Dave Evans with Fictiv
On this week's Industrial Talk we're talking to Dave Evans, Co-Founder and CEO of Fictiv about “Product Development Manufacturing Speed Solutions”. Get the answers to your “Product Development” questions along with Dave's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!
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DAVE EVANSS CONTACT INFORMATION:
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evansda11/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fictiv/
Company Website: https://www.fictiv.com/
PODCAST VIDEO:
OTHER PODCASTS, BLOGS AND VIDEOS OF DAVE:
https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/guests/dave-evans/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7mqqRraB8HBtAVrouXlQmk
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/supply-chains-are-on-the-cusp-of-digital-transformation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-YsWlv8eVU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTmoI2up4A
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Fictiv, scott, build, supply chain, quality, supplier, world, industrial, people, product, manufacturing, ford, engineer, part, pandemic, wheels, dave evans, manufacturers, industry, solution
Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. Alright, once again, welcome to industrial talk the, let's say ever expanding industrial ecosystem that is dedicated to you, the industrial professional solvent province. Yes, collaborating, absolutely innovating you back here, industrial talk. We're featuring incredible professionals that embody those qualities each and every day in the hot seat. Speaking of which, his name is Dave Evans. He is founder, co founder excuse me, of a company called Fictiv Fictiv FICT i v. And you know, we're talking about some of the challenges that are happening in the supply chain and what can we do for new product development? I'm telling you right now, that Fictiv platform, stellar let's get going.
So
in my past, I guess it's the past Yeah, it is, it's the past, the way I used to do product development as you you know, you design it, and then you'd have to go find some sort of company to be able to develop it and, and as as time goes on, as time went on, that you just keep on working at it and designing it and then try to come back and see what happens and then refining it. There's a lot of work that goes into this, this whole product development. And I think today, once you'll hear from Dave, that the future in new product development and supply chain,
it's bright, and I know that we're we're struggling right now with supply chain stuff, but I'm telling you right now, team, Fictiv Dave, his team absolutely got their fingers on the pulse of of a real solution. That if it's transformative, it's transformative. And I not It's not hyperbole, I really enjoyed the conversation. And it's all doable. Because of all the technology and the innovation that exists out there a couple of things.
One, again, we're going to be at IoT solutions World Congress, this is a Barcelona broadcasting live. So make sure that you catch all of those great conversations from industry leaders, companies that are truly solving problems, desire to collaborate, absolutely their IoT solutions, World Congress, we're also going to be up in Dallas. And that is for distribute tech, and we're going to be talking utilities, energy, and all the solutions that are around there, we're going to be broadcasting live there. And then we're going to also be in Chicago digital manufacturing Summit. And the same thing we're going to be doing, we just got word that we're going to be at IMTS, that is going to be in September, that's a huge manufacturing platform. So my call out to you.
If you are there, and you want to be able to talk about what you're doing, and you want to do it in person, and you're going to be at that conference there. You got to start, knock on the door, come see me. And if I have you down there, I'm gonna be pushing this all day long. But I would love to be able to have the conversation and have a conversation with you talking about what you are doing. So that's it. Another thing that I want to make sure that you guys are aware of we're starting the campaign called we are industry and and if you're looking out on video, I have this hash tag on my shirt there. And it really is just sort of a celebration of the human component of industry, industry as humans, right. It is made up of people who have a passion to try to solve problems. It puts food on the table it creates meaningful work for a number of people around the world. And so this campaign celebrates that and it's we are industry hashtag. We're going to put it out there on on LinkedIn and just hopefully be able to highlight those human stories of people solving problems helping people succeed, because that's what we're all about. Right here. Education, collaboration, and innovation. All right on to the interview. So Fictiv reached out and you go out to stack art. It's fantastic. And
it is just a wonderful conversation of how this platform accesses a number of of capable manufacturers to come up with great product development solutions, deals with the logistics, all of the components associated with that so that you new company, existing company, what you do is you just say hey, Fictiv. I've got this product, and then they work hand in
glove with you to come up with the right product and then be able to sort of begin mass producing it. It's a fabulous, fabulous solution. So you're going to tons of information that you're going to get gleaned from this particular conversation. So, enjoy the conversation. Again, Dave, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. How're you doing today? Doing great. How are you doing? Scott, I thank you for your flexibility. We had a bit of a burp up last week listeners and he was very kind and gracious and said, Okay, no problem. So here we are, we were able to good all good, all good. Yeah, I see. I like that. I like that flexibility. Real good. All right. Before we get into the topic, let's talk a little bit about your background. Give us a little background on who you are. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm sitting here in sunny California, in San Francisco. And I'm a mechanical engineer by training. So
founder and CEO of Fictiv and prior to that I started my, my world in the automotive industry. So I was at Ford building infotainment systems, so dashboards of cars called vehicle bucks. This was kind of 2020 12. So what we were trying to do was basically put, think about tablets, iPhones, iPads, Android devices into a car, you know, almost a decade ago. And the challenge was really its development cycles. So we took a lot of this time from Ford, my training as a mechanical engineer from Stanford, and saying, how can you help basically put better consumer electronics into a vehicle? How do you shorten development cycles to really make that happen?
But then how do you also make it easier to bring products to market? So you know, what we'll talk about the company, I think we'll get into the problems we've seen supply chain. But really, this comes from, you know, a decade ago, looking at how products are designed and developed in an automotive setting, and saying that to be a better way, Scott, and, and I wish we'd made more improvement in 10 years, but I think that the future is even brighter ahead of us. So we'll dive into all that I'm sure. Yeah, it's I love, I love the emphasis on speed. Because I know for me, personally, I expect things faster. Now, you know, I expect delivery of whatever quicker, right? And it's just a modification in my expectation DNA. And I think, across the board, I think what's crazy is, as a consumer, as you start using an Amazon or I use DoorDash, to get food delivered to me, right, I click a button and Uber comes, it's not like a taxi, and you call and you wait for it to come or you know that you had to go to the local store, go through five different shelves to find that, you know, pencil that you like, it's just everything's immediate in a consumer world. So then you come into your business world, wherever you're working. And you're back to like Excel spreadsheets and faxing forms to vendors and manufacturing, and like having to get on a plane and go to Vietnam to fix an issue. And you're like, wait, but in my consumer world, I can just order you know, that device. And and, or I can get a taxi, just, you know, an Uber directly to me, do I want to an SUV or a black car, or I just want to Toyota, you know, Prius to show up. But then you come to the industrial world. And it's like, nothing's happened for decades. And so that was my experience, being a hardware engineer at Ford building infotainment systems. I was like, Man, this is a mismatch and you know, speed was the emphasis. But then what you've learned is actually it's quality. Because speed without quality is nothing. But quality without speed is actually like, well, you know, if I wait two months for something, and it's the highest quality, I didn't get any learning. So we started with speed, but then quality had to become table stakes. And you know, that that's the that's really the emphasis that what we'll get into as we peel back the onion here, but definitely started with speed. Yeah, and and I think you're, I think that's an important component. I mean, I'm just I expect things faster. I just, I don't I don't have the patience like I used to, and maybe it's because I'm an old and crotchety son of a gun. But it's, it's the reality of business, especially today and that window of opportunity, right? If I'm able to work with Fictiv and say, I got this idea. Here's the design, let's get it rolling. And press that because the old way or no, even today, it still works the same way where it takes a long time. Give us a little sort of rundown on on the process. Yeah, for sure. Let's let's lay that process out. Yeah, I think so. Let's go back to that example. So I'm at Ford. I want to build a new vehicle Buck dashboard. How do you do it? Okay, I got an idea. I want to do some amount of you know, put an iPad in that you bring with you. Okay, you go to your CAD station we use CATIA, you're going to 3d model and design this
From there, you have a physical, or you have a digital design of what you want to get done. Maybe you have some requirements for what that part or, or mechanism looks like. And you have that. And now you got to get a physical form of that meet, you got to build a prototype, we call this whole thing, new product development and PD. So in my Ford way, which not much has really changed, I would say in a decade was you would have kind of three options, you would go to your internal machine shop prototyping shop, wherever it's a Ford has a whole facility that's dedicated to this. That's option one. Option two is maybe I call it my tier one supplier, I call Magnus I called Dana call, I call someone I say, hey, tier one supplier go make this prototype for me.
