Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S7E30 Steve Riley | Small Improvements, Big ROI: Lessons from the Factory Floor
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Steve Riley brings a unique perspective to Being An Engineer because he is not an engineer by title, but he has spent his career working directly in the environments where engineering, operations, manufacturing, and continuous improvement have to come together. His background spans plant leadership, program management, operations management, engineering management, injection molding, medical products, carbon fiber manufacturing, dental equipment, and Lean/5S implementation.
Steve is currently Chief Organization Officer at Bespoke, a company that helps continuous improvement professionals achieve tool control through custom shadowboards and tool organization systems. Bespoke’s work is focused on making 5S and Lean practices easier to sustain in real production environments, where missing tools, unclear standards, and inconsistent follow-through can quietly erode productivity over time.
Earlier in his career, Steve held leadership roles at Innovative Composite Engineering, Forest Dental Products, Freeport-McMoRan’s Kinetics Metal Injection Molding operation, GM Nameplate, Nypro, and Precision Laboratory Plastics. Across those roles, he has worked close to the factory floor in areas such as program launches, operations leadership, high-volume molding, medical device manufacturing support, and press-side automation.
For this episode, Steve wants to focus on continuous improvement and ways to make projects deliver long-term ROI. That is a valuable angle for engineers because many technical projects succeed in the short term but fail to become part of the organization’s daily operating system. Steve’s perspective centers on leadership behavior, standards, team ownership, and practical systems that keep improvement alive after the excitement of the initial project has worn off. A recent Lean Solutions Podcast episode featuring Steve highlighted this exact theme: Lean breaks down when standards become optional, and leadership behavior often matters more than the tools themselves.
LINKS:
Steve Riley's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevejriley/
Bespoke website: https://bespoketooltrays.com/
Aaron Moncur, host
PDX 2026 is October 20-21 in Phoenix, AZ. Learn more and register at https://pdexpo.engineer/
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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 like cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us at www.teampipeline.us
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Initiatives can can fade even when they're successful out of the gate. If we are following up to make sure that the changes stayed in place and it is still obvious and it's important to leadership team, so some form of the audit or walkthroughs or gimbal walks or whatever your audition calls those things are important over time to make sure that our book is done is still being maintained.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the Being an Engineer podcast. Today we're talking with Steve Riley, a manufacturing operations and continuous improvement or CI leader with more than 30 years of experience helping teams improve performance, launch programs, support production, and make lean practices stick. Today, he serves as chief organization officer at Bespoke, where he helps CI professionals implement custom shadow boards and tool control systems that support 5S, reduce wasted motion and search time, and keep improvement visible on the floor without requiring customers to do any tool tracing, cutting of foam or CAD work. Steve, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I enjoy watching
Steve Riley:airless of this program, and it's fun to be here as a guest.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for the the support. So, Steve, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about your background. You have a degree in manufacturing technology, but how did you you know where did you start and how did you end up where you are now?
Steve Riley:Well, it's a very windy path, right, from start to finish in that. But I did go to school for aviation technology with manufacturing minor, and so my focus was planned to be around. How do we how do we make airplanes for the world and how do we manufacture those? I ended up out of aviation work finding a connection with somebody who owned a plastic injection molding plant and transitioned to that as my main career path and spent more than 20-five years injection molding with plastics and metals and those kind of things, as well as a little bit of time at composites and general assembly as well.
Aaron Moncur:Was it about plastic injection molding that that spoke to you and said, "Ah, you should come over on this side and and do this instead"
Steve Riley:Yeah, good question. The aviation group I was with actually held a meeting in this customer's factory. So he had a plastic condition on the factory. He offered the conference room for us for a meeting we were having, and during that meeting, one of the guests complained about the noise that was coming in. Was the hey, can you go out and shut that stuff off? And the owner very quickly quipped. He goes,"That's the sound of money being made. Be quiet over there.
Aaron Moncur:Nice. The customer is not always right. Very cool. Okay, tell us a little bit about what you do right now. Your your position as chief organization officer.
Steve Riley:Yeah, we help continuous improvement professionals and other manufacturing leaders implement shadow boards into their processes, and we do that through a unique process where they take a picture of what they want from way of tools. We convert that into CAD files with them, and cut parts and ship shadow boards back to them. So we make it easy to do a professional quality shadow board for your operation without all the extra work that has been with those in the past.
Aaron Moncur:Most people probably know what a shadow board is for those who might not be familiar with the term. Can you explain what is a shadow board?
