Growing up, Susan Murray Carlock must have absorbed countless tidbits about metal stamping, forming, bending and all the other shop talk her father shared at the dinner table. “Sounds great, Dad,” was among her repertoire of respectful replies, but at that young age, she wasn’t interested in a manufacturing career. She wanted to be a nurse. In typical Murray family fashion, she achieved her goals; after earning a bachelor of science degree from nearby Marian University, she became an RN and served for more than a decade in emergency medicine and home healthcare.
Since then, however, Carlock has taken on different though equally weighty responsibilities. In 2011, she set aside her nursing career and began working at her father’s company, Mursix Corp. of Yorktown, Ind. It was here that she became the director of human resources and watched as far too many skilled machinists and sheet metal workers retired or went to work for a competing shop, taking the knowledge they’d accrued there with them. She calls it “the knack.”
No, we aren’t talking about the power-pop band that burst out of California in the late 1970s. And while the very mention of the knack might cue up a belated download of “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t” for anyone who came of age in those bell-bottom, roller-rink years, the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “an ability or special method for doing something easily and well.”
That’s precisely what Carlock and business partner Paul Boris set out to capture when they founded Murray Mentor Inc. in 2023, a company that’s website describes it as “the digital mentor for the skilled trades.”
Making a mark
We’ll discuss the software startup and its AI chatbot shortly, but first, it’s necessary to provide a little background. Aside from her work with Murray Mentor, Carlock also serves on the board of multiple organizations: the Greater Muncie Chamber of Commerce; Conexus Indiana, a non-profit working to position the state as a global leader in advanced manufacturing and logistics; the Purdue Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), which is said to support Indiana’s 8,000 small and medium-size manufacturers with practical, cost-effective solutions; and her alma mater’s Byrum School of Business, where she helps shape the curriculum for students pursuing degrees in logistics and supply chain management.
On top of that, Carlock is also president of Pivot Mfg., a woman-owned machine shop in Yorktown that she launched during the Covid pandemic to make face shields, but has since pivoted to prototyping and product development for entrepreneurs. The company is a member of Manufuture Purdue, the university’s SMART Consortium, which seeks to “empower U.S. manufacturers to increase their resiliency and international competitiveness by successfully adopting privacy-preserving, scalable, certify-as-build AI/ML practices.”
Oh, did we forget to mention that Carlock is now the co-owner and executive vice president of Mursix? She’s clearly a busy woman, but this story isn’t about her many manufacturing-related activities. It’s about how she wants to capture the knowledge tidbits mentioned earlier – the knack – and use them to train others. It’s important to note that Carlock’s father, Stephen Murray, passed away in 2016, but he would undoubtedly be proud of all that she and her brother, CEO Todd Murray, together with president Jeff Frost, have accomplished. But in all fairness, they had a solid springboard from which to launch.
Repairing history
“When my dad bought Twoson Tool in 1990, it was already a 45-year-old company, one that got its start making wire hose reels but soon moved into four-slide die design and manufacturing for the automotive and appliance industries,” Carlock explains. “But much of that work ended up moving to low-cost labor countries soon after Congress passed NAFTA, so we began investing in punch presses and other metalworking equipment. And that’s a good thing because this type of tooling has become a dying art here in the States.”
Speaking of dying arts, Carlock notes that legendary actor James Dean was on the Twoson payroll, but left soon after the company’s formation. “It’s said that the day he quit, Dean walked up to the foreman and said, ‘I’m leaving for Hollywood. I’m gonna go make movies,’” she laughs. “The rest is history.”
Some of that history, as it relates to Mursix, anyway, is the company’s steady march toward vertical integration. Twoson’s original lineup of 44 stamping presses has dwindled to “maybe 15, with around half idled while waiting for service parts.” That is a sobering figure that has since been made much brighter after Mursix added plastic injection molding and CNC machining to its capabilities list.
“We’ve also invested in value-added services like welding, plating and overmolding, all to give our customers the most competitive price possible,” Carlock says.
One way to attain this success – and reach a goal with which manufacturers have long struggled – is by capturing the tribal knowledge that keeps a shop running efficiently.
“That’s a very real problem,” she adds. “As I noted earlier, in the 14 years since I joined the family business, I’ve watched as decades of tribal knowledge walked out the front door. This is information that no one has documented – people just know how to do certain things – but without it, a company’s long-term survival is at risk.”