And, and you use that tier one or tier two. And then there's a third option of hey, I'm gonna go a little bit rogue that I know Scott's local prototyping shop down the street from me. And Scott and I have a relationship we met at a trade show. And I'm, I'm just going to call up my buddy Scott and and have him build this. And so what I found at Ford was my internal shop had a backlog, that was way too long. And I was never prioritized. It was always too busy. The tier one shop, they wanted to make a million of something. And I said, Hey, build this one mechanism for this iPad, and they're like, I'm not busy enough. This is only 50 grand or, or whatever, I don't want to do it. And then I found myself as a mechanical engineer, I'm great at thermodynamics and fluids and all these things, having to build relationships with Scott's basically all these local direct relationships. And so yeah, I could get speed maybe from Scott's you know, local shop.
But like, Scott, you want to know how I bumped up the queue in your shop, I brought a six pack of beer. Not that I was gonna send hundreds of 1000s of dollars to your machine shop. I've literally I'd fly there I drive it. Hey, Scott, I know you love Guinness man, here's a six pack of Guinness, can you take me to the to the queue?
It's all crazy, right? So it is not it's yeah, it's like this is the way that the industrial world runs is it's relationship driven. It's some, it's some local, and it's primarily offline. It's low sets of tools. And so when we looked at the space, you know, I'm at Ford, and with my co founders, also my brother, Nate. And I'm like, Nate, this isn't just my problem at Ford, like every design engineer that I know, has the same thing of internal, a tier one supplier that they build relationships. Meanwhile, you know, Lyft and Ubers. Coming out, I can stay in someone's house with Airbnb, you know, there's all this what we, you know, Cloud is going on, that's things are transitioning. And I was like, Nate, there has to be a better way of not just relationships in the industrial world, where we can do this. And so what we set out to build, you know, almost nine years ago, so almost a decade ago, now, Scott was we said, hey, let's find all of these manufacturers in the world that have the best quality, we're going to vet them. And then we're going to find idle machine time at any of these factories. And we will allow engineers to order custom mechanical products, high quality products from this pre vetted network of basically Scott's machine shops of of all of these factories around the world. And this was just an idea back in 2013, right? And we said, well, if we did that, could the engineer speed up their development cycle? Remember speed at high high quality? Yeah, yeah. And could we drive more volume to the Scott's manufacturing plants all over the world? So kind of these two thesis of better for Scott because he's getting more work sent to him from like Ford, better for Dave as the engineer, because he can order things just like he does on on Amazon or Uber or wherever. And we said, Wow, that that'd be pretty cool. And so what we call this is a digital manufacturing ecosystem. That basically like we we digitize this ecosystem of manufacturers, to allow an engineer or a supply chain professional out of Ford, to order custom mechanical products from a pre vetted network of of machine shops. And there's a whole bunch of cool stuff that goes on there to make that happen. But it's it's really this basis of a of a distributed network, idle capacity, and really speed and quality. So I, Dave, now, all I have to go to is a platform just like Uber, or Airbnb, whatever, and be able to, in that interaction, find
a manufacturer with idle capacity that has the qualities already been vetted. You know, yeah, that's great. And be able to
create that dialogue, that relationship that is so important and begin compressing that time, but in it and still maintain quality, is that right? Totally, what I would adjust for you is like, Well imagine the scarf, what I did was, I just gave you the we have 250 of these partners globally. But now you still have to build relationships with them. I'm not actually helping you as a design engineer, or a supply chain professional. In the same way, it's like imagine if you ordered Uber, and you personally had to vet every car, or you had to have a relationship with everybody there, that wouldn't be much help. So actually, what we do is, we are your manufacturer of record Fictiv. Meaning if you're that supply chain professional, or they're you're buying apart from Fictiv. I just don't own any machines, but I'm accountable for the price. I'm accountable for the quality of that product. I'm accountable for the pre vetting and management of that network. So basically, what I'm doing is, Hey, Scott, I'm going to guarantee for you the fastest speed at the highest quality, but I don't own machines, but I have a whole group of people, you know, an entire quality department that vets all these manufacturers is boots on the ground for you checking your parts before they come out. And you want to know what we've made 19 million parts to date through the system. So like, You think we're good at this. I've done it almost 20 million times. And, and but we are your manufacturer of records. So it's not like you have to vet all of these ones individuals even better. Yeah, to me, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Now,
if I came to you and I have a budget constraint, right, it's like, here it is, right here. You work with me on that 200%. What I think about here is, how do you give an engineer or a supply chain professional choice? Meaning like, there's always three aspects, you're trying to do speed, which is a schedule driven quality, which is like something really hard to have to go to space or a medical device, or price, you have a budget. And so from there, think of this triangle, you're moving around into which one do you want? And so let's say you have a budget constraint. Great. We'll build that overseas for you. We have an entire team in Asia, it's a lower cost region, maybe the maybe it takes an extra three days to ship it. Oh, you have a lightning hot project, you got a trade show coming up needs to be there tomorrow. Great. We're gonna build this thing. You're in Charlotte. So we're gonna go build it in Atlanta for you like pretty close? Overnight it directly to you'll have it there on Friday. Oh, hey, you have the highest quality, you're in aerospace. But all of your manufacturers are capacity? Well, we actually have a medical grade supplier that can do the same level of quality requirements that has available capacity. And maybe you don't need that certification. Okay, great. Let's just leverage another supplier from another industry with available capacity to get to that quality need. Oh, you have a quality requirement. Great. These all have certifications of 1345 and medical as 9100 and aerospace. We all know that's pre vetted for you. So think of this as like, what I what I like to tell folks is think of this as like your sandwich shop. You know, your show up there. Oh, I want the sourdough roll. I don't want the you know, peppered crusted turkey with Havarti. And I want to avocado on it. Okay, great. There's a primo sandwich, and we'll build it for you, whatever, whatever you need. Scott, do you
know me as a user of your solution and platform part of the ecosystem whatever it might be?
Do I get an opportunity to sort of look at maybe the
the manufacturers or do I just say hey, here it is. I've got this budget constraint I'm looking for this type of quality and I'm and I needed in this time and just allow Fictiv team Fictiv just to come up with a the right solution for me. Personally, I'm lazy, I don't want to get into the details. I just want the delivery of what I want. So I'd say we have we have to, to kind of like personalities that come in. We have the Scots you describe I'm a lazy give me what I want. Yeah. We we define quality, as conformance to requirements.
It's always a good one. What is quality? Everyone's like, I don't know what quality quality is conformance to requirements. So if you come in Scott, and you say I want this product at the highest quality, what that translates effective is I need to make sure that every requirement can is conforming in the part that comes back to me. So then the question is the old school or traditional ways like I want to control the conformance aspect meaning like, I want to pick the supplier, I want to be on site. I want to go see it. And what I'd ask you is like, Well, why do you want to do that? Do you think you're
I'm better at controlling that quality than I am like, our entire livelihood. 19 million parts is controlling, you know, we can conformance to requirements. So hey, maybe maybe Scott, you as an engineer, you've produced maybe 5000 parts in your career? Yeah, I've done 19 million. And we've done it at the highest quality. And so it always takes a little bit of trust, like any relationship, you know, where, where you got to show it. And so we do that through data, you know, we can show what we call QBR is quarterly business reviews with them, we can show them quality ratings of like, how much in the last 90 days has this manufacturing partner been on time and to spec and I can show you data, not just for your parts, but every single part they've produced on a on a trailing basis and say, Hey, yes, you could go control this supplier, pick them. But don't you think that processes and system and data is going to have a better outcome than what you might do? And I think generally, after you break this down, you start to build trust. And then you start small, I build one part, I build 10 parts of the 100 parts. And it's this combo. And so I'd say you do have the two personas got you have you where it's like, it's not that you're lazy. It's just like, I trust you take care of it, rather than you have the skeptic that comes in. It's like, I want to do the whole thing. And to the skeptic, you say, Here's data, here's processes. Here's historical, like, trust me, we got you, you know what, we'll, we'll take care of you. Yeah, because you can't you, you can't afford to have a burp on that, right? No, you just oh, if you're, you know, if I got Johnny Ives from Apple showing up, and he wants to look at the quality of this part. You can't just trust Fictiv that you're gonna get it done. You have to like you have to guarantee and that's really what we do is we say, look, it is a combination of technology to make sure that part's right. But it's also people on the ground. And that's really important, Scott, it's not like, yeah, it's not like it's this marketplace of 1000 suppliers, we send it out there and you do this, cross your fingers and good luck. We've literally have supply quality engineers that have eyes on every single part that ships through our system. So with that said, if I would imagine the your manufacturing ecosystem that can manufacture it's expanding, because there's always going to be somebody that say, Hey, effective, can I be a part of your network part of your ecosystem? And you say, okay, here, this is the quality requirements, give it fill this out? Let's let's Batchi and all that. And yeah, you get the the seal of approval from Fictiv when that happens, and you guaranteed, you know, boots on the ground. And that person's in, you know, Timbuktu, you hire somebody out there and just say, hey, we need to find somebody to verify that the qualities if that supplier is that good. And there, they make, you know, magnesium parts, you know, for aerospace, and it's like, yeah, then we're flying out there. It's boots on the ground. We're living in the factory and doing it, because that's what it takes. This is the industrial world. But what we do on top of it, Scott, which is really important, is you put technology in place, so you don't miss park a button there. And so you stay there. We've used technology to come in. And so what I like to tell folks is like you can track a Domino's Pizza better than most people can track their supply chain, which is just absolutely mind boggling. Your mind boggling it Edwards somebody has to that except you sit there on the app, and you're watching it update.
