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In his segment, Richard highlights Seraph’s commitment to forging new connections in the medical device field:

“It’s not only about how Medical Alley can help us, but how we can help the partners in Medical Alley improve their operations.”

Richard Payne

Check out the highlight of Richard’s interview below, and follow the link to listen to the full discussion!

Listen to the complete interview here

“When you cut that cord and move that production far away, it can become really hard to collect that information to inform your design work. The ability of the design firms to operate at a very high level is reduced. You’re facing a competitor that’s native in your product better than you are.”

Miles Arnone

CEO, Re:Build Manufacturing

Links:

Episode Highlights:

On company principles vs. mission statements:
“When you visit a lot of companies, they’ll have a mission statement, something like, ‘to serve our customers with a high level quality, and as well as possible.’ Our principles are meant to be more first order fundamental beliefs, as opposed to a goal statement, how do we need to behave? How do people need to treat each other in the company, in the community, our vendors, our customers, to be successful over the long term?”

On long-term decision making:
“If something will increase our profits this year, but hurt us over the next three, we never do it.”

On the impact of offshoring on product design and innovation:
“You learn a lot from making something as far as shaping how you will design it or improve it for the future. When you cut that cord and move that production far away, in terms of time, distance or other barriers like language or culture, it can become really hard to collect that information to inform your design work… the ability of the design firms to operate at a very high level is reduced.”

On the importance of manufacturing to democracy:
“We need to be able to build products and have manufacturing in this country because without it, we can’t provide good jobs and a good future for people to participate in our system. Democracy is expensive. It costs a lot to run a democracy more than to run an autocracy. And so we need a very well functioning economy to make that happen.”

On the challenges of reshoring manufacturing:
“Once a supply chain has migrated offshore, it’s very hard to bring it back. It’s a large systems problem. We are very unlikely to reshore Happy Meal Toy production. Everything you need to do it now, the design, the production, the piloting of it, all of that is not resident here.”

Re:Build’s “hard-tech” startup customers:
“We’ve chosen to focus on working with hard tech startups and hard tech innovators in the U.S. to try to ensure that their newest products and services that they develop don’t migrate.”

On Re:Build’s approach to cost-sharing with customers:
“We want to proactively share with the customer 70 percent of the savings we generate and retain 30 percent for ourselves after any fixed cost we might have to incur like capital or some special things of this nature. The reason we drove that is because we want to be able to have a truly collaborative relationship with the customer and also a transparent one.”

On Re:Build’s approach to customer relationships:
“Our goal is always for our customers to be getting the product at the right level of quality, on time, as inexpensively as possible. That will make them more profitable. That means they’ll be more work for us.”

Rejecting the practice of profiting from contract technicalities:
“I don’t want our business to be in the business of making its money on the footnotes, like in the margins of the contract.”

On the importance of local cultural understanding in business:
“We think of our system, Re:Build, as kind of a federal system. Like, each of our member companies is like a state. States like Massachusetts has a different culture than Texas, has a different culture than California, than Montana, and you allow that and you happily want that. You want to promote that culture because it leads to some goodness.”

On Re:Build’s internal collaboration strategy:
“Every Re:Build employee is on the same incentive plan. Every Rebuild employee owns the incentive plan shares or options if they have invested in rebuild the overarching business, not their local entity. They get part of their cash bonus and option bonus based on how much collaboration was done by the member company of which they’re a part.”

On adapting Japanese Keiretsu-esque management styles to American culture:
“Americans really value their independence, almost above all things. If you tell an American that they don’t have the freedom to make a decision about something, they really don’t go for that.”

Emphasizing the importance of practical manufacturing knowledge over high-level software solutions:
“What’s needed is a focus on the tactical work of making things. That requires subject matter expertise. The people we met at that conference largely were people that had pure software, in many cases pure e-commerce backgrounds, believing they could take that knowledge and apply it in a general way to manufacturing and solve a problem. But they’re chasing a problem that I think doesn’t really exist, they’re sort of creating. The problem is, again, the tactics… We’re focused on developing software that solves those kinds of problems. For example, software that is tied intrinsically into production equipment, and monitors the variables of that production equipment, and helps us to adjust the production process in real time. Not how long has my spindle been up today? Kind of basic stuff, but much more fundamental data collection and decision making.”

On Re:Build’s approach to implementing technology:
“We’re much more a fan of an incremental, give me value in the near term approach to win hearts and minds and get people on board with the idea that this voyage towards that wonderful digital thread future is a good journey.”

