institutes. The U.S. can only lead in research if we invest 

in research. 

We need a bipartisan deal to raise the budget caps on both the 

defense and non-defense side so that important investments in infrastructure and innovation can continue. 

I thank you, and I yield back, unless there is anybody who wants 

my remaining time. OK. I yield back. 

Thank you. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back. 

The chairman of the full committee has not arrived yet. But is 

there anyone on the Republican side wishing to claim that time? 

5 

Not hearing anyone, the chair now recognizes the ranking member of the full committee, the gentleman from New Jersey, for 5 

minutes. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FRANK PALLONE, JR., A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY 

Mr. PALLONE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Since 2015, this subcommittee has been examining the opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things, from autonomous 

vehicles to wearable technology. But the Internet of Things extends 

beyond consumer products. It can be found across industries including in the energy, healthcare, and transportation sectors, and 

today we will discuss how it can help make manufacturing more 

efficient, more productive, and more safe. 

The Internet of Things is used in smart manufacturing to make 

real-time control of production possible. Companies report that 

using smart manufacturing technologies lowers their energy use, 

reduces waste, improves product quality, and saves money, and 

with more efficient manufacturing we see less pollution, fewer 

health issues for our work force, and more opportunities for good 

technology-based jobs. 

As with all connected technologies, strong cybersecurity is essential to successful smart manufacturing. While the Internet of 

Things helps ensure that a manufacturer is monitoring, measuring, 

and sensing control systems work together, one weak point can affect the whole network. Imagine the potential consequences if a 

malicious actor brought down automated manufacturing at a pharmaceutical plant that makes vaccines or if network disruptions affect the quality control monitoring for seatbelts at an auto plant. 

Experts have found that companies in the U.S. are not doing 

enough to address these risks and that a strong comprehensive 

framework for cybersecurity in manufacturing is urgently needed. 

And also, unlike our smart phones, which seem to be replaced 

every few years, large machinery is used for decades, adding to the 

difficulty of ensuring they are consistently and properly updated 

for security vulnerabilities. And I have said at previous hearings on 

automation that we should not be scared of these new technologies 

but we must realize their potential effect on jobs. To stay competitive, we must ensure that employers are prepared for the changing 

workplace and we need to invest more in research and development 

so that the U.S. continues to lead the world in innovation. 

For years, we have listened to experienced witnesses in industry, 

academia, and government tell us that federal investment is vital 

if you want to keep making things in America. Unfortunately, the 

Trump administration proposed a budget last year that eliminates 

dozens of essential successful programs that make manufacturing 

innovation possible and provides support for U.S. factory workers. 

Moreover, industry witnesses repeatedly tell us what they really 

need is stability. Yet, Republicans have repeatedly failed to pass 

final appropriation bills for the fiscal year that began on October 

1st and we are once again at a deadline tomorrow. It appears that 

Republicans are going to try once again to kick the can down the 

road. And with this delay, Republicans are adding even more instaVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:49 May 30, 2018 Jkt 037690 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 I:\MY DOCS\HEARINGS 115\HEARINGS\115-91 CHRIS
6 

bility, ultimately hurting American manufacturers and workers. I 

think those delays must end, but we will see. 

And I would like to yield the remainder of my time to the gentlewoman from California. 

Ms. MATSUI. Thank you, Ranking Member Pallone. 

The Internet of Things and the industrial Internet of Things represents a shift in how companies and manufacturers interact with 

data. Smart manufacturing enables real-time monitoring and 

tracking of a company’s assets through the manufacturing process. 

New technologies and tools can be critical to the means of facilitating the efficiencies promised by Industry 4.0. Of course, 

connectivity is a cornerstone of the next industrial revolution and 

wireless connectivity depends on the availability of spectrum. 

I believe that technologies like block chain could play an interesting role in both spectrum sharing to potentially maximize efficient use of spectrum bands and as a means of tracking digital 

records in real time. 

Thank you, and I look forward to the witnesses, and I yield back. 

Mr. PALLONE. And I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back the 

balance of this time. This concludes member opening statements. 

The chair reminds members that, pursuant to committee rules, 

all members’ opening statements will be made part of the record. 

Again, I want to thank all of our witnesses for being with us 

today. We appreciate you taking time to testify before us and it’s 

very important to hear from you and your testimony. 

Today’s witnesses will have the opportunity to give 5-minute 

opening statements followed by a round of questions from the 

members. 

Our witness panel for today’s hearing will include Mr. Rodney 

Masney, the Vice President of Technology and Service Delivery Information of Technology at Owens-Illinois; Mr. Thomas Bianculli, 

Chief Technology Officer at Zebra Technologies Corporation; Dr. 

Thomas R. Kurfess, Professor and HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished 

Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology; and Mr. Sanjay Poonen, the Chief Operating Officer at 

VMWare. 

So we really appreciate you all being with us today and, Mr. 

Masney, you are recognized for your opening statement for 5 minutes. 

Thanks again for being with us. 

7 

STATEMENTS OF RODNEY MASNEY, VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY SERVICE DELIVERY, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, 

OWENS-ILLINOIS; THOMAS D. BIANCULLI, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION; 

DR. THOMAS R. KURFESS, PROFESSOR AND CHAIR IN FLUID 

POWER AND MOTION CONTROL, GEORGE W. WOODRUFF 

SCHOOL OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; SANJAY POONEN, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, VMWARE 

STATEMENT OF MR. MASNEY 

Mr. MASNEY. Good morning to the members of the committee 

and to my colleagues who have travelled to Washington today to 

discuss the importance of the Internet of Things. 

Before I begin, I would like to thank Congressman Latta for his 

continued leadership and engagement on the issue. I also want to 

thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss IoT, which is 

important to U.S. manufacturing and my company specifically. 

Owens-Illinois, headquartered in Perrysburg, Ohio, is the world’s 

largest manufacturer of glass containers, serving globally recognized brands throughout the world. Our company operates 79 manufacturing plants throughout the world, 17 of which are located in 

the United States. Glass making has historically been a trade 

where craftspersons and apprentices would develop expertise in the 

art of glass making. 

At the turn of the century, Michael Owens invented automated 

glass manufacturing, which was a huge step change in productivity 

and worker safety. While the glass making process is highly automated today, the industry is poised for the next step change, which 

will come from the factory becoming increasingly connected with 

IoT technologies throughout the end-to-end process. The information collected through IoT technology will be used to transform the 

craft of glass making to that of data-driven science which will enhance the competitive position of glass in the global packaging industry. 

Glass containers are the most sustainable option in the competitive packaging landscape with a life cycle that goes from cradle to 

cradle, reusable in many markets and infinitely recyclable into either new glass containers or other products. Glass is truly the sustainable packaging option. Owens-Illinois is on an IoT journey, 

which will transform our manufacturing process and add value to 

the products and services that we sell our customers. 

There are several IoT areas of focus for OI. Improve manufacturing performance through higher yields, increase quality, and reduce costs. IoT will deliver deeper insights into our end-to-end 

manufacturing process. The data generated from sensors in the 

plant will provide insights into environmental conditions, process 

settings, and control variances, enhancing our ability to increase 

first-time yields and improve quality. This work will require skilled 

engineers, information technology professionals, and data scientists. The data required through IoT will be used to reduce reaction time in the plants and allow us to adjust the process if controls 

are slipping out of tolerance. 

8 

Addressing the variations in manufacturing process will be realized in a more proactive manner. The IoT platform will transform 

the glass manufacturing process from one of reactivity to one that 

is proactive and highly automated. The information generated by 

new sensor technology, data science, and information automation 

will increase yields and improve quality while achieving reduced 

costs and enhancing OI’s ability to compete in the U.S. and global 

markets. 

Energy management and predictive maintenance are the second 

area of IoT development OI is pursuing. It takes a great deal of energy to melt and form glass and to operate a glass container manufacturing facility. Developing sensor technology can help glass containers maintain the status of the most sustainable packaging solution and reduce energy used to operate our furnaces. Advanced sensor technologies can also be used to collect information while monitoring equipment throughout the manufacturing facility and could 

be critical to seeking new ways to maintain equipment. 

IoT technologies and the concepts around IoT is enabling OI to 

also create and develop new and differentiated products and services for our customers with the goal to ensure the integrity, safety, 

and authenticity of its contents. 

I would like to highlight the several concerns regarding successful deployment and sustainability of IoT. Because the achievable 

deployment of IoT throughout an enterprise can be quite daunting, 

a successful deployment of IoT requires sensors, PLCs, IT systems, 

networking, massive amounts of storage and software to achieve 

the desired business outcomes. 

Seeking ways to make these investments more affordable can be 

a way to help U.S. manufacturing accelerate its investments in IoT 

technologies. Protecting against cybersecurity risks will become 

more critical while manufacturers deploy IoT in facilities. Manufacturing equipment devices, sensors, and control systems that previously may have been standalone, maybe exposed, not just within 

a plant location but also potentially throughout an enterprise. 

Cybersecurity-related disruptions could cause unplanned down 

time or impair productivity. Cybersecurity attacks could also put 

health and safety of employees at risk. 

Data scientists are in short supply and high demand. Transformation of the workforce becomes more critical. Tomorrow’s manufacturing workforce must be increasingly knowledgeable about the 

use of information technology. Engineering disciplines and information technology skills will be needed to deliver and sustain these 

solutions. 

The use of business intelligence analytics and the role of data scientists will be critical to success of IoT. 

In conclusion, as manufacturers continue on the IoT journey, 

Congress may want to look into the following ways to help foster 

growth of IoT technology and its use, assist manufacturers and 

making IoT technologies more affordable by encouraging research 

and investment in these capabilities or in programs which encourage manufacturing companies to deploy IoT or programs and resources that address cybersecurity in U.S. businesses and encourage more research in the IoT data science discipline and seek ways 

9 

to encourage a supporting pipeline of skilled workers through universities and manufacturing and related technical schools. 

Thank you for your time and attention. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Masney follows:] 

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Mr. LATTA. Well, thank you very much. 

And Mr. Bianculli, you are recognized for 5 minutes. Thank you 

very much for being with us. 

STATEMENT OF MR. BIANCULLI 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Thank you, Chairman Latta, Ranking Member 

Schakowsky, and members of the subcommittee for the opportunity 

to testify before you today. 