And so you want to know what we built at Fictiv Scott, we basically built the Domino's Pizza tracker. But for supply chains, I kid you not. So you can sit there, you place an order 5000 bucks, I need this titanium part. And it goes boom, parts been ordered. Boom. It's been scheduled with a partner. It's in production. It's off the machine. Once when it's Oh, it's in quality photos are getting taken of the part through our technology going through quality. Hey, Scott, you get a little notification pushed to you and saying Do you want to see your parts with all the quality reports before they ever shipped it click the button. You can see photos of all of your parts and all the dimensions that have been measured, analyzed conformance to requirements remember before the things ever left the facility. And so all of that is like at your fingertips that it's like hey, it's been tracking great. It's just shipped out of Guangzhou, China and it's going through export through through their customs. Now it's going through import through through US Customs. Hey, now it's at a depot like all of that is able to be tracked through our technology through the platform we've built
You bring up a good point about the supply chain and and going through customs does Fictiv hat handle all of the paperwork associated with that? You have to? I mean, because what, how else would I manufacture a record? I'm the manufacturer of record. And what we found is that a lot of people just make this a manual process, Hey, okay, maybe this is streamline. But then once we get to the customs, it's back to email and and PowerPoints and Excel files. We've built a whole workflow, all for the logistics engine, basically, because like, if you can't get the stuff imported, what good is this Suez Canal stuff gets stuck in his ship? Like, I mean, look at the last two years, as I was gonna ask, you could get everything right. And it stuck in the LA port, and like, what are you going to do? And so when we say we control this ecosystem, Scott, it's from, you have a set of requirements, and I'm gonna give you choice, all the way through to that part being on your desk, and we are your guides to get you through that entire process. Because like, I mean, come on this thing is called industrial talk, right? Like, this is the industrial world. Like if I if I just said, Hey, Scott, you deal with customs? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I'm having a hard time poking holes in your your value proposition, quite frankly, because I, I've been there done that manufactured overseas, it is a headache. It's, it's problematic. But the challenge I always had to deal with is, is is quality. I was that was always scary for me, you know? And I would say, look, it's scary to us to every day, we're making custom products that have to be perfect every time. So when we think about quality, you have QA, quality assurance, and you have QC, quality control. Assurance is all of your pre emptive processes, structure QMS quality management, it's all the stuff you do upfront. Quality control is the reactive things, meaning after the part comes out. How do you actually make sure it's conforming to requirements, it's all the checks here. And so what I'd say is like, Scott, we nerd out on this. So when I say we do quality, I promise you we are deeper than probably any supplier you've ever because like we've had to think through this, because we've built an ecosystem. We're not running a machine in a factory. We're trying to build processes, QA upfront, plus, you know, technology to do quality control at a global scale at 10s of millions of parts. And so the result of it is like I I'm with you, Scott, like I was at Ford, building dashboards of cars. And I'm, I'm up at 1am with a supplier on on Skype, trying to make sure that like, you know that my steering wheel is done, right. And then like, I don't trust it enough. So I have to get on a plane and fly and my my family's at home. Like, I don't want to do that. I want to stay at home. I want to hang out with my kids. I want to you know, I want to I want to do I want to make products. I don't want to fly to a supplier, you know, and so all those things are I think the reason why you're having trouble poking holes is like, like, this isn't our first rodeo. Yeah, like we've been doing it for almost a decade. Then on top of that, like we live the pain like like we're built by engineers for engineers kind of right now. But just in the case of supply chain when if you're manufacturing something in China, Asia, whatever and you've had all of that the the interruptions as a result of the pandemic, you recognize the fragility of the supply chain, something just burped snarled and fart and, and and it's just a problem. What does Fictiv How can Fictiv sort of navigate those those challenging waters? It's a great question. So I love examples. I'm an engineer, so I need tangible things. So let's take some of that recently happened in q1 of this year. So like in February of 2020, Shinzen, overnight went on lockdown. 17 and a half million people. China government said you're not going to leave your apartment, sorry, like this happening in Shanghai right now. But let's use something that was you know, a little bit in the past few months ago. So we woke up on a Sunday. And it was basically like 17 and a half million people can't leave their homes. And like we're like, okay, we pull out the playbook because we have this from 2020. And it's like, here's what we run. We had 249 Work Orders in flight in that region turn 49 in 24 hours, we moved all 249 to other regions that weren't affected with near zero impact on lead time or cost to our customers. Just like right move this move this move this Think of it like an air traffic controller diverting planes to an airport that is shut down. And because it's a digital ecosystem, we spent
But but but, and like near zero impact to the entire customers. If we were running in a manual way, Scott Yeah, like what would happen to those 249 orders, you would have been like, Sorry, bud, like, we're just going to wait for the Chinese government to say you can go back to work. And you'd be sitting here like, I'm trying to ship my products, my customers are mad. And you're and you just sit there with your hands tied. And so I think of this as like, the air traffic controllers are really good one, which most people can relate to. The other one is like, this is what cloud computing has done for the industry. It used to be like, Hey, your your on prem server racks went down. So hey, your website's just down. Sorry, too much traffic, you know, we just, we can't handle the load. That doesn't happen anymore. You're just like, hey, I'm on AWS, I'm on as your Hey, the Northeast region just went down because of a blizzard, they just moved the stuff to the south east. And like, your servers are still up and running and, and crunch. And so I always ask folks like spacing in industrial, you're so used to supply chain disruptions, like a pandemic, a trade war with China, a global conflict going on in Europe with a devastating war right now. And so you're kind of like, man, but I would say like, does it have to be that way, because in cloud and it, they found a way to have resiliency, they have all these different regions, you know, in other industries, you know, taxis want to go on strike, hey, Lyft and Uber are pretty much immune to that, you know, and so, I just, I think that you got to be creative and supply chain to say, there's another way to do this, there's another way to build resiliency, and, and, and you've got the product development down pat. And then you do handle, let's say, scalability, and packaging, and all the other stuff. Uh, you know, I got to load up a container, and you just go through all of that the total, I would say, there's kind of three major solutions where we like work really well with customers, there's what's called an NPD. So new product development, we just talked, talked about all that, hey, I got an idea. I want to build a new microphone, we're going to help you get through that new product development. The second area where we really help it's what's called eto engineer to order. So think of this as like one off products that I am
building, you know, maybe some very custom stage equipment for a Beyonce, you know, tour or for Led Zeppelin going back out, or ZZ Top, or whoever, and like you're building, you know, a flame machine. But one time that eto, we do a lot of these one off products, you know, that are custom. And then the third,
you know, solution where we do a lot of is what's called an MRO, which is maintenance, repair and overhaul. I like to tell folks especially in the industrial this is like aftermarket for your car, hey, you have a 1970s Mustang and you need a new fender for this and like they don't make anymore, we make a lot of that aftermarket product or you know, aerospace and their, you know, engines are getting refurbished, you know, we do a lot of MRO as well, so it tends to be a new product development, these customer customer engineer to order or in this like aftermarket MRO that's a that's our sweet spots god it's where this solution that we've built really, you know, really kicks butt. You know, I believe we take that MRO component for granted. For example, I'll go out there and I'll find some obscure product just an obscure product in fact, I just for our neighbor, I just bought the trolley for their old that broke on their garage door opener. There it is plastic. Boom. Like it's not it's it's what you need. What literally lat last week came back from a long trip. Put my luggage you know, on the plane, like it like a dummy. I didn't put it overhead I checked it. I come off. What have they done? They've snapped all the wheels broke on it. How do these wheels
so normally what would you do? You just you toss out toss it right and another one? You want to know what I do? I go to Fictiv and make a little wheel. I upload the wheel. Oh it's 40 bucks. Cool. It's gonna be in carbon fiber. Awesome. Just hit Buy literally came back last week, put the new wheels on the luggage and I'm like, Hey, honey, like our luggage is fixed and she looks at me like Oh god, what am I gonna do on it's pretty dead sexy story, right? No.