Steve Riley:Yeah, shadow board is just a general description of some visual way to tell what tool should be in a particular location. So in our case, we typically make shadow boards for workstations or toolbox drawers. So when you open the drawer, there's a pocket that's the shape of every tool, and I let you identify immediately where each tool should be placed in that workstation.
Aaron Moncur:And how did you get involved there at Bespoke?
Steve Riley:Yeah, so over the years, in as a manufacturing theater, I've used shadow boards, whether it be you know just tracing around a tool on on a pegboard or cutting out foam as we create pockets like we do today in almost every factory Arizona. That's it's part of the process of bringing some visual elements to the lean practices and. I wanted to have a professional toolbox like that in my garage at home, and didn't want to do it the old-fashioned way with cutting things out. So just worked on developing a process. I was pretty sure, in the day and age we lived in, as a way to do this with a digital process versus manual. And so spent some time back in the COVID days, working out the process of how do I go from a digital picture to a cutting file and develop this process. Once we had it down, it had done our own boxes. Reached out to some of the lean practitioners that I knew and said, "Hey, I got a process for this. If you're interested, and many of them said, "Oh yeah, that sounded great. I'd love to have that done for you. So that was that was the beginning of what we're doing here.
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. So we haven't gone through that process before, but not knowing about your process, taking a digital picture and turning that into your your DXF or your CAD file, whatever format you're using, I would have just found the tools that I want and laid them out, and maybe taking some rough measurements, and then go into CAD and put a big rectangle in CAD and start cutting out the the shapes of the different tools, and and it would have taken forever, and it would have been a huge pain in the the rear end, right? But you you've circumvented all that and bypassed it with with your process. So I'm a little bit curious about how that works. Do you have like how do you calibrate the size? Do you have your customers just put like a ruler or something in there so there's a reference for scale?
Steve Riley:Yeah, great question. We actually have the customer just draw a rectangle. That's the exterior of the surface that's going to go into. So for the toolbox, just measure the inside of the toolbox and either draw a rectangle that size, or we actually have a template generator on our website. You can just click on that, type in the two numbers, length and width, and plot out a a template, and then just drop your tools inside of that. And the picture that you take gives us a scale by reference to that rectangle.
Aaron Moncur:Got it. Okay. So end customer defines the overall shape, the the rectangle size, and then drops a picture in that size, but there still has to be some kind of scale right between like the size of the tool and the size of the the drawer or the the shadow board that goes in that drawer.
Steve Riley:Yeah, it's part of the magic of what we've done with our software, and basically we're able to extrapolate that from the rectangle that you capture with your picture, yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Interesting. Okay, so there's some black magic going on behind the scenes there.
Steve Riley:Just a little bit, just because that's the nature of how things work. But it's very straightforward. Customers who who try it, you say, like,"Well, that's exactly the way I would dream it to be. Just to shoot a picture of the tools and a general alignment that you want because we're once we have the tool cut out so we can adjust them and move things around. And method that's not on account for customers to have one one pegboard layout today and say like, hey, I'm replacing a tool with a different tool. Can you just recut it and put this new tool on permission? So we do remakes for fast storage as they make adjustments as well.
Aaron Moncur:Cool, very cool. All right, you've been involved with continuous improvement CI for for some time. How did you get into continuous improvement?
Steve Riley:Well, I think it's the nature of of things in the world we live in, manufacturing processes. There's always something that is, even though you're up and running and you have you're making product, there's something that is undesirable that you want to make better. That's really kind of the core continuous improvement. So whether you're, hey, I reduce the scrap rate and need to make more in the same amount of time because volume is higher, or you drive labor out. There's just some way there's always some some demand for that, so that was kind of the where you began to look for what are the solutions around making things go faster.
Aaron Moncur:Was there a particular event or an experience that you had that that kind of started your journey down that CI path. The Product Development Expo is back october 20 and 21st in Phoenix, Arizona. PDX is a hands on training event for engineers who develop physical products. Exhibitors teach practical sessions on design, GD&T, manufacturing, automation, testing, simulation, inspection, and more. From august 3 through august 7, attendee tickets are 50% off. After august 7, prices return to normal. Mark your calendar for august 3 to get your discounted ticket. See you at PDX.