I am Thomas Bianculli, the Chief Technology Officer of Zebra 

Technologies Corporation, and we are a global leader in bringing 

Internet of Things solutions to business-to-business and businessto-government markets. With approximately $3.7 billion in revenue, nearly 7,000 employees, and doing business in more than 40 countries, Zebra is a trusted partner to more than 95 percent of all Fortune 500 companies. 

And while many Americans may not know us by name, I am sure 

they come into contact with our solutions every day. For example, 

the bar code labels that are printed and applied to airline baggage 

tags or express delivery packages and pharmaceutical prescription 

bottles are often generated by a Zebra bar code label printer and 

tracked and managed by Zebra bar code scanning technology and 

mobile computers. 

Similarly, manufacturing, warehouse, and delivery workers as 

well as countless healthcare workers across the globe employ our 

mobile computing devices in their daily work to increase efficiency, 

reduce errors, and drive a better customer experience. 

Overall, what we see in the marketplace every day tells us that 

manufacturers and their supply chain partners are increasingly 

recognizing the transformational role of industrial IoT. Solutions in 

driving growth and improving performance in several key areas of 

business activity including increased total production and through 

put, improved ability to adjust to fluctuating market demand, and 

increased ability to produce a greater number of product variance, 

and increased visibility into operations across a given business enterprise, and a decreasing cost of production. All of these advances 

reflect the fact that, at its heart, the IoT revolution is a dramatic 

change in advancement in the way companies capture and ultimately share data. 

The ability to have data about inventory that’s immediately 

available to both plant floor managers and suppliers is providing 

new levels of visibility that heightens operational performance and 

from the greater visibility comes the great advances we are seeing 

in manufacturing across a wide array of industries. 

In the opening comments from Chairman Latta, I heard mention 

of augmented reality and wearable technology. I think we should 

really keep that in mind as we see industrial Internet of Things 

creating more and more data. There is the opportunity to collect 

that data, analyze that data, and then use that information to inform a worker. And as we are starting to see that occur, we are 

seeing that mobile and computing technologies migrate from an 

interface that is handheld to interfaces that become heads up and 

are able to augment our physical reality with digital information 

that helps U.S. citizens and U.S. workers just get the job done. And 

I think that’s an incredible opportunity for competitive advantage 

17 

for us to help drive efficiency and to lead the world by way of example in that regard. 

Whirlpool Corporation wanted to optimize mobile device management at its distribution centers as a way of enhancing productivity. 

They were experiencing problems with misplaced devices, battery 

life, the inability to update devices in a systemic way, and a lack 

of data metrics around device performance. It needed a centralized 

management system to track device health, productivity, location, 

and ensure proper deployment. To solve their problem, Zebra 

worked with Whirlpool to employ an IoT-based solution which uses 

our mobile computers connected to their vehicle-mount computers 

and our handheld devices. 

We connected all of their devices back to the cloud across all of 

their facilities. We are able to manage to predictably detect when 

batteries may need replacing, when the performance and health of 

applications on the device, the resiliency and security of the network, and by monitoring all that information in near real time we 

can detect and proactively intercede if we see that a device is going 

to have a problem, thereby driving up the overall worker efficiency 

and uptime of their operations. 

Congress can play an important role in helping to ensure that all 

companies across America can successfully employ industrial IoTbased solutions. Specifically, we urge you and your colleagues to 

support infrastructure legislation that promotes the deployment of 

mobile broadband networks as well as directs the NTIA and FCC 

to allocate more commercial licensed and unlicensed spectrum in a 

technology-neutral way. Additionally, we urge Congress to advance 

policies that will help assure coordination among government agencies so that regulation of IoT does not needlessly impede innovation. 

In sum, Mr. Chairman, we commend the subcommittee for holding this hearing, for your ongoing efforts to ensure that American 

industry has the ability to continue to roll out new technologies 

that will improve the lives of both our workers and our citizens. 

IoT presents a transformative opportunity, some calling it the 

fourth industrial revolution, the advent of cyber physical systems 

that will create opportunity for jobs of all types and sizes across 

the United States to work smarter, be more productive, and help 

improve the overall American economy. 

At Zebra, we are committed to bringing IoT solutions to companies to help them achieve their goals. We look forward to continuing to work with the subcommittee and I thank you for the opportunity to share a Zebra story, and I am happy to answer any 

questions you and your colleagues may have. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Bianculli follows:] 

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Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. 

And Dr. Kurfess, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Thank you. 

STATEMENT OF MR. KURFESS 

Mr. KURFESS. Thank you, Chairman Latta, Vice Chairman 

Kinzinger, Ranking Member Schakowsky, and other members of 

the committee. 

I do appreciate the opportunity to testify here before the subcommittee. So I am Tom Kurfess. I am at Georgia Tech. The difference between my colleagues here and myself is our product or 

our students. For example, mechanical engineering produces about 

3% to 4% of all the mechanical engineers in the Nation and these 

kids are extremely capable and really moving a lot of the IoT forward. 

I have spent a lot of time in manufacturing. I grew up actually 

in a plant in Congresswoman Schakowsky’s district. I went to high 

school there and so forth—a small family plant. So I’ve been in production for over 40 years. And if you look at it, we talk about the 

fact that, yes, it’s going to take a lot of money to sensor up, as we 

would say it. But there are already a lot of sensors out there and 

they’re providing free information to us and so forth. 

So there are a lot of sensors. They’re generating big data. The 

companies know this and we are starting to track this. My team 

works with two major U.S. OEMs in automative, a major OEM in 

aerospace and several large-scale suppliers to figure out what their 

digital manufacturing platforms need to look like. And, basically, 

all the data are there for the taking and how are we going to make 

use of them, right. And then the question is what can we do with 

it. 

Well, certainly, we can improve efficiency. I think we’ve heard 

about that. We could lower our energy consumption. We can lower 

our waste. This is very clear. It’s been demonstrated time and time 

again. I’ve spent a lot of time actually over at the BMW plant in 

South Carolina—tremendous opportunities there in terms of moving it forward. A safer work place—certainly, the more sensors you 

have out there, you know what’s going on. You can make sure that 

your employees are safe and you can make sure that those machines keep them safe and actually make their jobs easier and 

more reliable. But perhaps a very important point that we need to 

really understand is that this capability allows us to respond rapidly to the changing markets and the changing technologies that 

are out there, and those technologies and markets are changing 

rapidly. 

It took about 70 years for the telephone to become ubiquitous. It 

took about 10 years for the mobile phone to become ubiquitous. It 

took about a year for the smart phone to become ubiquitous. This 

is how fast things are changing. So we can have a safer place, a 

place that responds better, and what industry doesn’t want to respond better and faster? 

What do we get out of the Internet of Things for manufacturing? 

First of all, there are better paying jobs. There’s no doubt about it. 

But I will caution you, and I will say this again, it requires a much 

lower-skilled workforce and a better trained workforce. But it’s not 

28 

impossible to do. I think we just saw over here, and I will wave 

mine around too, people are used to the smart phone. This is not 

something that they’re afraid of. We can get them to use it and actually we are using smart phones in production operations day in 

and day out at a number of different corporations. 

We get a stronger, more productive manufacturing base, which 

is always good for the Nation’s economy and national security, and 

we basically excel in the strengths of the culture of the United 

States of America. 

We are innovative, right. We have some of the best ideas and 

what this technology allow us to do, IoT for MFG, as we call it, it 

allows us to get these ideas out there rapidly and not just out there 

but to scale them in terms of the market. And you know, if somebody else wants to copy us, come get us, because by the time you 

copy us, we’ll have our next technologies out there and we can see 

how fast these things are moving along. 

So how do we get there? Basically, we have to look at workforce 

development. I heard cybersecurity a number of times. This is critical. People—and we’ve actually seen at companies where they say, 

no, we are going to not do this because of cybersecurity issues. 

They have now come to the realization that we have to do this if 

you’re going to compete, and we are looking at cybersecurity. We 

have a lot of, for example, national apps. 

NIST is doing some great work in cybersecurity analysis and so 

forth in conjunction with our universities and a variety of companies. So it’s there. We are thinking about it. We are working on it 

and we are beating the bad guys in most cases. We have to develop 

that infrastructure to make sure that that broadband 

connectivity—I heard that, right—that is so important. 

Again, the low-cost labor areas, yes, you see their shiny new factories but a lot of low-cost labor areas don’t have that type of 

connectivity. We can leverage that. We could make use of that. 

That is where we can compete. 

We also need to take a look at our universities. Right. How do 

we leverage our universities? How do we leverage our national 

labs—places like NIST and bring them together? I heard the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, Manufacturing USA. 

This is where companies are coming together to really move things 

forward for the United States of America and this is where we can 

really leverage these things. So, basically, this is going to allow us 

to rapidly address a changing market, not just what people want 

but what the technology is when it comes out there. 

The bottom line is IoT for manufacturing it’s going to grow. It’s 

going to grow high in jobs. But that basically means not just workforce development and workforce training, not training the next 

generation workforce but training the current generation workforce. It can be done. We can’t compete on the low-end jobs. We just 

can’t, right. But we can compete on the high-end jobs and people 

are not afraid of the technology. It is amazing. We are doing 

Pokemon out in the factories right now and they’re tracking things, 

and they love it, OK, and their reward might be to get off a couple 

of hours early on a Friday afternoon. But it allows to grow the national economy, to grow key sectors of the national economy—highVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:49 May 30, 2018 Jkt 037690 PO 00000 Frm 00032 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 I:\MY DOCS\HEARINGS 115\HEARINGS\115-91 CHRIS
29 

tech sectors—to strengthen our national security, to make sure 

that we are able to move forward in a rapid a nimble way. 

Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Kurfess follows:] 

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Mr. LATTA. Again, thank you for your testimony. 

And Mr. Poonen, you are recognized for 5 minutes for your opening statement. Am I pronouncing your name correctly, sir? 

Thank you. 

STATEMENT OF MR. POONEN 

Mr. POONEN. Dear Chairman Latta, Ranking Member Schakowsky, members of the subcommittee, and my honored colleagues 

from academia and the industry, it’s an honor to be here to testify 

in front of this committee. 

And by way of instruction, my name is Sanjay Poonen. I am 

Chief Operating Officer of VMWare. VMWare is one of the top five 

software companies in the world, about a $54 billion market cap 

company. We are headquartered in the Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. 

We are also part of the Dell Technologies family. 