Capturing curmudgeons
Fortunately for Carlock and other business owners, she met Paul Boris, a consultant, digital transformation expert and business executive with roughly two dozen organizations, among them ERP software giant SAP, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and industrial machine learning/data analytics provider Praemo. It wasn’t long after this meeting, Carlock notes, that they attracted some investors and founded the business named after her father, Murray Mentor.
The software works by sticking a microphone in front of senior people – interviewing them, in other words – while they perform everyday manufacturing tasks. Murray Mentor’s AI engine then filters out all the stops and starts found in natural human speech, makes sense of what is being said and indexes it based on the problem or process being discussed. When done, even a novice can use the digital mentor to tackle what Carlock sometimes calls the stuff “the old curmudgeons” can do without a second thought.
“For example, the operator can pick up a tablet and ask Murray, ‘Hey, the 400-ton press is leaking. What should I do first?’” she says. “The chatbot might then reply with questions such as, ‘Where’s the leak? How much fluid is coming out? What’s the color or consistency?’ Depending on the response, it could tell them to call maintenance immediately or maybe suggest trying A, B and C first. Either way, they don’t have to waste time chasing down a more experienced person to help troubleshoot a simple issue because they already have a digital version of someone with years or even decades of experience answering the question.”
The champions
As much as people don’t like talking to computers – myself included – Carlock is quick to point out that Murray Mentor’s customers are thrilled. But she’s equally quick to suggest what anyone who has implemented any type of new technology should already know: projects like this require top-down support.
“You need a champion,” she says, “someone in a leadership position who will make a concerted effort to see it through and drive the process throughout the building.”
That statement applies to all Industry 4.0 implementation efforts, not just AI chatbots. Carlock references a recent quarterly meeting at Boston Scientific where more than 100 members of the previously mentioned Conexus Indiana gathered to discuss advanced manufacturing, supply chain challenges, common pain points and, most especially, how to effectively leverage the large amounts of data these leaders have captured via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
“A large percentage of the participants have no idea how to build a digital roadmap or even know what Industry 4.0 and IIoT mean,” Carlock says. “And just as importantly, how does a manufacturer go about skilling up the people who will be responsible for helping install and maintain equipment and just understand how these various systems work? The statewide manufacturing forums – and I think Indiana’s blessed to have one of the best, most robust working groups in the United States – bring the stakeholders together to a place where they can talk about solving these problems and transforming their business as a result.”
And because it doesn’t hurt having a little extra cash when starting any business transformation project, the state of Indiana puts its money where its mouth is. Working with Conexus Indiana and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), it provides matching grants up to $200,000 to help qualified manufacturers “jumpstart into that digital journey.”
Bottom of the well
Boris is entirely on board with such financial assistance, but is quick to point out that Murray Mentor is “fairly affordable for the small to mid-size market with a robust return on investment.” He also labels it as having “almost zero cognitive load,” in that the chatbot is listening at the machine, in the maintenance shop, in the shift change meeting and in the conversations that occur every day, but that no one (except Murray) ever thinks to capture.
Boris explains that the typical digital work instruction systems focus on training the novice – they don a set of goggles and enter an augmented, immersive environment as though they’re standing at the machine or are presented with video work instructions similar to what can be found on TikTok or YouTube.
These systems generally glean their information from the equipment manuals, work instructions and other documentation that no one wants to read, he adds, or by having an expert dictate the procedures that AI then compiles and feeds back to the user.
“Murray can also perform these functions and needs nothing more than a cloud-connected smartphone to do it,” Boris says, “but it’s far more interested in gathering the massive body of data that isn’t stored anywhere. This is the tribal knowledge that Susan refers to as ‘the knack.’”
When asked if Murray can show a newbie how to tighten chuck jaws or load a die set into a stamping press, Boris offers an enthusiastic yes. He’s quick to add that these basics are overshadowed by the chatbot’s more powerful capabilities – the process improvement opportunities where a user wants to optimize a CNC lathe program or reduce tool wear or balance a scheduling bottleneck. Murray helps with all this and more.
“I use the term ‘at the bottom of the well,’” he says. “That’s where we get to the last 6 in., the space between your ears. We go straight to the source of the knack and gather everything we find there. Not only can we trace who asked the questions but also the person who provided the answers. Simply put, Murray is the first knowledge base that learns as it goes and is tailored to your business. It knows the machinery, the processes and the best practices, and it shares all that institutional knowledge with the people who need it most: the new hires who are desperate to get up to speed quickly.”
Murray Mentor Inc.
Mursix Corp.