I'm not throwing out this luggage. This is a nice piece of luggage. The whole thing's good. It's just
wheels busted. And unlike they probably didn't have, you know, you know, carbon fiber wheels on it. I just printed it, you know, on a on a high end 3d printer made, you know, two, two wheels that I needed. And it was simple, it was great. See, and again, I think that we take that for granted. I just it's just the other thing that unfortunately Amazon has done is, is created my expectations that are so high, I better have a better be looking for that Amazon truck. I just ordered it an hour ago. Where is it where
like, think about this example of the suitcase. It's a silly example where it's like it's not, but like, normally, you would just throw it out or if you didn't have Fictiv and if I had to design it, I had this call up Scott's you know, 3d printing service bureau and the email back and forth. I wouldn't go through that hassle. But for me, it was like it was a 10 minute exercise. It was like Amazon is like, here's the wheel for me. I can design really quickly circle extruded. Put a few things. Okay, great. Upload it. Oh, that's 50 bucks as too much. Just okay. $40 that material hit by it was like, you know, it was it. It was a little bit longer than Amazon. But it wasn't matter. It wasn't that much more so doggone cool. Now what? What's the pushback? I've been trying but what's the pushback? I'm impatient. I want things yesterday. I know. And I have grand visions for whatever. And I have ideas that are spewing out of my ears. What's the pushback? Why is why are people I think jumping on board. status quo is really hard Scott to change often. I'm sure all the listeners on here. You're like, come on. I I've known Scott's machine shop for 20 years. Yeah, Scott's never done me wrong. And he just he takes care of me. Why do I need this digital system data? And I'm like, trust me once when you try it. Like once when you try it, there is a there's a better way to do this. Right? And it's like, I remember my my in laws, they didn't have Amazon Prime. And then they'd always be like, Dave, why do I like why do you buy everything on Amazon. And I'm like, because I don't want to go to Walmart. And when I show up, it's not there. And they're like, God, it's always there at Walmart. And then all of a sudden, you it's like, you drip on them, you drip on them, you drip on them. And I'm like, Lisa, like, you should just try prime just like just try to. And so finally it was like around Christmas or something. She tries it out. And now every time we come over Christmas, my father in law, you know, he's sitting there and he's just like, man, it's another Amazon boxes come in and like, it's just it's too easy. You know? It's grumpy guy. He's like, whatever. Swipe right. Yeah. So he's just like, what, this is so much better than going to Walmart and standing in that goddang line. And, and so what I'd say is like, what's the what's the barrier here? It's like, man, Fictiv sounds too magical. How do they do this? It's, it's too modern for me. But what I'd say is, like, just try it. You know, it's like, if you try it out, you know, I think that like, I think that you'll really see that there is a better
there's a better way of of doing this.
And like, and that's what I would would really push for I don't think you can be build a build a business of resilience, if you're not in the business of trying to figure this out and be more efficient and and be, have greater responsiveness to market pressures demands, whatever it might be, and the needs of the market, funneling. And I think that, you know, for businesses that aren't deciding to build geographic resiliency, or agility into their supply chain, you're spot on, they're gonna be left behind, like, what the world has shown us is like, it's not if another trade war is going to happen. It's not if another pandemic or force majeure situation. It's not if there's going to be another, you know,
weather delay, you know, on there, it's when. And so then the question is, if you're not thinking about how to reimagine your supply chain, reimagine the way that you build things like somebody else is, and so I'd say it's not so much of like, of like, is this good for business? Should I do it? It's kind of like, if you don't do it, like your competitors are. And we're, we're seeing that shift today. We're totally seeing that. You have to, and you have to have a sense of urgency for one eye, and everybody through this pandemic, all of a sudden, everybody became a supply chain expert. Do you know why? Because they went to the Walmart, and then Walmart didn't have the product that they had on the shelf that they had before, but it was all stuck someplace.
That's the real pain. That's the customer component. And it ticked me off. Well, I know I'll go I'll go one step further. That ticked you off because he couldn't buy
Like during the pandemic toilet paper, we couldn't find him you couldn't find that with a wheel for your, your neighbor's garage door opener. But what I'd tell you is like, what if the world was perfect, like, like, you know, stay with me here for a second, we're in this utopia, supply chains run everywhere, and there's no delays. But like, Scott, you have to buy everything that's mass produced today. Like we talked about the microphone that you have here, how awesome, you know, the this, this thing is from plug ear trumpet labs, check it out, whatever. But labs ear trumpet labs go to the website. But like, what if you could buy things which were customized for what you wanted? Like, what if there was this world where you didn't have to buy that garage door, that like, you know, is just the generic one that you could get the special one that was for folks that, you know, were six foot five, and like, you know, really tall and it had, you know, all the bells and whistles for tall people or something like if that product could get to market because it was easier to design and develop it. Like, that's a pretty cool place. Like that's a now we live in an industrial world where you have more customization, it almost is like the software apps that you use is like you can find the the like, as a podcast, you know, creator yourself, you have all these little tools for your business. Imagine if you could do that in the physical world. Like, that's a cool place to live. And so when I dream and I think about like what could Fictiv actually help we help enable product innovators to create, meaning that whether that product innovator is a company or an individual, we are enabling them to create, and like, I think that all human beings are creative in some form or another. And we need more help enabling that creation to happen. And like, I get pretty excited by it. Yeah, and you bring up a good point, just think about all the ideas that get stifled just because they have no avenue to go. Like, Hey, I got this great idea. And I think it's work but I have no, I don't know how to do it. And then just let it die and it moves on. The benefits to society have been, you know, impacted. Let's figure out how we remove those, that friction. And so if you bring this bar if you if you lower the bar of entry to creation, what type of innovation would you unlock, and I'll give you like, an example that's out there. We went to the moon, what, like 60 years ago, and it took the entire US government to go push it. You know, fast forward six years later, technology's amazing. Look how far out we are. Who's getting the space today. It's a private company. It's like, when, when I was watching the first images of the war going on in Ukraine, it was from satellites of customers that we built those satellites Capella space, one example of it, and they're taking low Earth orbit images of this global conflict going on giving you like, like an API call. That's what Capella space does with an API call. You can take a photo of anywhere in the world. And I'm like, dang, that's cool. So like, like, they lowered the barriers to like, satellite images. Whoa, you know, and I'm like, but like, if you didn't make it easier for them to build all the hardware to do that would Capella ever be able to do it? Probably not. You know. And, and I think about this as an all of these ways of like, there's all this innovation that gets stifled because it's only the large, massive companies that have budgets and resources to do this. But if you can bring those barriers down, you'll see some really cool innovation that happens. There's some smart people out there, big dreams, we've just got to help enable that that dream become come to pass. Well, and that's that's excellent. How does somebody get a hold of you? Yeah, I think best way is, you know, you can websites, the easiest way is to go to Fictiv.com. You can check it out. I think the best thing that we have here is we produce a lot of really nerdy content. And I'd say like, we help teach people how to do this. And so go check out victor.com There's an entire what we call hardware guide. It's a guide to help you build physical products, whether you're a Stanford mechanical engineer that knows thermodynamics and you want to get super deep or you're like your Bob or Sarah, and you're like just trying to figure out you know how to make this thing like there's different levels of of information. So definitely check that out. I know we worked with the Scott thank you that we built a code so you can get a discount. industrial use the code industrial to get 10% off your first order.
So we'll make sure that's in the show notes. But you could test drive. Yeah. What do you got to lose?
Amen. So we just we want to show people, there's a better way to do this and just like, try it out, you know, like, don't don't take my word for it. We're not trying to blow smoke here. It's like, but we know change is hard. So, you know, use that code. Get out there. Sign up, literally, like, whether it's a suitcase wheel that we talked about. Yeah. Are you building a satellite Park? You know, for Capella? You know, go go check it out. Yeah. That's pretty doggone cool stuff. All right. Thank you. Big time, Dave. Big Dave. Wave. Big Wave. Dave, whatever you want to call it, man. Thank you for being on industrial talk. Man. You were awesome. It has been super fun Scott and looking forward to seeing what people create. It's cool. It's cool. See, that's cool. All right, listeners. We're gonna you know, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side, all the contact information for Dave and Fictiv will be there. So stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right, Dave Evans is his name. Fictiv is the company
and after that conversation, you should just be an absolute Gomer for the company and what they are doing anything to remove friction. In your work, your day to day work, is a big plus for me. And I'm sure a big plus for you think of is really worked out the kinks. And they've they've done it successfully. Why would you want to do that? Trust them, reach out to them? Ask them some questions. Bottom line, they are an open book there to help you in a big way. Remember, we're gonna be going to IoT solutions World Congress. We will be at distributech. We will be at manufacturing,
digital manufacturing
symposium, and many others. You got to look for us. We're going to be on the floor. We're going to be talking to you. Yes. Because you have a story. All right. Hang out with people like Dave Evans. Be bold, be brave, daring greatly. You're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stick around
Transcript
Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. Alright, once again, welcome to industrial talk the, let's say ever expanding industrial ecosystem that is dedicated to you, the industrial professional solvent province. Yes, collaborating, absolutely innovating you back here, industrial talk. We're featuring incredible professionals that embody those qualities each and every day in the hot seat. Speaking of which, his name is Dave Evans. He is founder, co founder excuse me, of a company called Fictiv Fictiv FICT i v. And you know, we're talking about some of the challenges that are happening in the supply chain and what can we do for new product development? I'm telling you right now, that Fictiv platform, stellar let's get going.