It’s very clear from a lot of what you have heard already that the 

Internet of Things and IoT has a profound impact on the consumer 

economy and also in the industrial age. I will just give you two examples of how our lives have changed. One is from my past job. 

I worked for a German software company, SAP, and many of the 

meetings that I had would actually be at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon, German time, which is 5:00 a.m. Pacific time. So mean 

scheduled, I go down to my home office and I find out that overnight some person had the great joy of canceling the meeting. Now, 

listen, wouldn’t it have been nice if I could have known that before 

I went to bed and I could have probably woken up an extra hour 

later? Well, it would be nice if once the meeting is canceled it actually communicated with my alarm clock that actually set my clock 

up an hour later, which is very much possible today with IoT because often the alarm clock and your calendar is on the same device. 

Another example—when I leave to go to ski—not a lot of snow 

this year in Tahoe but the years that we do have snow, we’ll have 

a debate with my wife as to whether we turn the heating off. And 

I like to keep the energy down and keep the house not necessarily 

heated all the time. She wants to keep the house warm for our kids 

when we come back home. Well, now with modern thermostats you 

can actually turn your thermostat on or off from your phone when 

you get about an hour closer to NIST and many others are doing 

this. 

So this is the practical way in which our consumer lives are 

being transformed for the better with IoT and this is now starting 

to invade the American worker. And manufacturing actually becomes enormously smart, as you heard, because of this and it has 

profound impact, we believe, in lots of new areas—artificial intelligence, big data machine learning that can be very positive as opposed to as much as what’s also been talked about, the negative 

impacts. But it does have some profound security challenges and 

that’s been a key part to VMWare’s focus. VMWare’s focus is to ensure that the cyber attacks that we’ve seen, whether it’s 

WannaCry, Petya, many of these things that could get even more 

profoundly disruptive in the context of IoT is something that we 

can attack and we can protect ourselves from. 

37 

So we’ve actually been focused on aspects of cybersecurity and 

cyber hygiene that allow companies to protect themselves in this 

era of IoT. 

We’ve got some very practical ways in which management security would be baked into the infrastructure of both technology and 

manufacturing. 

We think that everybody today, whether you’re in technology or 

not in technology, need to be educated in some very fundamental 

principles of security, like, for example, lease privilege, micro segmentation, multi factor authentication and identity management, 

encryption, patching. These are all very fundamental concepts that 

board members today are being educated on and certainly government and other professionals need to. 

As we think about the notion of hardware, that’s also getting 

more sophisticated. We heard about mobile devices and rugged devices—one of my colleagues. Edge gateways now are becoming 

ways by which this miniature data center could actually become 

micro into something like a little nano data center, protected and 

ready for the production line. These are the ways in which we believe that the Internet of Things and smart manufacturing can actually be secure. 

In closing, the Internet of Things will have a significant and positive impact, we believe, on both American innovation and jobs. Billions of IoT devices will be in the free market for consumers, will 

be available to manufacturing and can have a very positive impact. 

But to make sure that this is actually deployed in a safe fashion, 

security is key. If consumers are to trust these devices and manufacturers were to trust these devices, we’ve got to take security seriously and we believe that this is something that both the coming 

together of academia, of industry and the government makes this 

a priority. 

We look forward to working and doing our part at VMWare to 

make this happen. The other aspect of this that could be very positive is the way and which the data can actually help a whole new 

category of jobs, whether it’s machine learning, big data, artificial 

intelligence. 

This is going to be the next color of jobs, and much the same 

within the agrarian culture. A hundred years ago we couldn’t see 

the coming of computing and high tech the same way the next 50 

to 100 years are going to be very exciting in terms of new jobs. 

Chairman Latta, Ranking Member Schakowsky, I applaud the 

leadership of this committee for holding this hearing today. Thank 

you for the opportunity to testify and I look forward to answering 

the committee’s questions. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Poonen follows:] 

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Mr. LATTA. Well, again, thank you all for being with us today. 

We really appreciate your testimony before the subcommittee. 

And now we’ll move into our question and answer portion of the 

hearing, and I will recognize myself for 5 minutes. 

Mr. Masney, what are the major advantages for OI that come 

from using IoT? And, again, I’ve been through the facility in 

Perrysburg where you do a lot of the testing and seen a lot of what 

you’re implementing there. But if you could maybe just walk us 

through what you’re doing. 

Mr. MASNEY. Certainly. Some of the advantages are increased 

productivity in our manufacturing facilities. As I said in my statement, glass is still somewhat art, and we need to transform to 

data-driven science manufacturing process where we can increase 

our yield. 

Glass manufacturing yield is somewhere in the 90 to 91 percent 

yield rate. If we are able to do that, we are able to unlock potential 

and capacity out of our factories and better serve the markets and, 

ultimately, reduce our cost to our customers. 

Mr. LATTA. What are some of the challenges that you’re facing 

out there today in the home manufacturing process then? 

Mr. MASNEY. And having enough of knowledge base in a workforce that has a demographic that is changing. The degeneration of 

knowing what to do, when to do it, is changing in our organization, 

and being able to empower people with information so that they 

can react faster and more nimbly is incredibly important. And 

cyber security—that is a concern today because many of our machines and equipment stand alone. So they’re not exposed to cyber 

attack. And as we network them and collect more and more information to better empower our workforce it’s going to be incredibly 

important that we protect the floor, our people, and the company. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Bianculli, can you give us an example of how a sensor can 

be used to convert data from a format that allows companies to improve manufacturing efficiency? 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Sure. I think a couple of examples there—one is 

just driving operational efficiency. I mentioned the Whirlpool example earlier, where we just have a stream of data coming from devices. Well, just like we’ve done that with Whirlpool on device 

health, we are looking at doing that with the entire manufacturing 

facility. 

So imagine, if you will, a smart manufacturing environment. We 

know where goods are. We know where the capital assets are in 

that environment. We can know where people are located and we 

can bring the intersection of all those things together in an optimized way. 

We think about our daily lives using a route navigation GPS system in our vehicles. The incredible amount of advantage—the ability to dynamically reroute based on whether in traffic in real time 

and think about going from outside the four walls to an inside the 

four walls factory environment and being able to bring that same 

level of route optimization, work flow efficiency, dynamic work flow 

optimization to the processes by instrumenting the environment. 

I think that as we look at data coming from these environments 

we are moving toward a world where we no longer operate on what 

47 

we think is happening—where do I think my people are, where do 

I think my assets are, where do I think inventory is—we are operating in a world where we truly know that in real time. 

And so we are able to close this gap between what we think is 

happening and what we would ideally like to be happening and 

that is where the benefit is—the efficiency benefit. The return on 

investment is being able to close that gap. And so you can run your 

operations in a much more precision way and in a way that’s optimized from the get-go. 

We are seeing the imperative to do that because of the on-demand economy. The notion that products and services are being delivered ever closer to the point of demand is a reality. We order online and the expectation is that product or good or service is delivered sometimes in an hour to our doorstep if it’s a package that we 

ordered online and we live in an urban city, or in some cases I am 

standing at a street corner and I request a ride and in moments 

I expect that to show up. 

So the production and provisioning of products and services ever 

closer to the point of demand dictates, mandates, it’s an imperative 

that we have IoT solutions that are able to create real-time 

streams of data to enable that new reality to propel us forward. 

Thank you. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you. 

Mr. Poonen, I guess in my last 40 seconds—this is going to be 

quick—this deals with how to manufacturers manage the threat of 

cyber attack disrupting their operations? 

Mr. POONEN. OK. Good. 

Yes, I think one of the things that we have learned, Chairman, 

sir, is that in this world of mobile, this device is not sort of a remote control to your life. 

We’ve learned a lot about security in the last 10 years with the 

mobile device. These operating systems have adapted themselves 

from the PC era to have even greater level of security, whether it’s 

Apple iPhones or Android devices. Some of the security things that 

you saw in the early days of Windows. And even the PC operating 

systems, latest version of Windows 10 are better at being able 

to—— 

We respect that same innovation, and this country has got some 

of the best research, whether it’s from academia or other places. 

We’ll continually pour it into the operating systems that run on 

these IoT devices. That’s one, and we expect that to just have a 

greater and greater level of enterprise hardening. 

Secondly, the devices and the systems that they talk to, whether 

it’s the data center or the cloud, will have the types of things that 

I talked about—cyber security, security infrastructure baked into it 

that have the types of things like segmentation, multi factor authentication, encryption. And we are learning from all of the attacks that have happened to make those also systems hardened. 

And then the third and final thing is just basic hygiene, and sort 

of just like you have a good diet, you do your exercise, you still 

have to have certain hygiene principles—brushing your teeth, taking a shower, things of those kinds. 

48 

We’ve got to educate government, industry, academia, college 

students, so that as they approach the workforce there are simple 

things you probably want to do. 

You may not want to send your password, for example, in clear 

text on a text message. These are the types of things that—and you 

may want to change your password—these are the types of things 

that I think are very easy for us to continue to educate that make 

us all a much more secure society and a secure infrastructure for 

IoT. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. 

And the chair recognizes the gentlelady from Illinois, the ranking 

member of the subcommittee, for 5 minutes. 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you. 

First, Owens-Illinois—are you still in Illinois at all? 

Mr. MASNEY. Yes, we are. We are in Streeter, Illinois. 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. OK. Glad to hear that, being from the Chicago 

area. 

I think I, years ago, saw the plant. Were you over in Granite 

City, down in southern Illinois? 

No. OK. Let me ask Dr. Kurfess some questions. 

How do workers in manufacturing stand to benefit from the 

adoption of these technologies? Can the IoT be used to, for example, positive things—prevent workplace injuries, limit workers’ exposure to hazardous materials, et cetera? And what are some of the 

pluses of IoT for workers? 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. It’s a great question. 

There are a variety of things that could be going on, for example, 

worker going through the factory. If you have been, for example, 

to an automotive factory you see the robots going on. They’re moving, they’re working. These are carrying sometimes in the thousands of pounds. So they’re very powerful robots. And you’d never 

let a human get close to them. But now you have the robot area. 

You have the human area, and the reality is now with IoT of 

things, and again, one has to be careful about this issue of privacy 

and so forth. But I am even walking down with my phone. I know 

where people are. So if somebody walks into an incorrect area, we 

can shut it down and make sure the roadblock doesn’t hurt them. 

But even better, we can start to localize it better—a much tighter 

resolution such that the robots can be working with the people. 