Steve Riley:That's a good question. Potentially, yeah. If you look back to, I was working in a small additional molding factory macker, the first one that I was in, and our process was like like all edition molding was pretty automatic. Machines are running, cranking out you know 1000s of parts an hour into into boxes, and our production crew, their job was to pull the box out, put it on the way counter, and get it to the right count for whatever. But we were begging for those customers to unbox the product, so a manual process at the end of the introduction process. Maintenance manager came to me and said, "I got an idea. If I just take this electronic eye and a conveyor belt, I could ring this up to where you know we tie it to the machine count. The machine has put the right number of parts in the box and just index the box out of the way and bring another box in. So I said that's a that's a cool idea. We'll go ahead and do that. And so he he rigged that up in the maintenance area and went back and played with a little bit. Said yeah, looks like it works. That's that's pretty cool. And so we took that out to the floor, and of course that creates all kind of interest among the production staff. What what are you guys doing over there? What are you doing by machine? And as they described them, I said, "Hey, this is going to index the boxes when they're full. And they're like, "Oh, that's that's interesting. Let's see how this works. And once it was up and running, they had debugging done and demonstrated this truly did work. When the box is full, it just moved out of the way, or a new box moved in. They're like,"This is fantastic. We love this. And it moved from "Hey, what are you doing? to "Why can't we do this every day? And so, pretty quickly, we had bought some more conveyors, and every machine now had an indexing conveyor on it, and that was the hey of our early containers improvement projects that showed me the value of that that that facility, we had trouble with hiring labor for the night shift and keeping that consistently over time, and so there came a point here. So this is just so much of a struggle. We should find another solution, and so the decision was if we made the conveyors long enough to hold enough boxes for the entire shift, we could run lights out and just come back in the morning and have all the boxes filled up, and that's what we ended up doing. Went to eight hours lights out every night for them going forward, and addressed our labor issue. Also, cut costs down for the company, which they're always paying attention to other customers to reduce costs. It was mainly to to do that. The company was able to share some of the cost savings with the employees for a little pay increase and keep customers satisfied with lower costs. So they're wearing on both sides of that and made the employees very well and basically built this initiative when it was going through,
Aaron Moncur:that's a huge win. Great way to incentivize buy-in from the team as well, right? I mean, yeah. If this is successful, then you get a little bit of extra salary. That's fantastic.
Steve Riley:You know, one great thing about that facility. 10 years after I had moved out to to another company, I got a chance to go back through town and visit and get a Ford tour from Litter production manager, and was excited to see all those conveyors still in place and running a decade later. So
Aaron Moncur:wow, the value of that
Steve Riley:continuous improvement discontinued the way year after year after year, and they were they were still able to run. So it lights out that long later was was pretty cool.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome! Wow, what a great story! Thank you for sharing that. It seems you've always been pretty industrious, right? You've you've got this company now, the Shadow Boards that you're doing continuous improvement over the years, and and even in college, you I guess you you paid your way through college by by selling airplane kits, is that right?
Steve Riley:Actually, just assemble them for people. So, if you're familiar with Hoggle Airplane Movement companies sell kits to people that they can put together airplanes in their own boat garages, and I had some express with composite airplanes and was able to find our customers in any place I was going to school who had these kits in the garage. They weren't getting completed, so they were able to have college, inexpensive flavor to come in and help them move their project along. So, so so
Aaron Moncur:these are not. Like RC planes, these are, I mean, like flyable airplanes, composite. Is that right?
Steve Riley:Yeah, we made it. We're building a two seat. We see two seat hot rod kit with airplane.
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. And you also currently have your pilot's license.
Steve Riley:I do. Yeah, have an aviation background. I have a player license back in 2000 and a private license in 2018
Aaron Moncur:I spoke with a guy oh years ago who was a pilot, and he kept telling me how his perspective on like life changes as as he gets up there. It just kind of changes the way that he looks at things in general. Have you ever experienced that, or has your experience been different?
Steve Riley:No, I agree with that. I think that aviation just does give you a full view of the world. Things are three dimensions instead of instead of two dimensions you're used to driving around in, and also in the aviation program and most of the students I was in the program with for going on to be professional pilots. Literal and interact with them over the years. They describe that view of the cockpit as they take off in the morning and penetrate the clouds is one that just can't be beat. Yeah, so they don't go as high as they do. But I get same experience for you. You got to build the earth and up around it. It's pretty fun.
Aaron Moncur:Nice. Have you built your own planes since then?
Steve Riley:You know, amazingly, I have not. Thank you. You're
Aaron Moncur:hiring college kids to come in and build yours.