So
in my past, I guess it's the past Yeah, it is, it's the past, the way I used to do product development as you you know, you design it, and then you'd have to go find some sort of company to be able to develop it and, and as as time goes on, as time went on, that you just keep on working at it and designing it and then try to come back and see what happens and then refining it. There's a lot of work that goes into this, this whole product development. And I think today, once you'll hear from Dave, that the future in new product development and supply chain,
it's bright, and I know that we're we're struggling right now with supply chain stuff, but I'm telling you right now, team, Fictiv Dave, his team absolutely got their fingers on the pulse of of a real solution. That if it's transformative, it's transformative. And I not It's not hyperbole, I really enjoyed the conversation. And it's all doable. Because of all the technology and the innovation that exists out there a couple of things.
One, again, we're going to be at IoT solutions World Congress, this is a Barcelona broadcasting live. So make sure that you catch all of those great conversations from industry leaders, companies that are truly solving problems, desire to collaborate, absolutely their IoT solutions, World Congress, we're also going to be up in Dallas. And that is for distribute tech, and we're going to be talking utilities, energy, and all the solutions that are around there, we're going to be broadcasting live there. And then we're going to also be in Chicago digital manufacturing Summit. And the same thing we're going to be doing, we just got word that we're going to be at IMTS, that is going to be in September, that's a huge manufacturing platform. So my call out to you.
If you are there, and you want to be able to talk about what you're doing, and you want to do it in person, and you're going to be at that conference there. You got to start, knock on the door, come see me. And if I have you down there, I'm gonna be pushing this all day long. But I would love to be able to have the conversation and have a conversation with you talking about what you are doing. So that's it. Another thing that I want to make sure that you guys are aware of we're starting the campaign called we are industry and and if you're looking out on video, I have this hash tag on my shirt there. And it really is just sort of a celebration of the human component of industry, industry as humans, right. It is made up of people who have a passion to try to solve problems. It puts food on the table it creates meaningful work for a number of people around the world. And so this campaign celebrates that and it's we are industry hashtag. We're going to put it out there on on LinkedIn and just hopefully be able to highlight those human stories of people solving problems helping people succeed, because that's what we're all about. Right here. Education, collaboration, and innovation. All right on to the interview. So Fictiv reached out and you go out to stack art. It's fantastic. And
it is just a wonderful conversation of how this platform accesses a number of of capable manufacturers to come up with great product development solutions, deals with the logistics, all of the components associated with that so that you new company, existing company, what you do is you just say hey, Fictiv. I've got this product, and then they work hand in
glove with you to come up with the right product and then be able to sort of begin mass producing it. It's a fabulous, fabulous solution. So you're going to tons of information that you're going to get gleaned from this particular conversation. So, enjoy the conversation. Again, Dave, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. How're you doing today? Doing great. How are you doing? Scott, I thank you for your flexibility. We had a bit of a burp up last week listeners and he was very kind and gracious and said, Okay, no problem. So here we are, we were able to good all good, all good. Yeah, I see. I like that. I like that flexibility. Real good. All right. Before we get into the topic, let's talk a little bit about your background. Give us a little background on who you are. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm sitting here in sunny California, in San Francisco. And I'm a mechanical engineer by training. So
founder and CEO of Fictiv and prior to that I started my, my world in the automotive industry. So I was at Ford building infotainment systems, so dashboards of cars called vehicle bucks. This was kind of 2020 12. So what we were trying to do was basically put, think about tablets, iPhones, iPads, Android devices into a car, you know, almost a decade ago. And the challenge was really its development cycles. So we took a lot of this time from Ford, my training as a mechanical engineer from Stanford, and saying, how can you help basically put better consumer electronics into a vehicle? How do you shorten development cycles to really make that happen?
But then how do you also make it easier to bring products to market? So you know, what we'll talk about the company, I think we'll get into the problems we've seen supply chain. But really, this comes from, you know, a decade ago, looking at how products are designed and developed in an automotive setting, and saying that to be a better way, Scott, and, and I wish we'd made more improvement in 10 years, but I think that the future is even brighter ahead of us. So we'll dive into all that I'm sure. Yeah, it's I love, I love the emphasis on speed. Because I know for me, personally, I expect things faster. Now, you know, I expect delivery of whatever quicker, right? And it's just a modification in my expectation DNA. And I think, across the board, I think what's crazy is, as a consumer, as you start using an Amazon or I use DoorDash, to get food delivered to me, right, I click a button and Uber comes, it's not like a taxi, and you call and you wait for it to come or you know that you had to go to the local store, go through five different shelves to find that, you know, pencil that you like, it's just everything's immediate in a consumer world. So then you come into your business world, wherever you're working. And you're back to like Excel spreadsheets and faxing forms to vendors and manufacturing, and like having to get on a plane and go to Vietnam to fix an issue. And you're like, wait, but in my consumer world, I can just order you know, that device. And and, or I can get a taxi, just, you know, an Uber directly to me, do I want to an SUV or a black car, or I just want to Toyota, you know, Prius to show up. But then you come to the industrial world. And it's like, nothing's happened for decades. And so that was my experience, being a hardware engineer at Ford building infotainment systems. I was like, Man, this is a mismatch and you know, speed was the emphasis. But then what you've learned is actually it's quality. Because speed without quality is nothing. But quality without speed is actually like, well, you know, if I wait two months for something, and it's the highest quality, I didn't get any learning. So we started with speed, but then quality had to become table stakes. And you know, that that's the that's really the emphasis that what we'll get into as we peel back the onion here, but definitely started with speed. Yeah, and and I think you're, I think that's an important component. I mean, I'm just I expect things faster. I just, I don't I don't have the patience like I used to, and maybe it's because I'm an old and crotchety son of a gun. But it's, it's the reality of business, especially today and that window of opportunity, right? If I'm able to work with Fictiv and say, I got this idea. Here's the design, let's get it rolling. And press that because the old way or no, even today, it still works the same way where it takes a long time. Give us a little sort of rundown on on the process. Yeah, for sure. Let's let's lay that process out. Yeah, I think so. Let's go back to that example. So I'm at Ford. I want to build a new vehicle Buck dashboard. How do you do it? Okay, I got an idea. I want to do some amount of you know, put an iPad in that you bring with you. Okay, you go to your CAD station we use CATIA, you're going to 3d model and design this
From there, you have a physical, or you have a digital design of what you want to get done. Maybe you have some requirements for what that part or, or mechanism looks like. And you have that. And now you got to get a physical form of that meet, you got to build a prototype, we call this whole thing, new product development and PD. So in my Ford way, which not much has really changed, I would say in a decade was you would have kind of three options, you would go to your internal machine shop prototyping shop, wherever it's a Ford has a whole facility that's dedicated to this. That's option one. Option two is maybe I call it my tier one supplier, I call Magnus I called Dana call, I call someone I say, hey, tier one supplier go make this prototype for me.
And, and you use that tier one or tier two. And then there's a third option of hey, I'm gonna go a little bit rogue that I know Scott's local prototyping shop down the street from me. And Scott and I have a relationship we met at a trade show. And I'm, I'm just going to call up my buddy Scott and and have him build this. And so what I found at Ford was my internal shop had a backlog, that was way too long. And I was never prioritized. It was always too busy. The tier one shop, they wanted to make a million of something. And I said, Hey, build this one mechanism for this iPad, and they're like, I'm not busy enough. This is only 50 grand or, or whatever, I don't want to do it. And then I found myself as a mechanical engineer, I'm great at thermodynamics and fluids and all these things, having to build relationships with Scott's basically all these local direct relationships. And so yeah, I could get speed maybe from Scott's you know, local shop.