Robots are great. But they’re never going to replace people completely. They’re great at lifting really heavy things but try and pick 

up an egg with one and so forth. We have great research on that. 

But again, working together is really where you leverage it and, by 

the way, it also allows us to get rid of a lot of the really nasty jobs. 

You’re taking away the terrible jobs, checking cooling tanks and lubrication tanks and machines. That’s all automated. In fact, this 

morning I was down in your cafeteria and I saw your coffee containers—the coffee urns. They have the same technology that we 

are using now in there. It’s about 50 cents and so the only difference is ours are online and so they’re reporting the information. 

But we are talking with companies like Chik-fil-A and McDonald’s 

about how to do that for improving their efficiency. 

So these are the types of things we see out there. 

49 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Well, I am also very interested in keeping 

manufacturing jobs in the United States and bring them back, and 

you wrote in your testimony that America’s infrastructure gives us 

an advantage there. I would like to hear more about that. 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. Well, if you look at everything from our 

roads to broadband and so forth, and again, these are things that 

people really use all the time. Whether it’s broadband or you’re 

wired into your factory or broadband, over here, that capability and 

that growing of that capability allows us to take the big data generated by all of these different sensors, and in some instances, 

again, it’s not just well, I’ve have a bunch of sensors, but in some 

instances I’ve got this phone with this really nice camera and we 

have our workforce taking a picture. 

So now we are combining the workforce who says oh, this is 

good, this is bad, taking the picture. That integrates the information together. But you have got to get that out streaming all of the 

data and it is a lot of data. And then, of course, the other infrastructure of these, the educational infrastructure. If you think 

about the technology from even 5 or 10 years ago, it’s old. So we’ve 

got to keep that work force spun up. Lifelong learning and that infrastructure needs to be put into place so that today’s worker is 

still viable in 5 or 10 years. 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Well, I was going to ask about that because, 

the role of government and, certainly, public education is a part of 

that, but there’s also federally funded research, et cetera. 

So government does have a role to play then, doesn’t it? 

Mr. KURFESS. Oh, definitely. And all the way—again, you know, 

from the K through 12 that we hear about education and so forth 

to our Bachelors students or Masters and Ph.D.s, if you take a look 

at National Science Foundation, I was sponsored at MIT, right, as 

a National Science Foundation on a project there. A good chunk of 

our graduates, Masters and Ph.D.s in engineering, technology, and 

in science are supported by the National Science Foundation. 

Again, that’s something that you don’t really see but they’re supported as research assistants and this is a very important thing to 

move forward, the entire infrastructure for the Nation. 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I appreciate that. 

So I am concerned because spending plans that we’ve seen from 

Republicans make drastic cuts to many of these things and to programs that directly support manufacturing and innovation, including President Obama’s Manufacturing USA initiative. 

So these cuts, I am assuming, then could be a barrier to 

progress? 

Mr. KURFESS. Yes. I think that what you have to look at is in 

the short term it’s fairly easy to make a cut like this and so forth. 

But really, the Federal Government—we don’t have AT&T Bell 

Labs anymore. We don’t have really long-range thinking companies. They’re focusing on the here now, and I don’t blame them. 

The Federal Government has to step in there and really do some 

of the longer range thinking. I guarantee you, China’s doing it. 

Germany’s doing it. You name it, other countries are doing it. We 

need to do it. 

So in 5 years, in 10 years, we are positioned to continue to move 

forward. This is really, again, what we really need to be looking at 

50 

a little bit longer term and that’s what these R&D capabilities are 

all about that we are talking about. 

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I appreciate that, and I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. KURFESS. Thank you. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back. 

The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Illinois, the vice 

chair of the subcommittee, for 5 minutes. 

Mr. KINZINGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And just to go off with what you were saying, sir, I agree with 

you. I think there’s a role for the government in terms of long-term 

strategic planning that sometimes gets lost in the kind of momentary debates which is, as we look at world that changes, whether 

it’s with IoT, whether as we look at autonomous vehicles, which 

this committee deals with and all that kind of stuff, we have to 

have people that are thinking long range and beginning to prepare 

our workforce for what that future looks like. It doesn’t mean the 

heavy hand of government but it also means let’s consolidate some 

of these programs we have and try to incorporate a vision which 

some of our competitors, unfortunately, do all too well. 

I want to thank the chairman for yielding and I want to thank 

you all for being here. I am excited. I have two companies represented here that have a strong presence in Illinois—Zebra and 

Owens-Illinois. 

Zebra is based in Lincolnshire, Illinois, which, now that the economy is expanding maybe you can build one in my district too because there’s no presence there yet. But we’ll take it in Illinois. 

And Owens-Illinois, of course, does have a strong presence in Illinois. Somehow they’re headquartered in Mr. Latta’s state but we 

can talk about that, too. 

And as Mr. Masney said, there’s an OI facility right in Streeter, 

Illinois, and in my district. So proud to have you there. You provide 

good-paying jobs. I was able to visit a few years ago and have been 

very impressed by what I’ve seen. 

I would like to ask the panel, talking about the development of 

IoT, does that mean that American workers will require new training and what are companies doing to obtain a skilled workforce? 

I would like one or two of your to answer that with your perspectives. 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Sure. So yes, absolutely, happy to have our presence in Lincolnshire and we should talk later. 

Mr. KINZINGER. Yes. 

Mr. BIANCULLI. So yes, with regard to that, worker training—I 

think the future we are talking about here isn’t going to arrive 

evenly. 

We are going to see certain areas. We are already seeing IoT 

drive location technology being used to control drones in site facilities to be able to—in manufacturing plants, actually, to be able to 

detect inventory in a more automated fashion. 

The ability to have robots deployed in a distribution or fulfilment 

center—but what’s happening in those environments today is—let 

me take the robot example where goods now are bringing—taken 

to the picker. If you have a human, at the end of the day, doing 

that picking for those online orders to fulfil those orders, and the 

51 

goods are being brought to them instead of them walking to the 

goods. 

And what does that mean? There’s no job taken away. There’s 

just several less miles a day that that worker is going to walk. 

That means there are many more picks per hour that worker can 

do. 

And so we are in a world now and will be for some time where 

humans and machines and automation, whether it be physical automation or it be artificial intelligence augmenting the worker, basically, a digital assistant—— 

Mr. KINZINGER. And I just want to add onto that. 

If you look at the example, for instance, around Europe, the Germans are very good at manufacturing. They have a very low unemployment rate. But they are also embracing this kind of future 

technology. 

So we don’t have to be scared of the future because it’s coming. 

We just have to figure out how to lead and innovate in that process. 

I will go on. Mr. Poonen, when you talk about the Internet of 

Things, does that create new concerns when it comes to intellectual 

property? 

For instance, does the data collected in IoT manufacturing reveal 

anything proprietary that companies might want to protect? 

Mr. POONEN. Yes, sir. 

I think that one of the things you have to first remember is that 

the first wave of IoTs being able to take away mundane tasks and 

make them something that could actually be done more autonomously, I will give a very simple example. 

You don’t want to watch me parallel park a car. I am terrible at 

it. That’s a perfect job for a machine to do better than a human 

because it’s a combination of cameras and geometry, and it’ll probably parallel park better than you. 

But my value add long term isn’t parallel parking. So what we 

want to be able to do as the next wave of economy shows up is to 

ensure that you have got the appropriate privacy and security 

baked into many of the machines. And there’s a whole dedicated 

work of security being focused on the devices and what’s on there 

and we have to make sure that there’s standards also because the 

same type of privacy that applies to peoples’ homes, people are worried as to whether or Alexa or Siri is always listening to you. Those 

are the types of things that standards need to be applied both from 

the government and industry working together, and I believe that 

this is absolutely solvable in the same say that the industry and 

government work together on standards like common criteria. 

This will be applied to the new world of IoT in the coming years, 

we believe. 

Mr. KINZINGER. And Mr. Masney, what’s the trend when it comes 

to the cost of deploying IoT? Can you envision a day when the entire manufacturing process, from the procurement of raw materials 

to the delivery of the finished project, is 100 percent automated 

without human intervention? 

Mr. MASNEY. No, I can’t envision a day like that. It still takes 

human beings on the manufacturing floor to make things happen 

and make sure things are moving forward. 

52 

I will share with you, in Streeter, Illinois it is one of our facilities 

where we are delivering what we call the factory of the future for 

the organization and invite you to come see that at some time that 

make sense. 

But, certainly, we are still going to need the capability to have 

people on the floor that can run machines, be ever present, make 

sure things are running safely, that productivity continues to move 

forward. 

Our innovations are around more flexibility and making sure 

that we can be more responsive to our customer base. And IoT is 

another area where we think we can do that as well. 

Mr. KINZINGER. Thank you all for being here, and I yield back. 

Mr. LATTA. The gentleman yields back, and the chair now recognizes the gentlelady from California for 5 minutes. 

Ms. MATSUI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 

thank the witness panel. This is absolutely fascinating to know 

what’s going on now and what the possibilities are too in the future. 

Digitally connected supply chains have the potential to be an important component of the industrial Internet of Things. Just in 

time, manufacturing promises to drive down the need for storing 

excess inventory and allow suppliers to anticipate and deliver the 

materials manufacturers will need more quickly. 

Decentralized ledger technologies like block train can make supply chain transactions faster and cheaper by securely connecting 

manufacturers and suppliers in real time. 

I would like to hear from Mr. Poonen and Mr. Kurfess what are 

your thoughts on technology such as block chain and others and its 

ability to play a role in IoT manufacturing and security. 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. So it’s a great set of questions and the reality is the distributed capability, whether it’s block chain, or any 

of these other distributed capabilities. 

These are going to be critical in terms of moving things forward. 

If I’ve got a supplier, only one supplier that supplies me with parts, 

and if I say tomorrow, oh, I was at Toyota—how is it going there, 

this was in Kentucky, and they said, well, great, we’ve got very, 

every 6 hours we can get parts from Denso and so forth—we are 

very lean. We have very small inventory. You go to Denso—how is 

that working for you? Well, we’ve got two or three months of supply back there because we don’t know what they’re going to ask us. 

Now, they’re starting to figure out how they’re going to ask together. But imagine if instead of one big company, Denso, we had 

a bunch of smaller companies that could supply this. 