Steve Riley:One of the things that I learned in in that process, and I watched you know many families go through the process of trying to build their airplanes, was that the the the value of the kit while you own it and it's not complete is about half what they have in it for dollars. You can you can resolutely they for about 50 cents on the dollar, so it's not good. And when you're totally dumb, it's not worth a whole lot more than the the cash that put into it, so all the labor is a labor of love at that point in time. So it's not something I've ever divined into, yeah. As much as I had to enjoy the process, but it's a long process. It takes a lot of hours to pull it.
Aaron Moncur:I'm sure. I'm sure. All right. Well, going back to continuous improvement, I imagine that for a lot of teams, it it might seem or it could seem like a big hurdle, a giant obstacle, and and probably some of these continuous improvement initiatives stall at some point, and and maybe never cross the finish line. What have you ever seen? Like a pattern that separates ones that go the distance from the ones that that stall and never quite get across the finish line.
Steve Riley:Yeah, unfortunately, many of us are familiar with the McKinsey report that came out in like 2021 that described the fact that seven out of 10 continuous approved projects don't bring ROI for the company that invested them, which is a discouraging statistic for those who are doing this pretty much as their careers. So I will say, like our goal is to be in a 30% category that did bring value, and that that value lasts for years, not just enough to pay it back. But yeah, I'd say that the difference to those kind of boils down to a couple things. I'd say leadership is a key one. So leadership of a TS improvement individual and their management team that is working with them is really important. And the second one is a team engagement with the folks who are the ones who are responsible for keeping it alive after the initiative is over. It's critical that leaders throughout the organization, multiple levels, as high as possible, are supportive of the initiative, so that everybody knows that this is important, and then it's also important that the people who will carry on that in their day-to-day work are buying into it on the floor level. Otherwise, if you you don't have either of those all as strong, there's a pretty good chance that school buy over time. If you can get those solidly in place, where everybody knows this is important to the organization, all the leadership shares are way behind it and follow them on it, and you get the people involved. You have a much better chance of this being a good initiative.
Aaron Moncur:What does leadership support look like, practically speaking?
Steve Riley:Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's different in every culture and every leader style. But I would say, yeah, kind of the ideal context is the leaders are talking about it, interactions they have with people. Whether you have you know a stand-up meeting and leadership is talking about it, or if you have an all hands type meeting. And the leadership can say, "Hey, we're going to do this initiative, and here's why it's important, so that everybody understands what's coming and why why we're doing this. That's really important. And then I'd say during the initiative, the leaders show up, so this isn't just something that somebody else did, but they participate in the process, so that it's evident that this really has valued polarization, and then following up after the fact once things are in place, initiatives can fade even when they're successful out of the gate. If we are following up to make sure that the changes stayed in place and it is still obviously this important leadership team. So, some form of a potted or walkthroughs or giggle walks or whatever your tradition calls those things are important over time to make sure that what is done is still being maintained. Maintained.
Aaron Moncur:Looking back at your time at at Bespoke, are there any continuous improvement projects that you can share that that had, you know, hopefully part of the the three out of 10 statistic and not the seven out of 10 that actually saved the company money.
Steve Riley:Yeah, I'd say for us, we started out of the gate with a pretty lean process. It was we looked at the details in the initial boards we made. We had that kind of dialed down. I spent some time with the artists who do the the true work of converting the images into layouts and got their process as simplified as possible, including lit flows at Exchange. Is there the perhaps the one that's most significant? We had a large customer come through with a potential very large order for us, so we were pretty excited about supporting them with just hundreds of these toolbox shellboards. But they had several cost. They had shopped around and they found some alternatives, of course, as they should, and so when they came back to us and said, "What can you do about your prize? it caused us to go back and look at what is in our process that could be improved, and we found there was a part of the process that we were outsourcing in raw material side that we could potentially bring in house, and so we looked at the look at what was the cost of going emulator and things that we're going to need to pull this off. And I said, "Yeah, if that order has three, they put this in place, and we'll drive our cost down. So we're able to give them a discount, which is in line with the scale of their ordering, and also give us that ability to keep our fat spent, and the result is our prices today are the same as they were two years ago. Even though risks look, we haven't seen huge increases than anything else. We're still comfortable that that price level, so I'm really hooked for us, not just for that big customer, full quality constraint.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, so that's if you were to simplify it, vertical integration is that basically, yeah,
Steve Riley:exactly. Yeah, okay,
Aaron Moncur:nice. Yeah, it's so much cheaper to do things internally than it is to to outsource them. That's kind of the trick, I think, of growing a business, right? Is to how much can you bring internal versus outsourcing?
