Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S5E33 Devon Copeland | Working for Apple & Tesla, Building a Better MFG Execution System (MES)
In this episode, Aaron Moncur interviews Devon Copeland. The conversation covers topics such as the engineering decision-making process, the importance of side projects, traceability in manufacturing, implementing a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and strategies for accelerating engineering speed.
Main Topics:
- Copeland's childhood experiences that inspired him to become an engineer
- Engineering projects, such as the American Solar Challenge, and communication strategies
- Insights from working at Apple and Tesla, including the art and science of engineering decision-making
- The value of side projects and how they can benefit an engineering career
- Traceability in manufacturing, including digital twins and automated inspection
- Using Serial's data analysis tools to improve manufacturing processes
- Implementing an MES and preparing for the integration process
- Challenges and solutions for Serial as a startup, including getting the word out and accelerating engineering speed
About the guest: Devon Copeland is an accomplished engineer with extensive experience in hardware engineering and product design. He is currently the Co-founder and CTO of Serial, a company that aims to streamline manufacturing data analysis, making it easier for engineers to identify and resolve production issues swiftly. Devon's background includes significant roles at Apple, Tesla, and Aeryon Labs, where he contributed to the development of high-profile projects like the Apple Watch Ultra and the Tesla Model 3.
Links:
Devon Copeland - LinkedIn
Serial Website
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
The engineering decision making process is kind of a combination of an art and a science, in a way, because it's a combination of using your own intuition and your holistic design thinking with the hard data that you're collecting from experiments and from simulation and from calculations. Do music.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to another exciting episode at the being an engineer podcast today, we have the privilege of speaking with Devon Copeland, an accomplished engineer with extensive experience in hardware engineering and product design. He's currently the co founder and CTO of Serial, a company that aims to streamline manufacturing data analysis, making it easier for engineers to identify and resolve production issues swiftly. Devon's background includes significant roles at Apple Tesla at Aeryon labs, where he contributed to the development of high profile projects like the Apple Watch Ultra and the Tesla Model 3. Devon, welcome to the show.
Devon Copeland:Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Aaron Moncur:Absolutely. So you've worked at some some pretty impressive places and worked on some really cool high profile projects. Super excited to dig into that and learn all about your experiences there. But let me start with a simple question, what made you decide to become an engineer?
Devon Copeland:Yeah, so when I think back to my childhood, you know, there's been a lot of engineering related memories that come to mind that kind of paved the way, paved the way for what was to come. But one of the most formative memories I have, and probably the earliest memory, was actually with my grandfather. He was a civil engineer, and one day, when I was seven years old, he brought me to the local library in the neighborhood that we grew up in in Vancouver, Canada, and at the library that day, they had one of those popsicle stick bridge building competitions. And we weren't in the competition that year, but we got to watch as these bridges were loaded up with weight to failure. And I was kind of enamored by seeing this competition take place. And the following year, we entered it together. And I think it was a bit unfair to have, you know, a practice, practicing civil engineer, pair up with an eight year old, but we entered the competition nonetheless, and it was just a lot of fun. And over the years, my grandfather was a huge inspiration to me in becoming an engineer. So I owe a lot to in my career and in my childhood. to him.
Aaron Moncur:Your grandfather sounds like a special guy, and what a great story about how you became an engineer. I love it. Thank you for sharing that the popsicle bridges, what a fun challenge in competition, right? We recently did something similar here at pipeline. We had a quarterly team meeting, and we decided to do a little team building event where we had spaghetti straws and marshmallows and yard of tape, like scotch tape and a yard of string. And the the design challenge was to build a structure as tall as possible. The only requirement was, well, you could only use those materials, and the marshmallow had to end up on top. It was one of the bigger like roasting marshmallow ones, not the small ones. And that was a lot of fun, right? Engineers, we just love to dig in and build things like that.
Devon Copeland:I love it. I love it. And, you know, I find that the best Innovation often comes out of scarcity, right? And when you're just given a short set of materials to work with, often, you know, some really fun ideas come out of that?
Aaron Moncur:Totally. Yeah, I agree 100% we did this in our office. So there were, like, the typical office tiles in the ceiling, and one of the teams, there's still a little bit of a debate about whether this was fair or cheating, but their idea was to hang everything from the ceiling, and then, you know, distance from the ground to the top of the marshmallow was like, far and away higher than anyone else, even though they hung it from the ceiling instead of having a structure that supported all the way. But technically, you know, that wasn't in the rules. So out of the box you said, for Yeah, creativity. That's right. Cool. When you were in college, you you competed in this American Solar Challenge, and that seemed like kind of a fun project. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, maybe a little bit of background about what this challenge was and some of the hurdles, the challenges that you ran into, and how you guys overcame them.