But like, Scott, you want to know how I bumped up the queue in your shop, I brought a six pack of beer. Not that I was gonna send hundreds of 1000s of dollars to your machine shop. I've literally I'd fly there I drive it. Hey, Scott, I know you love Guinness man, here's a six pack of Guinness, can you take me to the to the queue?
It's all crazy, right? So it is not it's yeah, it's like this is the way that the industrial world runs is it's relationship driven. It's some, it's some local, and it's primarily offline. It's low sets of tools. And so when we looked at the space, you know, I'm at Ford, and with my co founders, also my brother, Nate. And I'm like, Nate, this isn't just my problem at Ford, like every design engineer that I know, has the same thing of internal, a tier one supplier that they build relationships. Meanwhile, you know, Lyft and Ubers. Coming out, I can stay in someone's house with Airbnb, you know, there's all this what we, you know, Cloud is going on, that's things are transitioning. And I was like, Nate, there has to be a better way of not just relationships in the industrial world, where we can do this. And so what we set out to build, you know, almost nine years ago, so almost a decade ago, now, Scott was we said, hey, let's find all of these manufacturers in the world that have the best quality, we're going to vet them. And then we're going to find idle machine time at any of these factories. And we will allow engineers to order custom mechanical products, high quality products from this pre vetted network of basically Scott's machine shops of of all of these factories around the world. And this was just an idea back in 2013, right? And we said, well, if we did that, could the engineer speed up their development cycle? Remember speed at high high quality? Yeah, yeah. And could we drive more volume to the Scott's manufacturing plants all over the world? So kind of these two thesis of better for Scott because he's getting more work sent to him from like Ford, better for Dave as the engineer, because he can order things just like he does on on Amazon or Uber or wherever. And we said, Wow, that that'd be pretty cool. And so what we call this is a digital manufacturing ecosystem. That basically like we we digitize this ecosystem of manufacturers, to allow an engineer or a supply chain professional out of Ford, to order custom mechanical products from a pre vetted network of of machine shops. And there's a whole bunch of cool stuff that goes on there to make that happen. But it's it's really this basis of a of a distributed network, idle capacity, and really speed and quality. So I, Dave, now, all I have to go to is a platform just like Uber, or Airbnb, whatever, and be able to, in that interaction, find
a manufacturer with idle capacity that has the qualities already been vetted. You know, yeah, that's great. And be able to
create that dialogue, that relationship that is so important and begin compressing that time, but in it and still maintain quality, is that right? Totally, what I would adjust for you is like, Well imagine the scarf, what I did was, I just gave you the we have 250 of these partners globally. But now you still have to build relationships with them. I'm not actually helping you as a design engineer, or a supply chain professional. In the same way, it's like imagine if you ordered Uber, and you personally had to vet every car, or you had to have a relationship with everybody there, that wouldn't be much help. So actually, what we do is, we are your manufacturer of record Fictiv. Meaning if you're that supply chain professional, or they're you're buying apart from Fictiv. I just don't own any machines, but I'm accountable for the price. I'm accountable for the quality of that product. I'm accountable for the pre vetting and management of that network. So basically, what I'm doing is, Hey, Scott, I'm going to guarantee for you the fastest speed at the highest quality, but I don't own machines, but I have a whole group of people, you know, an entire quality department that vets all these manufacturers is boots on the ground for you checking your parts before they come out. And you want to know what we've made 19 million parts to date through the system. So like, You think we're good at this. I've done it almost 20 million times. And, and but we are your manufacturer of records. So it's not like you have to vet all of these ones individuals even better. Yeah, to me, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Now,
if I came to you and I have a budget constraint, right, it's like, here it is, right here. You work with me on that 200%. What I think about here is, how do you give an engineer or a supply chain professional choice? Meaning like, there's always three aspects, you're trying to do speed, which is a schedule driven quality, which is like something really hard to have to go to space or a medical device, or price, you have a budget. And so from there, think of this triangle, you're moving around into which one do you want? And so let's say you have a budget constraint. Great. We'll build that overseas for you. We have an entire team in Asia, it's a lower cost region, maybe the maybe it takes an extra three days to ship it. Oh, you have a lightning hot project, you got a trade show coming up needs to be there tomorrow. Great. We're gonna build this thing. You're in Charlotte. So we're gonna go build it in Atlanta for you like pretty close? Overnight it directly to you'll have it there on Friday. Oh, hey, you have the highest quality, you're in aerospace. But all of your manufacturers are capacity? Well, we actually have a medical grade supplier that can do the same level of quality requirements that has available capacity. And maybe you don't need that certification. Okay, great. Let's just leverage another supplier from another industry with available capacity to get to that quality need. Oh, you have a quality requirement. Great. These all have certifications of 1345 and medical as 9100 and aerospace. We all know that's pre vetted for you. So think of this as like, what I what I like to tell folks is think of this as like your sandwich shop. You know, your show up there. Oh, I want the sourdough roll. I don't want the you know, peppered crusted turkey with Havarti. And I want to avocado on it. Okay, great. There's a primo sandwich, and we'll build it for you, whatever, whatever you need. Scott, do you
know me as a user of your solution and platform part of the ecosystem whatever it might be?
Do I get an opportunity to sort of look at maybe the
the manufacturers or do I just say hey, here it is. I've got this budget constraint I'm looking for this type of quality and I'm and I needed in this time and just allow Fictiv team Fictiv just to come up with a the right solution for me. Personally, I'm lazy, I don't want to get into the details. I just want the delivery of what I want. So I'd say we have we have to, to kind of like personalities that come in. We have the Scots you describe I'm a lazy give me what I want. Yeah. We we define quality, as conformance to requirements.
It's always a good one. What is quality? Everyone's like, I don't know what quality quality is conformance to requirements. So if you come in Scott, and you say I want this product at the highest quality, what that translates effective is I need to make sure that every requirement can is conforming in the part that comes back to me. So then the question is the old school or traditional ways like I want to control the conformance aspect meaning like, I want to pick the supplier, I want to be on site. I want to go see it. And what I'd ask you is like, Well, why do you want to do that? Do you think you're
I'm better at controlling that quality than I am like, our entire livelihood. 19 million parts is controlling, you know, we can conformance to requirements. So hey, maybe maybe Scott, you as an engineer, you've produced maybe 5000 parts in your career? Yeah, I've done 19 million. And we've done it at the highest quality. And so it always takes a little bit of trust, like any relationship, you know, where, where you got to show it. And so we do that through data, you know, we can show what we call QBR is quarterly business reviews with them, we can show them quality ratings of like, how much in the last 90 days has this manufacturing partner been on time and to spec and I can show you data, not just for your parts, but every single part they've produced on a on a trailing basis and say, Hey, yes, you could go control this supplier, pick them. But don't you think that processes and system and data is going to have a better outcome than what you might do? And I think generally, after you break this down, you start to build trust. And then you start small, I build one part, I build 10 parts of the 100 parts. And it's this combo. And so I'd say you do have the two personas got you have you where it's like, it's not that you're lazy. It's just like, I trust you take care of it, rather than you have the skeptic that comes in. It's like, I want to do the whole thing. And to the skeptic, you say, Here's data, here's processes. Here's historical, like, trust me, we got you, you know what, we'll, we'll take care of you. Yeah, because you can't you, you can't afford to have a burp on that, right? No, you just oh, if you're, you know, if I got Johnny Ives from Apple showing up, and he wants to look at the quality of this part. You can't just trust Fictiv that you're gonna get it done. You have to like you have to guarantee and that's really what we do is we say, look, it is a combination of technology to make sure that part's right. But it's also people on the ground. And that's really important, Scott, it's not like, yeah, it's not like it's this marketplace of 1000 suppliers, we send it out there and you do this, cross your fingers and good luck. We've literally have supply quality engineers that have eyes on every single part that ships through our system. So with that said, if I would imagine the your manufacturing ecosystem that can manufacture it's expanding, because there's always going to be somebody that say, Hey, effective, can I be a part of your network part of your ecosystem? And you say, okay, here, this is the quality requirements, give it fill this out? Let's let's Batchi and all that. And yeah, you get the the seal of approval from Fictiv when that happens, and you guaranteed, you know, boots on the ground. And that person's in, you know, Timbuktu, you hire somebody out there and just say, hey, we need to find somebody to verify that the qualities if that supplier is that good. And there, they make, you know, magnesium parts, you know, for aerospace, and it's like, yeah, then we're flying out there. It's boots on the ground. We're living in the factory and doing it, because that's what it takes. This is the industrial world. But what we do on top of it, Scott, which is really important, is you put technology in place, so you don't miss park a button there. And so you stay there. We've used technology to come in. And so what I like to tell folks is like you can track a Domino's Pizza better than most people can track their supply chain, which is just absolutely mind boggling. Your mind boggling it Edwards somebody has to that except you sit there on the app, and you're watching it update.