So, yes, if I need 500 parts, as opposed to having one company 

say can you make 500 parts, I could go to a hundred companies, 

local companies, mom and pop shops, and say, I need five parts, 

or how many can you supply—five, ten. 

And all of a sudden you can bring that together. You not only 

can get those parts there—and by the way, you could use something like an Uber to make a delivery, right. Again, back to the infrastructure, it’s there to pull it off. 

But now you also have a very resilient supply chain. If one goes 

down, you don’t have to worry about it. 

53 

Turning that around as well on the educational side, you can 

take at what are these guys doing and, you know, where do they 

need more training and let’s get them that training. 

We could even percolate that down into our colleges and into our 

high school levels so we can deliver the education to the workforce 

and we can even start to send the right students in the right direction to really engage them. 

So lots of stuff. Distributed all the way from supply chain of 

parts but supply chain of our workforce as well. Thank you. 

Ms. MATSUI. That’s great. Thank you. 

Mr. Poonen. 

Mr. POONEN. Yes. I think, Congresswoman, this is a very important topic. There’s a lot of speculation and euphoria right now 

about Bitcoin and block chain. 

I think the bigger story is the fact that this notion of a subledger, 

which is really what block chain about—— 

Ms. MATSUI. Yes. 

Mr. POONEN [continuing]. Really transforms the way in which 

you do commerce at a much more miniature level and if you think 

about IoT it’s sort of a miniaturization of this type of device. 

Now, combine that with commerce now becoming even more miniature, it has profound implications that could be enormously positive, and that’s really, we think, the big story. 

If there are ways by which manufacturing could get smarter and 

even potentially more secure, and the commerce that happens— 

electronic data interchange—all of this would become a lot more efficient and potentially also secure because it’s now distributed as 

opposed to one choke point—distributed actions have lots of inherent ways in which you can actually make the system a lot more secure. 

At the same time, it does require us to take security and privacy 

even more importantly because of this distributed nature, and 

that’s something we are beginning to do early research on, not just 

from industry perspective but also in academia. 

But I am confident that the positive aspects, if you take away the 

speculative aspects of block chain, the positive aspects will have a 

profound implication that’s actually—and we need to, as a country, 

be at the forefront of the research. If we don’t do it, some of the 

other countries in the world will. 

Ms. MATSUI. Oh, good. Well, I thank you very much. 

That was very interesting. Let me go on to something quickly. 

The Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute in 

California has been working to accelerate smart manufacturing 

throughout the country. 

Broad collaboration on integrated tools and systems that are 

driving smart manufacturing will help reduce the cost of deploying 

these technologies. These partnerships and collaborations can also 

facilitate the interoperability of devices and standards. 

Mr. Kurfess, how can government and industry partnerships 

help develop tools and practices that will drive smart manufacturing adoption? 

Mr. KURFESS. That’s a great question. 

I think we’ve already heard about things like—— 

Ms. MATSUI. Yes. Go ahead. 

54 

Mr. KURFESS. Oh, I am sorry. Have heard about things like 

standards and so forth. But, really, to help move this forward. 

The difficulty is, again, you get back to the distribution. Different 

people want different standards and different capabilities and so 

forth. 

When you start to bring these entities together so, the smart 

manufacturing team that’s, I think, centered in the Los Angeles 

area, and it’s not only the big companies but it’s also the so-called 

small- and medium-sized enterprises—the SMEs—that they’re 

bringing together. So they’re really bringing everybody together to 

say yes, how does this move forward—how do we do this. 

And what a lot of companies are getting is, yes, I need to release 

this, because to become more productive, more capable, right, I 

need to participate in this standard. 

It’s like when I turn my laptop on, the wifi, I know I am going 

to be online. That’s a standard and that’s really where we need to 

be going with manufacturing. 

And by the way, we see our competition overseas doing it in a 

big way. So, we have to be cognizant of that. 

Thank you. 

Ms. MATSUI. Well, thank you. This is all very interesting. 

I know I ran out of time but thank you. 

Yield back. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back. 

The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky for 5 

minutes. 

Mr. GUTHRIE. Thank you very much. I appreciate this. My background, before I got here, was in manufacturing, and it wasn’t very 

long ago that somebody from Ford Motor Company would make an 

order from a supplier—my family was a supplier—you would have 

a production meeting where they’d say, ‘‘We need a thousand of 

these parts.’’ 

A guy would walk out to the plant to look around and with the 

clipboard—or lady—and say, ‘‘OK, we got this much here, this 

much there. Let’s go to the shipping dock. See how much we have 

there,’’ because you couldn’t always depend on the counts. So then 

they would call the buyer at our place and say, ‘‘I need X amount.’’ 

So they would walk out on the floor and say, ‘‘How many do I 

have?’’ and with the clipboard and it would—this whole string of 

things. 

And if you go to an assembly plant and invite anybody from 

Bowling Green, Kentucky to go the Corvette plant and see one of 

America’s great cars made, well, what you look for is how phenomenal all of this stuff just comes together and how much effort 

and time and planning. 

So if you do it now, you get a production manager who says, ‘‘I 

need a thousand parts,’’ somebody uploads it on the internet, the 

supplier comes in the morning, downloads it, everything is 

barcoded—I assume Zebra—but everything is barcoded so you can 

depend on the counts, and all of a sudden it makes a work order. 

When you ship it you barcode it. When it goes out it creates a purchase order so you get paid for it and that’s distributed through the 

internet or through the transfers—not necessarily through checks 

like you used to have to open checks and move forward. And that’s 

55 

happened in the last—since I’ve been in manufacturing. It wasn’t 

that long ago I started. And it’s just a phenomenal look forward. 

But I was looking at Mr. Poonen’s testimony and looking at Dr. 

Kurfess’ here, my son went to Georgia Tech so we appreciate having you here today. 

But I was looking at this security and cybersecurity, because we 

think about data security and whether your credit card was secure. 

You had all these retailers come in and talk about—really, if you 

put everything online and everything is Internet of Things in your 

manufacturing facility, is there a cyber attack, could that shut 

down an assembly plant. 

So in your testimony you talked about the importance of systems 

like Internet of Things, gateways, and why—you talk about securing the production lines, and not necessarily, I don’t think, it’s just 

from attack you were talking about. But just if you could throw 

that in as well and the importance of cyber hygiene and can you 

describe how this would provide a reasonable level of security? 

Mr. POONEN. Happy to, and I think the focus on security is a 

very good one, and I think just the same way that if you thought 

about various different eras of computing, sir—mainframe, the client server, to mobile cloud—this notion of security has become a 

more and more profound because if there’s one thing that’s true, 

even though security is getting a lot of spending in software the 

bad guys, there’s more attacks than there’s actually investment 

even in security companies. 

So we have got to take this seriously, and the good news is that 

countries like the United States and Israel have been on the forefront of security spending. We want to take that seriously. 

So the way in which we think about IoT is as these devices get 

miniature, first off, you want to make sure the operating system 

that’s on those devices are as secure as possible and I think we’ve 

learned a lot as the new operating systems that are post-PC have 

gotten more mature and with every generation they’re getting better and better. IOS is a good example of that and the iPhone being 

more secure than the first examples of the PC and those will play 

down to the miniature devices. 

Secondly, you want to have control points that dislocate just 

these devices into what’s called a gateway. So gateway is just a 

consolidated form of many of these so that you have one place rather than multiple places where much of it gets consolidated. Dell 

manufactures some of those gateways. You got to make sure those 

are secure. 

And then as they talk to other systems, for example, a data center or a cloud, that connection needs to be secure, and there’s techniques like micro segmentation, ways in which you authenticate 

into those systems using multi-factor authentication. These are all 

technical terms but for the folks who are savvy in security we are 

educating more and more of them. 

And then, finally, for the common person, as I described earlier, 

you want to be able to educate them on some very basic principles 

of cyber hygiene, especially as it relates to their access of systems. 

Having a two-factor authentication is something that everybody 

should know about. It’s not just your user name but some other 

factor. Maybe it’s your birth date. Maybe it’s your mother’s maiden 

56 

name. And setting up your system so that you have that and are 

refreshing. That allows fewer possibilities that your consumer accounts will get hacked the same way that the enterprise is dealing 

with it. 

These are just a few of the many principles of cyber security 

written in the white paper about this and it’s a topic that all of us 

in the industry—there shouldn’t be competing agendas here. We 

need to work together to make sure the security of the IoT systems. 

Mr. GUTHRIE. A quick question. I appreciate Mr. Masney. He was 

talking about glass and going from 91 to 93 percent. I am aluminum foundry die casting and as you said it’s sometimes more of 

an art than science, and I remember saying that in a meeting and 

a guy goes, ‘‘Well, all scientists were art at one time and how do 

you perfect it?’’ 

So I only have a few seconds. When these first come out a whole 

industry is created and everybody is buying these. All of a sudden 

you get saturation and sustainable and improvement. But there’s 

a whole world of people in Silicon Valley, all over America, to go 

in and redo these plants, redo these facilities. 

And I don’t have much time left, but anybody want to talk about 

just what transformation and what economy that could create by 

people going through and refurbishing their plants? 

Mr. KURFESS. I will just really quickly fire it off because we see 

it across the board. We work with a lot of different companies. 

The opportunity is tremendous. Whether the small or the medium or the large companies because, again, the kids now they program these things, and so they’re in there, hey, we can do this. 

This is the barcode readers now and so forth. And so they’re really 

implementing it. And so it does allow you to do these types of implementations. 

But back to Mr. Poonen’s point, we’ve got to make sure that we 

are very secure about this. So, and again, in our classes whether 

it’s high school or junior college, whatever, we now see that a lot 

of this type of thing, we are just doing good hygiene. For example, 

do not plug this into, just any old computer. I go to a machine 

shop. Million-dollar machine tool recharging my phone, which could 

have a virus on it. 

And so these are the types of things that we really have to start 

teaching them and stuff. But the opportunity is tremendous. 

Mr. GUTHRIE. Thank you. Thank you for indulging us. 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Representative Guthrie, one other point, if I may. 

There’s a whole suite of capabilities I was starting to bring to 

these enterprise devices. We actually called it mobility DNA. But 

the idea is taking a standard operating system that we might be 

using Android by way of example and layering a whole host of enterprise-centric security on top. 