Devon Copeland:Yeah, for sure. So I studied engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and like many other engineering schools around the world. Waterloo has these student design teams I think a lot of people will be familiar with, like formula. SAE, for example, is kind of a student competition. But there's many other different types of student design teams. And the one that interested me the most and that I joined was the solar car team. We call it the midnight sun solar. Car team at the University of Waterloo, and sort of the pinnacle of solar car competition in North America is the American Solar Challenge, which happens every two years, and it happens at a different part of the US every two years. And in 2018 the year that we competed, we raced from Nebraska to Oregon on a but a 1500 mile course on real roads.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, I had no idea it was that long. Yeah,
Devon Copeland:yeah, it's an amazing competition. And these cars are powered partially or fully by the sun, collecting energy from solar panels. And these teams typically go through a two year design build process where they start two years ahead of the competition, design up their vehicle, build it all of themselves, and then bring it to the competition. And so you asked a little bit about hurdles, one of the unique aspects of building a solar car at the University of Waterloo was that at this engineering school at Waterloo, we go on internships or co ops every four months. So at any given time, there's a different cohort of students on campus. And it would be kind of like if you're running a company, and you know, half the company left every four months, and you got a completely new company. So you can imagine that building a car and doing a big engineering project like this, with that dynamic of having the team switch up is a big challenge from a communication and a project management standpoint. So along with, you know, learning about core, hardcore engineering principles, I think the team grew a lot on the communication and project management side, which it was a great skill to learn.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, were there any special tools that you found to facilitate communication?
Devon Copeland:Yeah, at the time, we were using the Atlassian suite, so JIRA and Confluence and hip chat, which was kind of the precursor to Slack, and, you know, all of those productivity code tools were really useful. But I, you know, a lot of it is nothing new, right? You just over communicate, lots of documentation, lots of meetings, yeah, video calls, when people were remote.
Aaron Moncur:How long did it take to make that drive?
Devon Copeland:It was, I think, about a two week journey, maybe just under two weeks, around 10 days.
Aaron Moncur:Wow. And I'm curious, you said every two years there is a new design cycle. Are you building on what previous teams have done, or are you completely starting from scratch every two years.
Devon Copeland:We really try to build on the successes of prior cars. You know, it's a lot to take on, to engineer everything from scratch every two years. So it really helps in these student design teams to build on prior successes. And that's not unique to slower car. You know, Formula SAE does the same thing, even like Formula One does this right, or building on prior successes,
Aaron Moncur:All products do this, right? You start with the MVP, absolutely, and then you make incremental improvements over time, right? Yeah. Speaking of products and improvements over time, let's talk about your time at Apple and Tesla. Tell us about a couple of the projects that you worked on and were there. I mean, what design principles or philosophies or just best practices did you take from your experiences working there and bring into future roles.
Devon Copeland:For sure. So at Apple and Tesla, unfortunately, I can't go into too many details about specific projects because I want to protect the confidentiality agreements that I was subject to, and it still am. But one of the things that I would love to talk about is sort of how these roles shaped my thinking around the engineering decision making process, and the way that we as engineers make decisions. And what I mean by that is kind of how you decide between design A, B or C when you're tackling a problem. When I was in school, and to a certain extent, while I was, you know, working on the solar car project, I had kind of the idealized version of the engineering decision process in mind where you know, you're given a list of criteria and constraints, and then you formulate a table, and you apply weights to these criteria and constraints, and then you apply some formulas, and then out pops the perfect design. And that's kind of what they teach you in school as this sort of idealized decision making process to select an engineering design that you come up with, but when it came to, you know, practicing things in the real world, I began to learn and realize that the engineering decision making process is kind of a combination of an art and a science, in a way, because it's a combination of using your own intuition and your holistic. Design Thinking with the hard data that you're collecting from experiments and from simulation and from calculations. And it's also brings in the aspect of working with real people and real company politics and sort of convincing people that the route that you'd like to take is the correct route. So I really loved learning about this at Apple and Tesla. And I think, you know, like many great engineering companies, they really have a great process for coming to engineering design decisions.