Steve Riley:Indeed.
Aaron Moncur:All right. Well, let's talk about shadow boards. How are shadow boards saving time for folks on the manufacturing floor?
Steve Riley:Well, in many ways, shadow boards are really about bringing visuality to their workplace, and the ability to go to a drawer, open it up, and know instantly that the tool is going to be there, or if you open the drawer as a whole, the tool should be you know instantly the tool isn't there. Both the ways save time. The first one saves you time in Turkey is pulling the tools you need to do your job, and second one saves you time and digging through a drawer that may or may not have the Easter egg you're looking for in there after all. Say another way that it it saves time or saves effort. It's just mental load. See, they give out a mechanic a job to do. They go to the troller, find the tools they need, and return in a few seconds to the task. They've been able to keep their mental load focused on task at hand, not the task that you have to go around the shop trying to find. The tool they need, so just reduces fails in that area as well.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I confess we are not perfect at this. Keeping our our toolbox fully stocked and organized, I would say that more often than not, if you opened up a drawer in a toolbox here at Pipeline, I'm I'm not proud to admit this, but you would see tools. Well, you wouldn't see tools missing because there is no shadow board to tell you that. But there are tools that should be in that drawer that that are not. So the idea of having a visually obvious hole where something should be but isn't as an indicator that hey this tool has not been placed back. That's that's very appealing to me. Outside of shadow boards, I'm just curious since you're in the space if you have any practical suggestions for the rest of us that maybe don't have shadow boards yet. Hopefully one day in the future we all we all do it because it's a great way to keep things organized. But if we're not there quite yet, any practical pieces of advice that you can share for how to encourage team members to put tools back in in the drawers and and keep them organized? I feel like this this is a a theme that that recurs for us. You know, I don't know. Once every several months, someone gets frustrated that the the tool isn't back in the drawer, and we have to have a conversation with the team. And all right, how are we going to improve this? But do you have any, I don't know, any experiences or or guidance that you can share with us on how to encourage the right behaviors there?
Steve Riley:Yeah, that's that's a great question. I think visual organization is really not just about organizing things; it's about organizing information. So the information of where the tools are is what the shadow boards are trying to communicate. But yeah, lean thinkers don't use shadow board just as a place to store tools. They it's a communication device that tells people whether the workplace is operating normally or not to be looking for where those signals and something isn't right. Like you open it up and there's a hole, but there should be something else. As I go back, what I learned initially about shadow wards was from my father. He was a administrator in he was an academic teacher, and back when he was teaching shop classes and middle schools, all the walls were covered with plywood. They had nails sticking out of them where every tool was, and they drew a line around every tool. So you can do this in your toolboxes. You know, take yourself a piece of fabric, you know, cut up an old logs, throw it in the bottom of the drawer. Lay your tools in there, draw around every one of them. You've got a quick shadow board that at least communicates to the rest of the team where you want things to be. It's also a great starting point for your legitimate shadow board to go up to as well. So you need to go through that process as well, and I actually have a short document on how to implement shadow boards. I'll be glad to share with anybody that's listening that would be interested. So, if you want to reach out to me at the end, we'll talk about emails and things. They just drop me a note says they're interested in shadow board guide, and I'll send you a free free copy that they can can dive into, but I will describe for you one of the processes that I like when I help teams with their shadow boards is basically the principle that the fewer tools you can put in a shadow board, the better off you are in terms of lean approaches to things. So, just for instance, you don't need a combination wrench set from quarter inch through seven eighths. If everything on your workbench is only got you have quarter inch fasteners, right? So, so you only need the seven sixteenths wrenches. All you really need, right? So you don't fill a shadow board with everything. Only fill it with what you need. So the way that I have helped teams do that is go to the workstation first thing of the morning or first day of the week to remove every tool off the workbench, put it on a table two or three feet away from the workstation, and then begin let let work begin. And throughout the days, they need tools. They can go over and get it off the the other side and bring it over. Once it's there, it can stay in the restriction. Yeah. So oftentimes by noon, and if not, then the end of the day, we've got 90% of the tools that are necessary, and all that other stuff is now being cleaned out of it. So it's going to get 5s very quickly, and saves that that whole effort of sorting, but but that point in time, then you've got the tools you need. You know what you need to shadow board, and very quickly you got a very nice folk shoulder station. Is
Aaron Moncur:a great practical pro tip. I love that because I'm I'm thinking about our our tool. Right, and some of them, there are a lot of tools in there, and it would be, I mean, without a tip like that, I'd be like, man, what do I even start? There's so many tools, and I don't know what we use. You know, half the people who use them probably couldn't point out exactly what they use, and so that's a great idea. Put everything on a separate bench and just have them pick out what they're actually using, and after a few days, boom, you've probably got you know 95% of what you're going to be using day in and day out.