So we are working closely actually with VMWare on this sort of 

thing. So as these devices—these internet end points are deployed 

in these manufacturing facilities, being able to make it secure all 

the way up the device level, so we have a network of secure devices 

instead of just trying to secure the network, and that’s an investment we are making to basically serve enterprise in a more secure 

way than we might find in traditional consumer devices. 

57 

That, and the last thing—another word silos. I think there’s tremendous opportunity to bring silos down across what many of my 

colleagues here spoke about—from farm to fork, if you will. 

So for being able to share data from where that seed was planted 

in the farm field and be able to carry that data all the way through 

to optimize the harvest out to the transportation carriers for justin-time delivery and then ultimately getting to a retail location 

where we can all enjoy that in a much more efficient way and in 

a way that allows us to, in a more cost effective way, reach more 

people. 

So I think the data silo opportunity is tremendous as we start 

to collect more and more data across all the different elements of 

the supply chain. 

Thank you. 

Mr. GUTHRIE. Thank you very much. I appreciate the indulgence. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you. 

The gentleman from Pennsylvania is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. COSTELLO. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Dr. Kurfess, I wanted to focus on something that you had provided in your written testimony, not just ask you but ask the rest 

of the panel for their feedback as well. 

There’s no doubt IoT in manufacturing will help to grow our 

manufacturing operations and will generate new and higher-paying 

jobs. However, those jobs will be filled by individuals that are highly trained. Furthermore, those individuals will need to be continuously trained and that’s what I want to focus on. 

In the latest and state-of-the-art technologies to keep U.S. manufacturing operations at the forefront of this rapidly advancing technology wave, thus, a culture of lifelong learning must be instilled 

and supported in our workforce. If you look at our high schools and 

STEM schools and trade schools for 18 to 19 year olds, I am struck 

by the opportunities that might be available to incorporate more of 

this lifelong learning culture into curriculum at an earlier age so 

that it is not incumbent upon a company in order to do that. And 

when you look at company of 20, 30 people, even startups of two 

or three individuals, it’s just simply not sustainable to offer that 

type of learning and sort of up-to-date type education that’s required in order to keep a well-trained workforce. 

I’ve already spoken too long. Share with me what you think the 

right kind of learning platforms are in order for our country to be 

a leader for the next 20 and 30 years so that these are not jobs 

that are not remaining in the U.S. 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. So really quickly, the first thing is, I can tell 

you, we have turbine blade production. We do a lot of work in turbine blade production. So we have turbine blade production machines. We are doing research and so forth. And typically you need 

about 15, 20 years of experience before we turn you loose on those 

in production operations. 

We have developed gaming interfaces—high-performance computing that can really—it just pounds that problem to dust and 

there are gaming interfaces and we have high school kids who are 

now programming these types of machines and so forth. 

So it’s a whole different way of learning and as I mentioned before, we can even take a look at who is really excelling. People 

58 

think, oh, engineering—I’ve got to be a super genius. Well, you 

have to be fairly good at math and so forth. But if we can start 

to really identify those students early on and start to work them 

forward—they don’t necessarily have to go into engineering. Maybe 

they’re going to go into the shops and so forth and get the right 

type of training. 

But it’s a two-way street. So the infrastructure is coming into 

place. We have a number of these different—if again you look at 

Manufacturing USA, these centers that are working with the local 

and particularly the community colleges, the Associates degrees 

and so forth, they are saying, yes, what is the next generation that 

we need to be moving forward and let’s work that into the curriculum. And that’s not only for the 2-year degrees but for the continuous learning. And then we also see a lot of the professional societies, that they have a lot of curriculum development that’s 

deployable whether it’s on the web or interactive and so forth. 

So a lot of the technology is moving out. But I agree, you have 

got to build it in. Universities, I think, have done a good job with 

life long learning. We now have to start to propagate that down 

into the K through 12. It’s getting there, but once it’s there, I think 

the access for those students and for that work force is available 

and it also does respond very quickly to the needs of the workforce 

and the needs of the market. 

Mr. COSTELLO. Right. Mr. Poonen. 

Mr. POONEN. I would just briefly add, this topic is personally 

very much a topic of passion for me, sir. 

I came to this country as an immigrant. I am now a U.S. citizen, 

partly because the United States has the best universities. I studied my computer science at Dartmouth College. I did my MBA at 

Harvard University at Harvard Business School, and I hope that 

this continues to be the country with the best education in the 

world. 

The education has now changed. Today, my kids, who live in Los 

Altos, California, are learning through Khan Academy. YouTube 

has completely transformed education and it’s not just for kids. You 

can get a how-to or learn-to anywhere anyplace in 15-, 20-minute 

Ted Talk types of videos and we encourage our workers to constantly be in that learning mode and the good news is the internet 

makes that possible. And it’s almost upending the classroom where 

learning is happening at home in the evenings and the classroom 

becomes a discussion form. That’s the new fashion of what we’re 

doing. 

I think the other part that is incumbent on all of us as leaders 

is to mentor others. As much has been given to us, we’ve got to give 

back to the next generation. I encourage all of us—I know many 

of our colleagues here do the same—it’s our job to mentor the next 

generation. As we do that, both the combination of STEM and mentoring will make the next generation ready. 

Mr. COSTELLO. That’s interesting. So it might be technology that 

enables us to teach technology. 

Mr. POONEN. Exactly, sir. That’s what we hope. 

Mr. COSTELLO. Anyone else? 

59 

Mr. MASNEY. From a manufacturing company perspective, we are 

investing in our local high schools and STEM programs to help the 

younger generation get interested in science and technology. 

We are also working with local universities to make sure there’s 

an interest as well. So I personally believe helping workers, obviously, continuous learning—lifelong learning—there’s also an aspect of company helping our employees be lifetime employable 

through those kinds of ideas as well. 

Mr. COSTELLO. I appreciate your feedback. I yield back. 

Mr. LATTA. Gentleman yields back. 

The gentleman from South Carolina is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Siri, hey Siri. I use that as an example in that these devices are 

always listening, right. Whether you have an Echo in your home 

or some similar device, whether manufacturing has those devices 

that, as you say, are all interconnected, or whether you as an individual have a smart TV and internet rumors, true or not, that that 

TV is spying on you and sharing that information. 

As we move forward with technology and we have a refrigerator 

that notices that my milk is low and asks me if I want to order 

milk, and I do, sends a signal to the grocery store—milk, bread, 

other things I may need delivered to my home by an autonomous 

vehicle, right. 

So I consider myself a conservative. There’s nobody in this room 

that would say I am not a conservative. But I would actually take 

it another step further. I am a conservatarian in that I have a libertarian streak in me that it’s my information and I own it. But 

in this scenario that I laid out, who actually controls that data and 

who owns that data, and at some point, it’s the government getting 

that data and what do they do with it. 

Now, data sharing and by buying habits and what Amazon is 

sending me through e-mails or pop-ups that, because they watch 

my buying habits and they’re recommending certain things, that 

benefits me. I get all that. 

But I can tell you the constituents in the 3rd District of South 

Carolina are concerned about who has that information, what 

they’re doing with it and ultimately does it get in the government’s 

hands without any sort of 4th Amendment protection, so to speak. 

So I would just love to—I know, Mr. Poonen, you were talking 

about some of that earlier. I would just like to expound on that. 

Who owns that data and how can I assure my constituents that 

that data is not going to be used wrongly. 

And then I would also like to get back out on that tangent because you have got proprietary information and corporations, and 

we all know that China got the plans for the F-35. China has gotten plans for a lot of the military components with the best safeguards of cybersecurity in place by our government, right, who has 

access to all of you all to create those platforms for security. 

So I would like to talk about not only individual privacy and data 

ownership but also how do we keep China from—or a Chinese company, and I am not just singling China out but from going to BMW 

or Magna or some sort of manufacturer in the 3rd District and getting proprietary information as well and creating a competing product. 

60 

Mr. POONEN. Yes. Very briefly, and then allow time for my other 

colleagues, too. 

This is a very hard topic. I would be smug if I said we have all 

the answers today. This is going to require continued innovation 

and collaboration with the government. 

I would say there’s a family of problems that are related to predictive maintenance of machines that are positive. For example, if 

the refrigerator or the washing machine is decrepit and you need 

someone to come and help you in that, that’s a family of problems—that people are probably less concerned. The data on that 

machine probably needs to be encrypted. 

But as soon as you have things that are voice recognition, camera related, privacy concerns, and we encourage consumers, certainly enterprises also, to be extremely cautious. You can turn the 

camera off on your TV. You can certainly unplug Alexa when you 

need to and get appropriate cautions on how you handle these consumer devices. 

Mr. DUNCAN. But that smart TV is monitoring all of your viewing habits. 

Mr. POONEN. Exactly. So this is going to be one of those places 

where a combination of encryption, a combination of technologies, 

and I am with you. Consumer privacy—the consumer owns that 

data. The way in which they interact with enterprises—most of our 

focus has been on the enterprise use of this. But the consumer part 

of it is a huge problem that needs to be solved together and there’s 

no easy answer for much of this because we are just beginning to 

scratch the surface of many of the topics that are way out there. 

Mr. DUNCAN. In the essence of time, we know China took the 

plans for the F-35, so to speak, and government was involved. How 

do private industry—how can they have some assurance that their 

proprietary information is sheltered from their competitors? 

Mr. POONEN. We are seeing the shift from assuming that we can 

prevent an enemy, if you will, from getting in to being able to detect that as quickly as possible. 

So if you think about what is your mitigation plan if you assume 

a thesis of you’ll prevent attack from occurring, you have a very 

different outcome in that strategy and that plan that if you assume 

that you will not be able to prevent an attack and so now your 

strategy is going to be to detect that as quickly as possible, to shut 

down that intrusion, and then to take the corrective actions from 

that point forward but detecting that as soon as possible. 

So going from protecting to detecting and then taking a counter 

measure as quickly as possible in every sense of that word I think 

is a shift we are seeing right now. It’s no longer, as you pointed 

out, the best resources on the planet in some instances cannot protect that attack from occurring. So let’s focus more on leveraging 

all the technologies spoken about here—machine learning, artificial 

intelligence, technologies like deep packet inspection, over packets 

on the network, to be able to detect that if that is occurring. 

With regard to in-home, I think similarly we are going to see— 

technology has been used for a while in the network space called 

deep packet inspection where why not have a single source of truth 

of the information that’s leaving my home. 