Aaron Moncur:I love that you talked about, kind of the non engineering aspects of engineering, right? Doing engineering as a career is not just doing engineering, it's navigating office politics and things like that that we don't necessarily think of in school and maybe that we don't really want to deal with, but it's just a part of life. I wonder, is there not necessarily like office politics or Bucha is or anything like that. But can you think of an example at one of your past companies, or any really engineering experience that you've had where you had an idea and you felt that your idea was was the right path, and you had to convince others that that was the case. And how did you go about doing that?
Devon Copeland:For sure. Yeah. I mean, so many different circumstances have kind of been that sort of thing where you have an idea and it might differ from the concept that somebody else has had. And I think, you know, there's a ton of tools that I've put in my toolbox over the years to to articulate designs and to show people, or try and convince people, or just you don't necessarily even have to convince people. It's more just about having a productive, engaging discussion to come to an agreement on the design. And you know, some of those tools have been putting together nice visuals and slides and really telling a story more than just articulating a whole bunch of facts. Right when you're talking to somebody and you're trying to communicate your opinion or your realization, really what you're trying to tell is a story. And so practicing those storytelling practices of putting visuals on a slide and talking to those slides has been something that I really learned at my prior
Aaron Moncur:I have a background in in photography, roles. and I've always appreciated graphic design and just visual what's the word I'm looking for, not just making something functional, but but making it look visually appealing as well. And I think that that's really a useful skill to have because of exactly what you just talked about, which is storytelling and and part of the storytelling experiences is how you make people feel, and the right graphics can really do a great job of that. I'm curious, were there any, I mean, did you pick up Photoshop or video editing, or any of these kinds of skills as ways to enhance your storytelling?
Devon Copeland:One thing that I did to enhance the storytelling, which I found really useful, was using animations, and in a lot of times, they were just GIFs. One of the challenges, though, was that while working in a sort of confidential environment, it can be tough to use those online GIF editing tools, right? You don't want to be uploading pictures right, of your CAD to some random website. So one thing I did was I made a little macro, little script on my computer where I could take a series of screenshots that were cropped in the exact same bounds over and over again, and then stitch those together into a GIF. And this thing would run all locally, so none of these screenshots would ever leave my computer. But then I could very quickly, you know, take a whole series of screenshots of a CAD assembly and animate that into an animation that could be put on a slide or sent in an email or anything like that. And just having a little bit of motion in the image often goes a long way. So I highly recommend any mechanical engineers who are listening to figure out some way to get animations out of your CAD software in a really quick way.
Aaron Moncur:Great advice. I love that that's so practical. People can go do that right away. Excellent example and advice. So people listening to this, probably a lot of them out there are either already in product design or they're interested in going into product design. I know there are quite a lot of students that listen to this show, and probably some of them are still kind of deciding what direction they want to go into for those, for those listening, who are considering going into a product design leg of Engineer. What advice do you have for them?
Devon Copeland:My biggest advice is just to work on side projects in your spare time, as they are interesting to you. And you know, people tell me or ask me, What side project should I build, or what side project would give me the most opportunities in my career or be best on a resume or whatever. And to be honest with you, I really think it doesn't matter what you work on, so long as it's exciting to you and that you're learning something new in the process. There have been so many side projects that I've worked on just out of interest that I had no idea would come back in the future and kind of really help me out at one point or another in my career. One example of that, if you're interested, is web development, actually. And when the pandemic hit and we were all kind of stuck at home in covid, I sort of picked up an interest in web development and started building a couple of these interactive web apps in my spare time for different purposes in my personal life. And I had no idea at the time that web development would be useful to me at all in the future. I was working mechanical engineering and product design related roles at the time, so wasn't really related to the career that I was on, but having that experience of building websites and building web apps and on the side really, really came into play and became useful when we started the startup that I'm working on right now, Serial.