“We use LEAN, Continuous Improvement Through Respect for People. We do what are called Rapid Improvement Events and other types of events to drive improvement in the business. And we just altered our Rapid Improvement Event Template so that every Rapid Improvement Event has as a part of its goal setting, what are the improvements we’re going to try to get for the customers and what’s going to be their magnitude.”

Miles Arnone

“A lot of manufacturers have been stuck in this productivity rut for the last five to ten years. Thus, the real goal here is to boost the productivity of these manufacturers. Once they put in robots, what happens is that they get a lot more utilization. They produce more, and so their top line goes up, but their bottom line goes up way more.”

Saman Farid

CEO, Formic

Discussed in this episode:
✔️ Transforming the future of US manufacturing: inside the origins and impact of Formic’s robotics technology on customers today
✔️ Mitigating risk and maximizing ROI in the adoption of robotics technology
✔️ Revolutionizing labor: building an efficient service network for hourly deployment of robot workers across regions
✔️ How a disruptive business model is changing the robot industry: insights from a company working with a wide range of robotic suppliers
✔️ Benchmarking deployment speed: how does Formic compare to traditional competitors?
✔️ Challenges and strategies for building the world’s largest robot workforce
✔️ Enhancing manufacturing operations with automation: overcoming financing challenges and streamlining growth
✔️ Adaptability of robot workers: a key factor for lending in the manufacturing industry
✔️ Scaling new robot applications: mitigating venture risk and expanding markets
✔️ Exploring the organizational structure of the robotics company: software and implementation teams coordination
✔️ The future of manufacturing: in-demand skills for robotic automation

“Last year in America, about 40,000 robots were deployed. But, right now, in America, there are more than 1.3 million unfilled manufacturing jobs. The rate of robot deployment today is not even a drop in the bucket… [When Formic rolls out robots,] all of these are highly repetitive tasks. A lot of them are pretty back-breaking labor and they’re tasks that workers don’t want to do. And in a lot of cases, manufacturers can’t find people who are willing to do those jobs. When we put in robots, worker satisfaction goes up, worker’s injuries goes down, and utilization goes up and all of a sudden they get a lot more production.”

Saman Farid

“I love people who have passion. I don’t care if you’re a truck driver, biller, tax person, or a salesperson. We take our time to make sure we hire the right people from the beginning and always make sure our team has the proper tools, so they know what they’re going to get into. I’m a big believer that it all starts with people. If you have good people, you have a good culture, and then you can continue to grow.” 

Sam Simon

Founder and Chairman, Simon Group Holdings

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

“Your meetings should be in the field. Your meeting should be with the team. Your meeting should not be just sitting on the desk in the office. And then, so majority of opportunities, or issues or areas that you need to fix, it’s all in the field. So I go to the field, that’s how I get my best ideas.”

Sam Simon

Building a strong team and keeping good people starts with establishing a culture centered on doing the right thing. Atlas Oil’s 6 core values:

“Internally, within our company, we like teammates who not just find problems, but solve problems each and every day and prevent them from reoccurring… The problem solvers always rise to the top. People love to be around other people who can help them solve a problem. Customers love us because we help them solve problems.”

Chris Cummins

President and CEO, Micronics Engineered Filtration Group

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

“We’re transparent about the important aspects of our business that help us create value. We openly discuss what makes our business great, focusing on customer service. This includes on-time delivery, lead times, reducing past dues, minimizing warranty costs, and taking care of our customers should something go wrong.

Internally, we talk about the three things that are really important to our business each and every day:

  1. Cash flow: You can’t run a business without constant cash flow.
  2. Margins: How do we improve, reduce rework, remove quality defects, eliminate scrap and waste to make our company more profitable, enabling continued growth?
  3. Sales: How do we grow our business organically? Not just get new customers, but how do we do more for the really good customers we have? How do we take more tasks off their plate to make their lives easier? Can we be a one-stop-shop to make them better?

These areas are an essential part of who we are and ensure that our actions positively impact the three pillars of our business. We emphasize problem-solving and continuous improvement while holding ourselves accountable for doing the right thing.”

“We have an intensive engagement model, and our aim is to work closely with our teams to drive critical initiatives. It’s almost like being a co-pilot; we agree on the game plan, identify three or four key opportunities, and leverage each other’s capabilities to get the job done. As the saying goes, we’re changing the wheels on the car while it’s still moving. We’re still running the business, serving our customers, and managing employees. The key is to create the capacity and bring in the skill sets to make it happen.”

Doug McCormick

Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer, HCI Equity

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

Seraph delivers long-term operational improvements that help our clients transform their manufacturing operations.
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