61 

So what products are sharing what information with whom, and 

imagine if I had a dashboard that I could go to a portal on a web 

page in my home and I could see, well, I shut that TV—I don’t 

want that camera on that TV sharing information. Is in fact that 

data going out over my network or not, and those kind of dashboards so that we can have—enjoy, all of us, the convenience associated with sharing the information but have the integrity and single source of truth to understand what actually is being shared, 

and I agree with the number of devices and the prolific nature of 

this that thinking that we are going to be able to control that because we were told it works a certain way is not going to be sufficient. 

Mr. DUNCAN. I guess my constituents would say, is Big Brother 

going to call me or send me a notice and say that your thermostat 

was set on 72 when you left the house today and you have overutilized your allotment of electricity for the day. Do you see what 

I am saying? 

Mr. POONEN. I do. 

[Simultaneous speaking.] 

Mr. DUNCAN [continuing]. Be going and that’s a true concern. 

Mr. POONEN. I think the best answer to that is to use all the 

mechanisms I just mentioned and more to come to ensure that 

that’s your option—that you’re informed enough to—it’s your choice 

to share that information for a benefit gained. 

Mr. DUNCAN. I am way over time, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for leniency. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. 

The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Texas for 5 minutes. 

Mr. GREEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank our witnesses for 

being here. 

Sorry we have other committees—the Energy Committee upstairs and so I am jumping back and forth. 

When I first saw the hearing, and that’s why I appreciate this 

subcommittee—the Internet of Things—I thought, what in the 

devil is the Internet of Things? I cleaned up my speech after the 

president didn’t. 

But what is it? And thank goodness I have young staff to explain 

to me. I am glad you’re having the hearing because it makes some 

of us who don’t typically live with these things shed light on different aspects of the smart manufacturing and the Internet of 

Things. 

One of our witnesses mentioned manufacturing as one of the sectors that is investing the most in IoT. I have a district that’s predominantly petrochemical refineries, chemical plants, extraction, 

and I know they’re looking for every way they can using technology 

both to produce their product safely or cleaner and doing more 

smart manufacturing can make operations both environmental 

safer and more efficient. But Congress needs to do more to prepare 

our workforce for those changing needs and manufacturers. 

Mr. Kurfess, you mentioned in your testimony importance of instilling a culture of lifelong learning and of helping to train our 

manufacturing workforce in the data science and IT skills that 

workers need. Some people that need job training the most are the 

62 

unemployed and one of the biggest obstacles they face getting into 

that technical training is the cost of it. 

Can you elaborate on possible ways Congress can help this technical training be made more affordable as well as help support a 

culture of lifelong learning broadly? 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. I would be very happy to do that, Congressman. 

I know that there are a lot of initiatives that are really supporting the community colleges. These are the 2-year colleges and 

so forth. They’re very cost effective for the training of the workforce 

and so forth and there’s a lot of leveraging that goes on there. 

We heard about some of the online courses that are available 

today, even via YouTube and so forth. And actually, our—at least 

our younger generation they learn and they think in a different 

way, right. So, when I was a student I might have had one book 

to look at or maybe two books to look at. Now they go out there 

and they get 10, 20, 30 different examples and so forth. 

So, really, not only just saying yes, we could make sure that we 

can support the community colleges and some of the professional 

societies that have these types of courses offering technical training 

but also the ability to basically say yes, let’s make sure that we are 

starting to leverage some of these new approaches to teaching and 

so forth and that we understand that they’re out there so that it 

comes out there very quickly. 

And by the way, these are also very important not just because 

they’re lower cost but they’re very nimble. They can respond quickly to new technology as it comes along. 

So, if you have some YouTube videos out there—you can learn 

anything from fixing a faucet all the way to, hey, let’s go do a calculus problem. 

But as new technology comes along, it’s amazing. You can go to 

YouTube. You can go to some of these different courses, even 

MOOCs, these massively online courses and so forth that some institutions offer for free. And so how do we promote that, once you 

have that, I think the next key thing is certification. Yes, you are 

certified in that course. So that when they go to your company— 

and by the way, it’s interesting, when people think manufacturing, 

make a car. Those petrochemical plants are enormous manufacturers within the United States. 

And so how do we know when that company says yes, I want to 

hire somebody that yes, this person has the right credentials. It’s 

great that they have a degree from, let’s say, a Georgia Tech, but 

what about just some of the smaller credentials that are going 

along. So a lot of that credentialing and getting back to some of the 

standards that we are looking at. 

Mr. GREEN. Well, I appreciate that. 

I actually have a community college in our area who partners 

with the petrochemical industry—San Jacinto College in east Harris County, Lee College in Baytown, because of the dominance of 

that industry, and I’ve been out there and they’re doing—and a 

number of my other community colleges in our area developing the 

same thing because you just don’t go get your Associate’s or your 

Bachelor’s or anything. You need to continue to look at what’s new, 

and I was there on campus one time and a young man had about 

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three different certifications, and he was getting offers of over 

$150,000 at a Shell refinery or a LyondellBasell refinery or chemical plants. 

So it’s a way that someone—but you have to continue to keep up 

with your industry and that’s what community colleges can do. 

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the time. 

Mr. LATTA. Well, thank you very much. The gentleman yields 

back. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Indiana for 5 

minutes. 

Mr. BUCSHON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Poonen, I am going to primarily talk with you and some of 

the other about security. Mostly, it seems to me, when we’re talking about security we are talking about software and other—and 

access and things like that—passwords and all of that. 

But you probably saw in the news recently that in some areas 

across the country there were some communities and police departments that took down their security cameras because of concerns 

of where that product was made, and it was made overseas and so 

there was some question not about that it was connected to the 

internet but the actual hardware itself and whether that was compromised. 

There’s some things I know that we do at the Federal Government level to ensure, for example, that chips that are used in Defense Department products are not compromised, so to speak, but 

worldwide and even in the U.S. some people estimate as many as 

10 to 15 percent of computer—the hardware, like the silicon chips, 

are actually counterfeit. 

That’s an area I think we should also look at. What are we doing 

there? 

Mr. POONEN. I think it’s absolutely wise, sir. 

I think that when you think about security it absolutely is in all 

of those layers. You need a multi-layered, whether it’s the hardware or the software, whether it was the service, was the people. 

And listen, capitalism works only if the entire world is a level 

playing field and when some countries are not necessarily playing 

by that I think it’s absolutely the wise policy, whether it’s the FBI, 

whether it’s the appropriate agencies, to ensure that our products, 

whether they’re bought for a foreign party, don’t have embedded 

components, hardware or others, that could potentially compromise 

the security. So—— 

Mr. BUCSHON. I can tell you probably know and I know this myself, sometimes it takes an electron microscope and people that understand it to detect these problems with chips and stuff. 

Mr. POONEN. Yes, absolutely. 

Mr. BUCSHON. It’s pretty sophisticated. 

Mr. POONEN. Yes, and there’s absolutely evidence of that happening. I am not a protectionist in terms of the way in which we 

think about the economy. We do believe in free market. But it has 

to be one with a level playing field. 

So many of the governments that have been focused on this, certainly in the United States and Israel, that have had this have got 

a very good way of looking at the ways in which many foreign governments are building technologies, and without naming certain 

countries, we’ve got to continue that diligence, because whether it’s 

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the camera technology, whether it’s voice recognition, the types of 

things that could leave us vulnerable, we’ve got to make sure we’ve 

got the most protection. We work very closely, both the industry 

and the government, the agencies, to ensure that happens. That’s 

probably a topic we haven’t talked about. I am very glad that this 

committee is focusing a lot on security. Security is probably one of 

the key topics in this entire topic of IoT that needs even more and 

more focus. 

Mr. BUCSHON. Yes, because it is a global marketplace and I am 

in favor of that. I am a free market person also. I think we all are. 

But we also, from our jobs’ perspective as members of congress 

we have considered national security-related risks and the biggest 

port of entry that we have is our people using connected devices, 

maybe even at their homes. For example, say they work at the 

NSA and they deal with classified material every day that we don’t 

want people to know about. But when they go home they have all 

their devices at home are all connected and who knows who’s listening. 

And even though they’re not supposed to—what if they’re just 

pontificating among even themselves about the day’s activities? It’s 

hard to know. 

So I have pretty significant concerns about on the hardware side, 

because once we are able to mitigate other things, people are 

smart. You’re already too late when the hardware itself is compromised. Does that make any sense? 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Yes. I am just going to add it absolutely does 

make sense, Congressman. If I could suggest, we could break the 

problem down to two components. One is around the counterfeit 

side of things. So these are counterfeit chips or, that are made 

overseas, copying our technology, and as you pointed out, you need 

somebody with sophisticated technology to check that. 

But what I would say is that actually IoT is a mechanism for auditing that because if we’re seeing this occur today, if I’m a semiconductor manufacturer of those chips, I can have each one of those 

chips report back when they connect as a—just basically a heart— 

pulse to say that that device is present, and if I see that coming 

from more devices than I have shipped, I’ve got an indicator that 

there’s an alternate end around from a supply chain perspective. 

Someone else is injecting, if you will, these chips into the supply 

chain that aren’t coming from my factory. 

So it’s sort of an IoT connected auditing mechanism. I think that 

represents one level of—certainly compromises economics but is a 

little bit lower on the threat level compared to, as you were suggesting, information that’s being sent—that’s actually being captured we don’t know it—the example you gave around the device 

in the home connecting back to the network or a video camera in 

a municipality that’s sending information back to individuals that 

we don’t want it to go to. 

And there, I think, we and a number of companies working on 

networking technology that can detect if information is being sent 

that is different than what we intended to be sent. 

And I think if we can audit the network, if you will, the pipe of 

data that’s being sent to see what’s actually being sent versus what 

we’ve authorized, and at the same time we can continue to invest 

65 

and drive in IoT. So all of our devices, for instance, that are connected out in the field can connect back, we can literally count the 

devices we’ve shipped. We can count the devices we see. And if 

there’s more devices we see than we’ve shipped then something 

else is going on. 

So those, I think, are perhaps two ways to look at it. Certainly 

a complicated problem, as our colleagues have pointed out. But a 

food for thought, perhaps. 

Mr. BUCSHON. OK. Thank you. 

I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. LATTA. The gentleman yields back. 

The gentleman from California is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. CA ́ RDENAS. Thank you, Chairman Latta and Ranking Member Schakowsky, for calling this hearing. 