Aaron Moncur:I love it so much. Everything you're saying, I think, is just totally 100% spot on. I mentioned photography for for some time. I ran on the side a photography company with a friend of mine. I started a small web design business myself, way long, a long time ago, nothing too sophisticated, but, you know, building out the HTML and the CSS back then, I was using Dreamweaver. I don't think anyone uses Dreamweaver these days, but that's how long ago was and the and some video editing is kind of part of the photography and part of the web design, and I use those skills all the time now as as a business owner, because I'm doing a lot of the marketing and the business development and getting really nice pictures of things that we've developed, and putting some videos and case studies together, it really helps display that work and helps us communicate to our customers what we can do. So those are things that I've used for years and years and years that they're not really related to engineering at all, but they sure have come in handy. I remember, this is something I wanted to touch on, especially for the younger engineers out there that are about to enter the field and are going to be looking for full time jobs or even internships. Frankly, I think it's really important to be willing to do some free work, some work that you're not going to get paid for, and understand that that's just that's kind of part of the ritual of getting into a professional field. When I was in college, I wanted an internship at this local company, and it was kind of a smart pipe drilling something or other, I can't even remember at this point, but I got an interview somehow with the company, and I went on their website, and I was just looking at their products, and I was going to interview to do some CAD design internship role. And so I just started creating CAD models of, like, all of these products that I saw on their on their website. I was pretty good at CAD already, so I probably created three or four different CAD models that that, you know, the internals weren't there, but on the outside they look just like what you saw on their website. And so I went to this interview, and they asked me a few questions, and then I took out this short portfolio, right? And I gave it to them and said, Here, like, you want someone who can design products. I've designed the products that I saw on your website. And they were like, Oh, wow, that's yeah, okay, you can do this, and I got hired, right? And if I hadn't spent, I don't know it was a few days, right, of quote, unquote, free work stuff, I wasn't getting paid for, but it was tremendously valuable and totally paid off.
Devon Copeland:That's awesome. I love that story, and it really shows your initiative too, right, that you came into that interview with something different. It differentiates you from whoever else was interviewing. And you know, even if you hadn't got that job, you probably learned something in the process by practicing that you're constantly So, yeah, never lost time working on side projects like that.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, side projects are super, super important. So let's talk about Serial a little bit. Tell us a little bit about what Serial is and why, what prompted you to start the company. Absolutely
Devon Copeland:so. First of all, Serial is spelled with an S, not a C. We often get confused with the breakfast product, but we are Serial with an S like Serial number and. And Serial is a traceability first manufacturing software. So what do I mean by that? Well, when we think about traceability, the kind of boring definition that you might see on the internet is sort of tracking and documenting the history, the location, the usage of all your components in the manufacturing life, life cycle. But what I try to think about traceability as, and what we like to think about it as, at Serial is having a digital twin for every product that you produce, where all of the manufacturing records are tied to this digital twin that lives in your traceability system. Now, traceability having this digital twin. It's usually done for one of two reasons, either done from a quality perspective or a regulatory reason. This is often the case in medical devices, as I'm sure you're super familiar with, or it can be run from the perspective of having better analytics and a much easier way to run experiments on your production or on your parts. And when my co founder, excuse me, when my co founder and I were thinking about software that we'd used in our past, that, you know, our past roles, companies like Apple and Tesla, and especially smaller companies that were not Apple and Tesla and maybe didn't have the same capabilities to build their own resources or buy expensive software tools, we really felt that traceability was a big gap, so that's why we started Serial. We want to make the best traceability tool for small to medium manufacturers that need a really robust system for tracking all of their manufacturing data and having these digital twins.
Aaron Moncur:So when you say traceability tool is, is Serial PLM? Or should we think of it differently than PLM?
Devon Copeland:Yeah, we can think of it as a lightweight MES. So more on the manufacturing side, manufacturing execute execution system is MES that has a really robust traceability component, meaning that we can track the genial, the as built bomb, the as built genealogy of the products that you're producing, as well as capture any sort of data that you want to capture along the way. So if you want to know a dimensional measurement on a particular part, you can log that in Serial. If you want to know the final quality inspection report that may be produced by an automated test fixture that can be logged in Serial, things like operators and station IDs and date codes, lock codes that can all be tracked in Serial as well.
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. All right, I'm going to take a very short break here and share with the listeners that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Learn more at Team pipeline.us. The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave. Dot, engineer, we have the privilege of speaking with Devin Copeland today. So Devin, you, you just talked about maybe have this automated fixture that's feeding data into an mes. We we just delivered a piece of automated machinery that we developed, and this machine has some vision systems in it and glue dispensing. And there are two side covers that receive glue, and then the vision system inspects that glue and ensures that a, a sufficient volume has been deposited, and B that the glue has been deposited in the the correct locations on the side cover. And then the two side covers come together, and they get they get glued together. So every time an inspection is performed with this vision system, it takes some pictures, and there's, you know, there's a pass fail criteria, and so this is, this is the type of thing that you're referring to when you're talking about data that feeds into Serial. Is that correct?