Steve Riley:Absolutely
Aaron Moncur:brilliant! It's like you've been doing this for a while.
Steve Riley:Been doing this for a while. Yeah, we actually have another way to take Beth from the next level of Disevo Evo Warf on is when you bring a tool over, you just put a piece of masking tape on it and lay a sharpie in the workstation. And every time you pick it up, just make a mark on the tool. And then at the end of the day, you've got a bell curve of how often the tools get used. And can you tell me where you think you put the tools that use the most when you lay on your shovel? In the middle, there you go. The closest, basically that center space of your drawer, and basically the lower part as you open it up, that's where you want the tool that you you go to the most. Or if it's in your workstation at the bottom of the workstation, the tools that have you know eight or 10 marks on it, you want those very close at hand, easy to reach. The tool that had one markup after three days goes in the far left counter, far from the right point because I was here not using that one very much. So in terms of saving motion, quite your most active tools to be full systemafter.
Aaron Moncur:Fantastic, great practical tips. I love these. Any other pro tips that come to mind in terms of organizing your tools?
Steve Riley:Yeah, I think another one, and I'll borrow this one from a two-second main. It talks about what he calls GPS GPS tape is mark every tool in some way that if it's somewhere else in the shop, it's obvious how to get it home. So if you have workstations, it's great to mark all the tools the same color. So that can be as simple as just grabbing a you know purple spray can, right? Just every hand gets a purple.on it, and that is the color that is the the GPS signal to get that thing back home. So if I pick it up in kind of the back 40, oh, that should be up on the workstation. There's no question of where it goes. So again, give the visual clue so it's very obvious to everybody where the thing should be.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific! I love that these all feel very approachable, right? None of the best practices that you've just shared feel insurmountable. I mean, I could have an intern spend, you know, a couple of days, right? Maybe something like that, putting putting that that process together.
Steve Riley:I I would tell you some of our rough customers are the summer interns looking at facilities with some kind of lean hair containers of treatment job done.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific, yeah. All right, great. Okay, well, Steve, what what are you looking to learn right now? Is there like a technology or a type of expert or or vendor that you're looking for? What what can potentially the being an engineer audience do for you? How how can they connect with you and help you with something?
Steve Riley:I appreciate the question. The most recent addition to our shop is a MOPA fiberly or 60 watt unit. So we bought that to mark tools for some of our customers. Where tool control is looking for that kind of level. So we're marking IDs on each individual tool again for that process if you know what you have, but marking tools handles with that laser is just kind of scratching the surface of what that technology is possible to do. So I would love it if anybody in your audience has a workflow for the 3d imaging effort that can be downloaded with fiberglasser. So, workflow to go from an image file to a 3d depth map. We got that down, Pat. Please reach out to me. I'd love to talk to you and shorten that learning curve for myself.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful. Okay, and that leads us into our final question, which is, how can people get in touch with you?
Steve Riley:Yeah, I'm available on LinkedIn. Naturally, reach out to Steve Riley there on LinkedIn. Also, can reach out through email. So email direct is Steve r@bespoketooltrays.com and you can also reach out to our website. It's spokettolltrays.com and here's a comment section there. Shanley, you know the four server.
Aaron Moncur:Fantastic! All right, Steve, thank you so much for being on the show today. And is there anything else that we haven't hit on that that you want to impart to our listeners before we sign off.
Steve Riley:I guess I just reinforce what you said: is these things don't have to be complicated. These are not a deep dive in most cases. I find the continuous improvement projects that are most valuable are the ones that can be implemented quickly and last, and these are very easy to do with the visual cubes, so I'm sure people to take these on and to implement them in a way that they do bring value to the organization.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful! All right, thank you so much, Steve.
Steve Riley:Thank you, Aaron.
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 teampipeline.us to join a vibrant community of engineers online, visit thewave. Engineer. Thank you for listening. Being an engineer has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic, and listen to what's most relevant to you. See you on the next episode.