As a former small business owner myself, I know that a business 

that is not growing and evolving is a business that is not succeeding. 

As an engineer, I’ve studied the rise and proliferation of connected devices and for the potential to help businesses and government evolve and better serve their consumers and constituents. For 

example, a company in my district that testified last June in this 

hearing on the Internet of Things, Louroe Electronics uses connected microphones and sensors to help protect property and also 

help law enforcement detect and rapidly respond to gunshots. 

On the public service side, the Internet of Things technology has 

helped local governments and firefighters monitor and prevent and 

fight back firefighters in southern California, for example. 

Recently, the House passed my amendment to study the use of 

drones to detect and fight wildfires. However, I also know that as 

with any rapid-growing technology we must encourage innovation 

smartly, responsibly, and with our eyes wide open. 

We are constantly learning that virtually any connection can be 

hacked. So cyber security is an area that businesses and government will have to pay extremely close attention to and invest a lot 

of resources. 

Another issue that we need to hold our businesses to a high 

standard on is workforce preparedness. As our companies evolve, 

our workforce must necessarily evolve as well. 

Ideally, this evolution will come in the form of education and retraining. This was an important issue that I brought up during our 

markup of the SELF DRIVE Act and it’s an important issue in 

every environment. For example, southern California happens to 

be—I was told when I got elected to Congress I was reminded that 

southern California is the largest manufacturing area in the entire 

country. I was pleased and surprised to hear that. So this is an 

issue that not only is important to my district but important to one 

of the biggest economies in the world, which is California. 

My first question is to Dr. Kurfess. You have the advantage of 

a bird’s eye view of the industrial Internet of Things through your 

work with a variety of companies. 

So can you describe briefly what practices you’ve seen that help 

workers adapt to and learn how to better use new technologies? 

Mr. KURFESS. Sure. It’s relatively straightforward. Some of the 

practices that are out there actually get to some of the discussions 

66 

we’ve had about just hygiene. Don’t plug your phone into the million-dollar machine tool out there because it might have a virus on 

it and so forth. But some of the other practices really go along the 

lines of understanding what people are comfortable with in terms 

of using and so forth and letting them make use of that technology 

in place. 

As I said before, we actually have developed some software 

where you’re doing a Ppkeman type of program—you’re looking for 

the guy to try and capture. But that guy you’re trying to capture 

is a flaw in your production cycle and so forth and you capture it. 

So you actually start to bring these together. The Internet of 

Things—people are very comfortable in general. It just doesn’t matter who you are. People have the smart phones now and they’re 

very comfortable using it. 

And so the idea really is yes, can you bring that comfort together 

so that they make use of it in a very easy and natural way. 

So that’s one of the things. The other thing, again, and we’ve 

heard from several companies here, just continuous learning, to 

make it easy, you make it rewarding, to provide the time so that 

the people in the plant can do some learning. 

And we are not talking hours and hours of time. Typically, it’s 

just yes, just take a look at this thing—we can track your progress 

and so forth and making sure that they’re up to speed on what a 

company needs to have them up to speed on, whatever that might 

be. 

Today it’s going to be, and again, coming out of California you 

realize this—whatever’s going on today may not make a whole lot 

of difference tomorrow in terms of technology. That’s how rapidly 

things are changing. 

Mr. CA ́ RDENAS. It’s interesting that you describe the example of 

the cell phone and how that could interfere with the opportunity 

to, unfortunately, have an infiltration in your system. 

I learned, again, through one of the subcommittees on health, is 

that some hospitals, and a lot of people now realize that infections—if you’re going to get an infection, probably going to get it 

a hospital more than anywhere else—that it wasn’t some incredibly 

expensive process to bring down the infection rate at hospitals 

other than having the discipline of everybody washing their hands 

at every opportunity. Something as simple as soap. 

But what I am getting at is I think it’s important for us to teach 

the next generation of workforce that even though they find these 

things to be so darn convenient and think that it’s the answer to 

everything. It actually, if not handled properly, with simple measures you could actually cause a disaster or catastrophe that is unintended. 

So I think it’s important for us to realize that sometimes the answers are complicated. Sometimes the answers are really simple 

about basic discipline. 

Thank you very much, and I yield back my time. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back. 

The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Florida for 5 minutes. 

Mr. BILIRAKIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it, and 

thanks for the testimony. 

67 

I was at the joint VA Committee hearing. So I apologize for being 

late. 

I have a couple questions. The first one for Mr. Bianculli—in 

your testimony you state that industrial IoT-based solutions are allowing companies to create jobs. One of the big concerns we are facing is automation replacing jobs. So can you please explain to us 

how these solutions help create jobs? 

Mr. BIANCULLI. Sure. Yes, I think there’s sort of a micro and a 

macro view on that. The micro one I mentioned a little bit earlier 

around machines working with workers to help them get their jobs 

done more effectively. And I think when we think about that, we 

have a tendency to think of the brawn side of that, meaning that 

the physical movement of goods and that’s for sure a part of it. The 

other part of it is that the brain or the intelligence are an assistant 

that can work along with the worker. So we mentioned wearable 

technology, augmented reality, being able to put information right 

up in front of the user. And as this starts to assist you, that should 

create more job satisfaction, a better work environment. It also, in 

addition to increasing quality and having benefit to the bottom 

line, reduces the cost of getting that job done. And so if I shift from 

the micro perspective over to macro, as we reduce the cost of getting that job done, we become more competitive on a global basis, 

thereby bringing jobs back in. 

So if we look at any one instance we could point to well, if we 

are reducing the cost of labor that—some might say that’s reducing 

the number of jobs. I would say it’s increasing the efficiency of an 

individual and thereby increasing efficiency of that individual has 

the macro effect of making us more competitive on a global stage. 

And I think that we are starting—I mean, it’s happening already. We are starting to see that bear itself out. The other thing 

we are starting to see with the on-demand economy that we mentioned earlier is the peaks are getting peakier, if you will. If you 

look at the number of shipments that are happening from manufacturing facilities or from fulfilment centers in the November to January timeframe—in some cases, you see this in the headlines— 

transportation carriers, retailers, are doubling or tripling their 

workforce to be able to handle that peak demand. 

And so when you bring that influx of workers in, if it takes 2 

weeks to train somebody how to do that job, you’re a third of the 

way through that peak cycle. So leveraging this technology so that 

someone can be functional and up and running in an hour and be 

as skilled or as capable as someone that’s been doing it for several 

weeks also becomes very important. 

So I think if we view it that way and look at the bigger picture 

over the longer time horizon, there’s early indicators that what I 

just described is starting to happen and I think we should lean in 

and accelerate to take advantage of that for the country. Thanks. 

Mr. BILIRAKIS. Thank you. Good answer. 

In your testimony, Mr. Masney, you note that, and I quote, ‘‘the 

cost to achieve a full deployment of IoT throughout an enterprise 

can be quite daunting,’’ and suggest that lowering those costs 

would help ensure the deployment of the IoT. 

What are some of the ways policy changes could help? 

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Mr. MASNEY. Certainly. Looking at ways to reduce the cost per 

unit of a sensor or technology can help spur investment into IoT, 

and it’s not just one thing. It’s sensors. It’s PLCs. It’s storage. It’s 

systems. It’s investment in programming and those kinds of things. 

So, certainly, looking at ways that we can spur innovation, get 

products produced at a lower price than manufacturing companies 

can consume and deploy at a lower cost point, especially in a business like ours which is very capital intensive, is going to be incredibly helpful to move IoT forward. 

Mr. BILIRAKIS. Very good. Thank you. 

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you holding this hearing. Very informative and I will yield back the balance of my time. 

Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back the 

balance of his time. 

And seeing that there are no further members wishing to ask 

questions, I want to again thank all of our witnesses for your great 

testimony. 

Before we conclude, I would like to include the following document to be submitted for the record by unanimous consent—a letter from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. 

And hearing no objection, that letter is part of the record. 

[The information appears at the conclusion of the hearing.] 

Mr. LATTA. Pursuant to committee rules, I remind members that 

they have 10 business days to submit additional questions for the 

record and I ask the witnesses submit their response within 10 

business days upon receipt of the questions. 

And without any objection, the committee will stand adjourned. 

Thank you very much. 

[Whereupon, at 11:46 a.m., the committee was adjourned.] 

[Material submitted for inclusion in the record follows:] 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. GREG WALDEN

Good morning, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing before the Subcommittee today. Chairman Latta, I’m pleased to see the Disrupter Series continue 

with this subcommittee’s focus on innovation, and American jobs and competitiveness. The Internet of Things’ impact on the manufacturing sector has been transformative. I’m looking forward to hearing from the witnesses today about how their 

companies think about the best ways to utilize IoT, particularly if there are applications that improve safety for their employees. 

Over the last year our economy has expanded because of the efforts of entrepreneurs and American workers, and also in no small part because of the lifting of 

regulatory barriers. New technologies have continued to play their traditional role 

in driving American innovation, creating new opportunities and lowering costs for 

consumers. 

The Internet of Things is one of these technologies. In a sense the IoT is not newindustrial processes have long sought to create efficiencies through the acquisition 

and use of data. But revolutions in sensor technology, communications devices and 

data analysis have allowed manufacturers to utilize information in ways never before possible. Now machines can play an active role in their own operation, ensuring 

they are functioning properly and receiving attention when needed. 

That said, there is also an important conversation to continue around training 

and filling the workforce gaps we see in our own districts. This issue is has many 

facets, certainly one is the opioid crisis, and it is important to hear directly from 

businesses about their experience training and maintaining their workforce. 

There is bipartisan agreement that we want, and need, to see American manufacturing succeed. On that front there is great news: earlier this month the Institute 

for Supply Management reported that in 2017 U.S. manufacturing activity was the 

highest it has been since 2004, and in December continued to expand at its fastest 

pace in three months. 

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The renaissance in American manufacturing, empowered by new technology that 

drives efficiency and lowers costs, holds the promise of continued opportunities for 

future generations of Americans—and to keep good jobs here at home. As policymakers all of us share the goal of removing barriers to innovation and productivity. 

I look forward to hearing our witnesses describe the role of IoT in manufacturing, 

and how it can further drive America’s recent successes in expanding job creation. 

I also hope that our witnesses will share with us any areas for improvement, where 

Congress can help remove obstacles and promote growth. 

Mr. Chairman thank you for holding this hearing, and I yield back the balance 

of my time. 

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