Devon Copeland:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's at least three or four different data points that you just mentioned there that could be logged in Serial and could be really useful if there was ever a quality issue or a recall or some sort of concern later down the line when you manufacture these parts. And so, like you mentioned, the picture could be uploaded. The pass failed result, the volume of the glue. If you had multiple of these stations, multiple of these glue dispensing fixtures, you might have the actual fixture Id be logged as well, and later on, you might find that there's some sort of commonality or trend associated with the fixture itself. One fixture dispensing glue sub optimally, and that will all kind of shake out in the data if you're tracking it and tracing it properly in your. System.
Aaron Moncur:How would, let's say that something does go wrong in the field, a device fails or something? What's an example of how data from Serial could be pulled to help identify the root cause?
Devon Copeland:Absolutely, one thing that that makes me think of is a sort of a failure analysis strategy called commonality analysis. And I think when we're doing failure analysis as engineers, it's often really easy to figure out what went wrong, but not why it went wrong, and kind of getting really deep to that root cause. And commonality analysis can be a really powerful tool in getting to that root cause, because what it allows you to do is it allows you to aggregate a few different or all of the failures of the same mode together. So if there was a glue failure, and this happened on, say, you know, four or five different parts, you could look at that sample four or five different parts. And you could say, What's similar between all of these things, play a little bit of game, a bit of a game of spot the difference. And then what might shake out is, you know, all of these parts went through the same glue fixture, or they all had a sort of on the low range of the glue volume dispensed. Or you could look at the pictures, and you could sort of look at it from a qualitative perspective. Is there a specific pattern here? And running these commonality analysis analyzes is something that becomes really easy in Serial when you have good traceability on your components.
Aaron Moncur:So does Serial include the tools for running these analyzes, or just the data, and then you export the data and use external tools.
Devon Copeland:No, we absolutely do include those tools. So we're an analytics package as well as the database and data collection package.
Aaron Moncur:Nice, very cool. Talk a little bit about, I mean, there are MES systems out there, right? What, what did you see as lacking in the market and kind of, what, what hole Are you trying to fill with Serial?
Devon Copeland:Absolutely. So I think what a lot of this comes down to is the challenges that manufacturing engineers and engineers face when they're trying to do analysis and run experiments on their production line. And we found that there's kind of a tendency for it to be very difficult to get high quality analytics and to run experiments on manufacturing lines. So why is this? Well, I think it comes down to two things. One is a tendency for engineers to or manufacturing processes to kind of ignore the products genealogy when they think about data collection, and then also a tendency to have very diff, excuse me, disparate methodologies of collecting this data. So what do I What do I mean by this? So, from a genealogy perspective, I think engineers, specifically mechanical engineers, you know, really get the idea of having a hierarchy or a genealogy, right? Like in your CAD software, we have sub assemblies, and we have top level assemblies, and we have individual parts. But then when you kind of get to the manufacturing line, and when you're thinking about data collection, often that kind of takes a back seat, and we sort of just collect data where we can, and we don't really structure it the same way that the product is built, and that comes into play later on to make it really difficult to run a high quality analysis. And then the other aspect I mentioned was having disparate methodologies of data collection. What I mean by that is just having, like a lot of different places where you're collecting data. So you might have a spreadsheet in one case and a notebook in another case and a network drive in another case, and having all of these different locations where you have to go to collect your data is kind of difficult. So what Serial does is kind of solves those two problems, where we structure the data the same way that your product is built. We really respect the genealogy and the hierarchy, and then we also give it one home, and we can collect data from all different sources on your production line, and even different production lines or different factories in different countries, even
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. What if you could summarize the environments for which Serial is the best fit? It's really a perfect slam dunk for for these kinds of manufacturing environments, and then conversely, for what kinds of manufacturing environments is Serial just not the right tool,
Devon Copeland:For sure. So we specialize in complex assemblies, specifically ones that are electromechanical and have lots of serialized or lock controlled parts that go into the final assembly. So if you're just, you know, injection molding, plastic forks, this is not something that cereal would be great for, because each one of those plastic forks doesn't have. Its own unique identifier, but often in aerospace or medical devices or personal electronics or industrial equipment, a lot of the sub assemblies and piece parts that go into your final assembly have lot lot IDs, material IDs, Serial numbers that you kind of want to keep track of and have an as built genealogy or an as built bomb for every product that you produce, and that's specifically the type of industry that we're really specialized for.
