Supply Chain Queen - Making Industry 4.0 Real: Strategy, IT/OT Convergence & the Human Side
Industry 4.0 is not a tool set you buy. It is a business transformation. In this episode of Supply Chain Revolution, Sheri Hinish (Supply Chain Queen) sits down with Jeff Winter, VP of Commercial Strategy at Belden, the number one ranked Industry 4.0 thought leader globally (Onalytica, 2023), and one of the most influential voices in manufacturing with over 100 million LinkedIn views.
Jeff traces his career from sales engineer to the safety PLC turning point that changed how he thought about selling, through the evolution from product to problem to vision, and into his current role shaping commercial strategy at Belden across digitization, automation, IT/OT convergence, and physical AI.
In this episode, you will learn:
Why manufacturers struggle with Industry 4.0: they start with nouns (AI, IoT, MES) instead of verbs (reduce, accelerate, standardize)
The ingredients-without-the-meal analogy: why "we need AI" is not a business case
Five prerequisites that must be true before technology creates value in a manufacturing organization
Why every plant thinks it is special, and why that kills scale • Industry 4.0 as an era vs. a destination (and why both definitions are valid)
Jensen Huang's "two factories" model: the physical factory and the AI factory
Why the future is won by making intelligence operational, not by having the coolest AI
The selling evolution: from product to problem to vision as a career and leadership framework
How Jeff built 100M+ LinkedIn views across 1,300+ posts (and why he responds to every comment manually)