And so you want to know what we built at Fictiv Scott, we basically built the Domino's Pizza tracker. But for supply chains, I kid you not. So you can sit there, you place an order 5000 bucks, I need this titanium part. And it goes boom, parts been ordered. Boom. It's been scheduled with a partner. It's in production. It's off the machine. Once when it's Oh, it's in quality photos are getting taken of the part through our technology going through quality. Hey, Scott, you get a little notification pushed to you and saying Do you want to see your parts with all the quality reports before they ever shipped it click the button. You can see photos of all of your parts and all the dimensions that have been measured, analyzed conformance to requirements remember before the things ever left the facility. And so all of that is like at your fingertips that it's like hey, it's been tracking great. It's just shipped out of Guangzhou, China and it's going through export through through their customs. Now it's going through import through through US Customs. Hey, now it's at a depot like all of that is able to be tracked through our technology through the platform we've built
You bring up a good point about the supply chain and and going through customs does Fictiv hat handle all of the paperwork associated with that? You have to? I mean, because what, how else would I manufacture a record? I'm the manufacturer of record. And what we found is that a lot of people just make this a manual process, Hey, okay, maybe this is streamline. But then once we get to the customs, it's back to email and and PowerPoints and Excel files. We've built a whole workflow, all for the logistics engine, basically, because like, if you can't get the stuff imported, what good is this Suez Canal stuff gets stuck in his ship? Like, I mean, look at the last two years, as I was gonna ask, you could get everything right. And it stuck in the LA port, and like, what are you going to do? And so when we say we control this ecosystem, Scott, it's from, you have a set of requirements, and I'm gonna give you choice, all the way through to that part being on your desk, and we are your guides to get you through that entire process. Because like, I mean, come on this thing is called industrial talk, right? Like, this is the industrial world. Like if I if I just said, Hey, Scott, you deal with customs? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I'm having a hard time poking holes in your your value proposition, quite frankly, because I, I've been there done that manufactured overseas, it is a headache. It's, it's problematic. But the challenge I always had to deal with is, is is quality. I was that was always scary for me, you know? And I would say, look, it's scary to us to every day, we're making custom products that have to be perfect every time. So when we think about quality, you have QA, quality assurance, and you have QC, quality control. Assurance is all of your pre emptive processes, structure QMS quality management, it's all the stuff you do upfront. Quality control is the reactive things, meaning after the part comes out. How do you actually make sure it's conforming to requirements, it's all the checks here. And so what I'd say is like, Scott, we nerd out on this. So when I say we do quality, I promise you we are deeper than probably any supplier you've ever because like we've had to think through this, because we've built an ecosystem. We're not running a machine in a factory. We're trying to build processes, QA upfront, plus, you know, technology to do quality control at a global scale at 10s of millions of parts. And so the result of it is like I I'm with you, Scott, like I was at Ford, building dashboards of cars. And I'm, I'm up at 1am with a supplier on on Skype, trying to make sure that like, you know that my steering wheel is done, right. And then like, I don't trust it enough. So I have to get on a plane and fly and my my family's at home. Like, I don't want to do that. I want to stay at home. I want to hang out with my kids. I want to you know, I want to I want to do I want to make products. I don't want to fly to a supplier, you know, and so all those things are I think the reason why you're having trouble poking holes is like, like, this isn't our first rodeo. Yeah, like we've been doing it for almost a decade. Then on top of that, like we live the pain like like we're built by engineers for engineers kind of right now. But just in the case of supply chain when if you're manufacturing something in China, Asia, whatever and you've had all of that the the interruptions as a result of the pandemic, you recognize the fragility of the supply chain, something just burped snarled and fart and, and and it's just a problem. What does Fictiv How can Fictiv sort of navigate those those challenging waters? It's a great question. So I love examples. I'm an engineer, so I need tangible things. So let's take some of that recently happened in q1 of this year. So like in February of 2020, Shinzen, overnight went on lockdown. 17 and a half million people. China government said you're not going to leave your apartment, sorry, like this happening in Shanghai right now. But let's use something that was you know, a little bit in the past few months ago. So we woke up on a Sunday. And it was basically like 17 and a half million people can't leave their homes. And like we're like, okay, we pull out the playbook because we have this from 2020. And it's like, here's what we run. We had 249 Work Orders in flight in that region turn 49 in 24 hours, we moved all 249 to other regions that weren't affected with near zero impact on lead time or cost to our customers. Just like right move this move this move this Think of it like an air traffic controller diverting planes to an airport that is shut down. And because it's a digital ecosystem, we spent
But but but, and like near zero impact to the entire customers. If we were running in a manual way, Scott Yeah, like what would happen to those 249 orders, you would have been like, Sorry, bud, like, we're just going to wait for the Chinese government to say you can go back to work. And you'd be sitting here like, I'm trying to ship my products, my customers are mad. And you're and you just sit there with your hands tied. And so I think of this as like, the air traffic controllers are really good one, which most people can relate to. The other one is like, this is what cloud computing has done for the industry. It used to be like, Hey, your your on prem server racks went down. So hey, your website's just down. Sorry, too much traffic, you know, we just, we can't handle the load. That doesn't happen anymore. You're just like, hey, I'm on AWS, I'm on as your Hey, the Northeast region just went down because of a blizzard, they just moved the stuff to the south east. And like, your servers are still up and running and, and crunch. And so I always ask folks like spacing in industrial, you're so used to supply chain disruptions, like a pandemic, a trade war with China, a global conflict going on in Europe with a devastating war right now. And so you're kind of like, man, but I would say like, does it have to be that way, because in cloud and it, they found a way to have resiliency, they have all these different regions, you know, in other industries, you know, taxis want to go on strike, hey, Lyft and Uber are pretty much immune to that, you know, and so, I just, I think that you got to be creative and supply chain to say, there's another way to do this, there's another way to build resiliency, and, and, and you've got the product development down pat. And then you do handle, let's say, scalability, and packaging, and all the other stuff. Uh, you know, I got to load up a container, and you just go through all of that the total, I would say, there's kind of three major solutions where we like work really well with customers, there's what's called an NPD. So new product development, we just talked, talked about all that, hey, I got an idea. I want to build a new microphone, we're going to help you get through that new product development. The second area where we really help it's what's called eto engineer to order. So think of this as like one off products that I am
building, you know, maybe some very custom stage equipment for a Beyonce, you know, tour or for Led Zeppelin going back out, or ZZ Top, or whoever, and like you're building, you know, a flame machine. But one time that eto, we do a lot of these one off products, you know, that are custom. And then the third,
you know, solution where we do a lot of is what's called an MRO, which is maintenance, repair and overhaul. I like to tell folks especially in the industrial this is like aftermarket for your car, hey, you have a 1970s Mustang and you need a new fender for this and like they don't make anymore, we make a lot of that aftermarket product or you know, aerospace and their, you know, engines are getting refurbished, you know, we do a lot of MRO as well, so it tends to be a new product development, these customer customer engineer to order or in this like aftermarket MRO that's a that's our sweet spots god it's where this solution that we've built really, you know, really kicks butt. You know, I believe we take that MRO component for granted. For example, I'll go out there and I'll find some obscure product just an obscure product in fact, I just for our neighbor, I just bought the trolley for their old that broke on their garage door opener. There it is plastic. Boom. Like it's not it's it's what you need. What literally lat last week came back from a long trip. Put my luggage you know, on the plane, like it like a dummy. I didn't put it overhead I checked it. I come off. What have they done? They've snapped all the wheels broke on it. How do these wheels
so normally what would you do? You just you toss out toss it right and another one? You want to know what I do? I go to Fictiv and make a little wheel. I upload the wheel. Oh it's 40 bucks. Cool. It's gonna be in carbon fiber. Awesome. Just hit Buy literally came back last week, put the new wheels on the luggage and I'm like, Hey, honey, like our luggage is fixed and she looks at me like Oh god, what am I gonna do on it's pretty dead sexy story, right? No.