Aaron Moncur:Great, great, terrific, very clear. If I have a manufacturing line right now, and I don't have any kind of MES, but I know I need to what kind of preparation should I do so that implementing the MES, whether it's Serial or something else altogether, what kind of preparation should I do to make that integration process as seamless as possible?
Devon Copeland:For sure? Well, I think the best thing to do is sort of get familiar with the MES space before you dive into that. I would recommend to any manufacturer who's thinking about bringing something on like this, before you make any changes internally, go and explore the space and schedule meetings with companies, schedule demo calls, because you'll probably learn a lot from just seeing what options are available there and making any changes internally are always super costly, right? You don't want to touch a process that's already working, so don't change anything to start. Just go and learn. Go and explore, and then once you do, pick out something that you're trying to bring on. I think it's really important to have very clear documentation of what the process flow is, and different MES softwares can even help you with that by having built in flow charts and ways to visualize the process, but having a sort of very clear view with everybody on the same page of what the process flow is and what happens at each step, is super helpful. And then also having, you know, SOPs or work instructions documented as well, can really help communicate to whoever you're working with, with implementing this MES how your process runs.
Aaron Moncur:How about the nitty gritty details of how your production equipment communicates with an MES are there, like just foundational elements that have to be there otherwise you can't even do the communication. For example, equipment has to be PLC based with with sufficient IO versus, I don't know, running off some kind of Windows based system.
Devon Copeland:You're talking about serial specifically, or just any MES?
Aaron Moncur:MES in general.
Devon Copeland:Gotcha, yeah, I think the, you know, the, the biggest requirement is some sort of network connection. So I think people often want to have these cloud connected or internal server connected machines or pieces of equipment in their factory, and the first thing that you need is some sort of either on prem network or Internet access on the factory floor for these devices to communicate with. There are options out there that you sell connectivity as well. So it's not necessarily a hard requirement that there's connection on the factory floor, but the first thing to figure out is how you're going to upload the data and then, yeah, like you said, there's different options for different pieces of equipment. At serial we have a public RESTful API, which basically means that any device that can connect to the internet or a local network can make requests to upload data. But if there's a specific instance with a PLC or some sort of specific piece of hardware, it's sort of like a case by case basis, and it's just best to reach out to the person who's implementing or helping you with the MES to figure that out.
Aaron Moncur:Cool, very cool. All right. Serial is a startup, and let's see, how long has your team been working on this now,
Devon Copeland:About a year and a half, or getting close to two years, actually. All
Aaron Moncur:right. Well, congratulations on coming up on two years that'll be a big milestone.
Devon Copeland:Thank you. Thank you.
Aaron Moncur:What? What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've faced as a startup? What? What are some things that have surprised you, whether good surprises or bad surprises?
Devon Copeland:For sure, I think one of the big challenges for us has just been actually getting the word out there. And I think engineers like myself, we kind of fall into the trap when we're starting a company or starting a startup that we sort of think, if you build it, they will come and I certainly thought that when I was starting the company, you know, I'm going to build this great piece of. Disability software this lightweight MES for manufacturing, and all of a sudden, all these manufacturers are going to come knocking and want to adopt this. And while we have had really, really good feedback from our customers and our early adopters, you really have to kind of put your put the word out there and make sure that people are aware of these new emerging technologies and trends in the field, because sometimes people, rightfully so, are just really, really focused on the task at hand and making you know what they're working on in their day to day work as best as possible. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:What have you found to be effective methods of going back to the storytelling that you were talking about, right? What have you found to be effective in terms of getting the word out there about serial
Devon Copeland:We've been doing a lot of video and multimedia content. We find that that's really engaging and helps people understand really what the product is, it's a it's a very simple user interface, but some of these ideas, you know, require a little bit more time and visuals to communicate what's going on with our product. So having videos and multimedia posts on social media and stuff like that has been really helpful. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:What? What? What social platform have you found to be the most effective at finding your customers?
Devon Copeland:LinkedIn is definitely the best social media platform. I mean, people are on there from a professional and working perspective. So
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, we find the same as well. Okay, let's see. I read a little bit about Serials grid builder and how it simplifies the analysis of sub assembly data. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Devon Copeland:I think it's best to talk about the grid builder and this feature in general, in terms of an example. So let's say that we're building a medical device, and the medical device is made up of a number of different parts and sub assemblies. So for sake of discussion, maybe this medical device has a PCB. It might have some sensors that talk to this PCB. It might have an injection molded housing. Now, all of these parts have potentially different sub line processes or sub assembly processes that happen as you're building the device up. So there might be incoming quality inspections that are done on the housing. There might be a flashing and a firmware uploading process that happens on the PCB. The sensors might have their own testing that's done on them before they go into the final assembly. So there's all these things that are happening asynchronously, on their own, on these different parts of the assembly, you're collecting data, you're running procedures, operators are following instructions, and then finally, at the end of the line, all of these parts come together. They might be a final functional test, and then device goes off into the field. Now, a huge challenge when you're a quality engineer or a manufacturing engineer, and you're trying to understand something, you're trying to run an analysis, is aggregating all of the data from these different parts that went through different processes along the production process. So let's say I want to know, you know, is there a strong correlation between sensor level testing and the testing at the end of my production line, that seems like a really easy question that should be able to be answered really quickly, but often this is, you know, hours or days long process to aggregate the data from different places, then you need to join data from different serial numbers together so data From the sensor level might be serialized to the sensor sub assembly, and then data from the top level is serialized to the top level assembly. So now you have to spend some time with VLOOKUP in Excel to stitch these things together. And so the grid builder comes in and makes this super, super easy. You drop in a list of serial numbers that you want to analyze, and then you can basically just drag and drop columns, any data point that you've collected at any point on your manufacturing line. This could even be, you know, who the operator was that did a particular process, or the cycle time of a particular process, or, like I said, the sensor level test measurements. You can just drag and drop these data sets in and construct your table the way you want it. And we've just released a companion to the grid builder, called the Graph Builder, which is the same thing, but for graphing. So instead of building a table, you're building a plot.
Aaron Moncur:That sounds Awesome is it? Would it be inaccurate to think of grid builder and plot builder as kind of like Excel on steroids, built specifically for analyzing sub assembly data sets.
Devon Copeland:I love that characterization.
Aaron Moncur:I love it. Okay, great, terrific. All right, well, let's see, Devin, let me, let's do one more question, and then, and then we'll wrap. Things up here. I'm I'm interested in any answer you have to this, but I'm specifically interested to hear if there were specific tools that that you learned or observed during your time at Tesla and Apple, because I'm sure they have just tons of very refined processes. And the question is, what is one thing that you have done or observed to accelerate the speed of engineering?
Devon Copeland:I think of our mission here at serial is basically trying to automate busy work so that you can focus more on the task at hand and decisions that really, really matter. And I think that our customers kind of feel this when they start to use our product. But I also want to take that mentality in house and have it influence how we build software and how we run our company. And so some of the things that we've done to sort of accelerate the speed of engineering within our team is to do things that, like I said, eliminate the busy work, eliminate the thought in the mundane tasks. And some of these things are not new to software engineering, like we automate our validation testing, and so every time there's a new build of the software, we have a whole suite of tests that run against it to make sure we're not playing a kind of a whack a mole game where you fix one thing but you break another thing. We also have a pretty robust style guide of reusable building blocks. So whenever we're building a new user interface, we have these Lego bricks to use that make the user interface really clean and uniform, but also accelerate the speed that we can push out new features. And so I think, yeah, we just really try to make the feeling that people have when they use our product of eliminating the busy work of their day to day also be the feeling that our employees have when they're working in serial and building up new features or new analytics,
Aaron Moncur:That's terrific. Great. All right, Devon, what a pleasure it has been to get to know you and a little bit about Serial thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharing some of your your insights and background to the field of engineering. How can people get in touch with you?
Devon Copeland:The best way to reach out to me is LinkedIn. Devon Copeland, feel free to shoot me a connection request. I'd love to hear from any people working in the hardware engineering space. I'm a huge hardware nerd, so I just love you know, even if it's just a casual conversation, hearing about what people are up to. And then the other place to check us out is Serial.io that's our website, Serial with an s like Serial number.io, we have a whole bunch of information there about our product, as well as some videos.
Aaron Moncur:Cool. Devon, thank you again.
Devon Copeland:Thanks so much for having me on.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you like what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