I'm not throwing out this luggage. This is a nice piece of luggage. The whole thing's good. It's just
wheels busted. And unlike they probably didn't have, you know, you know, carbon fiber wheels on it. I just printed it, you know, on a on a high end 3d printer made, you know, two, two wheels that I needed. And it was simple, it was great. See, and again, I think that we take that for granted. I just it's just the other thing that unfortunately Amazon has done is, is created my expectations that are so high, I better have a better be looking for that Amazon truck. I just ordered it an hour ago. Where is it where
like, think about this example of the suitcase. It's a silly example where it's like it's not, but like, normally, you would just throw it out or if you didn't have Fictiv and if I had to design it, I had this call up Scott's you know, 3d printing service bureau and the email back and forth. I wouldn't go through that hassle. But for me, it was like it was a 10 minute exercise. It was like Amazon is like, here's the wheel for me. I can design really quickly circle extruded. Put a few things. Okay, great. Upload it. Oh, that's 50 bucks as too much. Just okay. $40 that material hit by it was like, you know, it was it. It was a little bit longer than Amazon. But it wasn't matter. It wasn't that much more so doggone cool. Now what? What's the pushback? I've been trying but what's the pushback? I'm impatient. I want things yesterday. I know. And I have grand visions for whatever. And I have ideas that are spewing out of my ears. What's the pushback? Why is why are people I think jumping on board. status quo is really hard Scott to change often. I'm sure all the listeners on here. You're like, come on. I I've known Scott's machine shop for 20 years. Yeah, Scott's never done me wrong. And he just he takes care of me. Why do I need this digital system data? And I'm like, trust me once when you try it. Like once when you try it, there is a there's a better way to do this. Right? And it's like, I remember my my in laws, they didn't have Amazon Prime. And then they'd always be like, Dave, why do I like why do you buy everything on Amazon. And I'm like, because I don't want to go to Walmart. And when I show up, it's not there. And they're like, God, it's always there at Walmart. And then all of a sudden, you it's like, you drip on them, you drip on them, you drip on them. And I'm like, Lisa, like, you should just try prime just like just try to. And so finally it was like around Christmas or something. She tries it out. And now every time we come over Christmas, my father in law, you know, he's sitting there and he's just like, man, it's another Amazon boxes come in and like, it's just it's too easy. You know? It's grumpy guy. He's like, whatever. Swipe right. Yeah. So he's just like, what, this is so much better than going to Walmart and standing in that goddang line. And, and so what I'd say is like, what's the what's the barrier here? It's like, man, Fictiv sounds too magical. How do they do this? It's, it's too modern for me. But what I'd say is, like, just try it. You know, it's like, if you try it out, you know, I think that like, I think that you'll really see that there is a better
there's a better way of of doing this.
And like, and that's what I would would really push for I don't think you can be build a build a business of resilience, if you're not in the business of trying to figure this out and be more efficient and and be, have greater responsiveness to market pressures demands, whatever it might be, and the needs of the market, funneling. And I think that, you know, for businesses that aren't deciding to build geographic resiliency, or agility into their supply chain, you're spot on, they're gonna be left behind, like, what the world has shown us is like, it's not if another trade war is going to happen. It's not if another pandemic or force majeure situation. It's not if there's going to be another, you know,
weather delay, you know, on there, it's when. And so then the question is, if you're not thinking about how to reimagine your supply chain, reimagine the way that you build things like somebody else is, and so I'd say it's not so much of like, of like, is this good for business? Should I do it? It's kind of like, if you don't do it, like your competitors are. And we're, we're seeing that shift today. We're totally seeing that. You have to, and you have to have a sense of urgency for one eye, and everybody through this pandemic, all of a sudden, everybody became a supply chain expert. Do you know why? Because they went to the Walmart, and then Walmart didn't have the product that they had on the shelf that they had before, but it was all stuck someplace.
That's the real pain. That's the customer component. And it ticked me off. Well, I know I'll go I'll go one step further. That ticked you off because he couldn't buy
Like during the pandemic toilet paper, we couldn't find him you couldn't find that with a wheel for your, your neighbor's garage door opener. But what I'd tell you is like, what if the world was perfect, like, like, you know, stay with me here for a second, we're in this utopia, supply chains run everywhere, and there's no delays. But like, Scott, you have to buy everything that's mass produced today. Like we talked about the microphone that you have here, how awesome, you know, the this, this thing is from plug ear trumpet labs, check it out, whatever. But labs ear trumpet labs go to the website. But like, what if you could buy things which were customized for what you wanted? Like, what if there was this world where you didn't have to buy that garage door, that like, you know, is just the generic one that you could get the special one that was for folks that, you know, were six foot five, and like, you know, really tall and it had, you know, all the bells and whistles for tall people or something like if that product could get to market because it was easier to design and develop it. Like, that's a pretty cool place. Like that's a now we live in an industrial world where you have more customization, it almost is like the software apps that you use is like you can find the the like, as a podcast, you know, creator yourself, you have all these little tools for your business. Imagine if you could do that in the physical world. Like, that's a cool place to live. And so when I dream and I think about like what could Fictiv actually help we help enable product innovators to create, meaning that whether that product innovator is a company or an individual, we are enabling them to create, and like, I think that all human beings are creative in some form or another. And we need more help enabling that creation to happen. And like, I get pretty excited by it. Yeah, and you bring up a good point, just think about all the ideas that get stifled just because they have no avenue to go. Like, Hey, I got this great idea. And I think it's work but I have no, I don't know how to do it. And then just let it die and it moves on. The benefits to society have been, you know, impacted. Let's figure out how we remove those, that friction. And so if you bring this bar if you if you lower the bar of entry to creation, what type of innovation would you unlock, and I'll give you like, an example that's out there. We went to the moon, what, like 60 years ago, and it took the entire US government to go push it. You know, fast forward six years later, technology's amazing. Look how far out we are. Who's getting the space today. It's a private company. It's like, when, when I was watching the first images of the war going on in Ukraine, it was from satellites of customers that we built those satellites Capella space, one example of it, and they're taking low Earth orbit images of this global conflict going on giving you like, like an API call. That's what Capella space does with an API call. You can take a photo of anywhere in the world. And I'm like, dang, that's cool. So like, like, they lowered the barriers to like, satellite images. Whoa, you know, and I'm like, but like, if you didn't make it easier for them to build all the hardware to do that would Capella ever be able to do it? Probably not. You know. And, and I think about this as an all of these ways of like, there's all this innovation that gets stifled because it's only the large, massive companies that have budgets and resources to do this. But if you can bring those barriers down, you'll see some really cool innovation that happens. There's some smart people out there, big dreams, we've just got to help enable that that dream become come to pass. Well, and that's that's excellent. How does somebody get a hold of you? Yeah, I think best way is, you know, you can websites, the easiest way is to go to Fictiv.com. You can check it out. I think the best thing that we have here is we produce a lot of really nerdy content. And I'd say like, we help teach people how to do this. And so go check out victor.com There's an entire what we call hardware guide. It's a guide to help you build physical products, whether you're a Stanford mechanical engineer that knows thermodynamics and you want to get super deep or you're like your Bob or Sarah, and you're like just trying to figure out you know how to make this thing like there's different levels of of information. So definitely check that out. I know we worked with the Scott thank you that we built a code so you can get a discount. industrial use the code industrial to get 10% off your first order.
So we'll make sure that's in the show notes. But you could test drive. Yeah. What do you got to lose?
Amen. So we just we want to show people, there's a better way to do this and just like, try it out, you know, like, don't don't take my word for it. We're not trying to blow smoke here. It's like, but we know change is hard. So, you know, use that code. Get out there. Sign up, literally, like, whether it's a suitcase wheel that we talked about. Yeah. Are you building a satellite Park? You know, for Capella? You know, go go check it out. Yeah. That's pretty doggone cool stuff. All right. Thank you. Big time, Dave. Big Dave. Wave. Big Wave. Dave, whatever you want to call it, man. Thank you for being on industrial talk. Man. You were awesome. It has been super fun Scott and looking forward to seeing what people create. It's cool. It's cool. See, that's cool. All right, listeners. We're gonna you know, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side, all the contact information for Dave and Fictiv will be there. So stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right, Dave Evans is his name. Fictiv is the company
and after that conversation, you should just be an absolute Gomer for the company and what they are doing anything to remove friction. In your work, your day to day work, is a big plus for me. And I'm sure a big plus for you think of is really worked out the kinks. And they've they've done it successfully. Why would you want to do that? Trust them, reach out to them? Ask them some questions. Bottom line, they are an open book there to help you in a big way. Remember, we're gonna be going to IoT solutions World Congress. We will be at distributech. We will be at manufacturing,
digital manufacturing
symposium, and many others. You got to look for us. We're going to be on the floor. We're going to be talking to you. Yes. Because you have a story. All right. Hang out with people like Dave Evans. Be bold, be brave, daring greatly. You're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stick around
About the author, Scott
I am Scott MacKenzie, husband, father, and passionate industry educator. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, I have applied every aspect of my education and training to lead and influence. I believe in serving and adding value wherever I am called.
