[00:00:00] Speaker A: We're not a deterministic control, but we don't need to be. When people are involved, nothing is deterministic.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the robot industry podcast. We're glad you're here, and thanks for subscribing. I'm going to have Faisal introduce himself. We've been friends for a lot of years. His name is Faisal Herzech, and his company is X out of Markham, Ontario. Faisal, we're just recording this podcast at the ADM show, and you're an exhibitor here. And one of the things that you and I are having a little later on tomorrow is we're going to have a fireside chat on evs. But before I get to that, could you tell the audience a little bit about who you are and why you're here and what you do?
[00:00:44] Speaker A: For sure. Our company's mantra is connecting people to your process. So if there's an application for extreme automation or robots, that's not us. We're in high complexity, high builds, where people are needed to do certain assemblies due to their dexterity. That's when we focus. So we have an HMI shows work instruction, or some guiding the operator to do things. And then we make a series of devices in various form factors to allow to connectivity to devices like nut runners, socket trays, wireless tools, and click wrenches and so forth. And so we try to integrate the people to the equipment they're using and then tie into back end systems like the processes like conveyors and quality systems and so forth.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: So one of the things that you've kind of glossed over a little bit, right, is that in a typical application, you might be, and you're tying usually, always to a quality system. But these are types of things that, like, if I have a nut runner and I'm meant to put four bolts on four nuts, that you're actually connecting to the nut runner gun itself, correct?
[00:01:48] Speaker A: That's correct. So the systems, and I kind of glossed over it was, the term is. The japanese term is pokiok or pokyoke. And what it is, is loosely translated, means to monitor a human process, right? So, yes, nut runners, as an example, our equipment will monitor whether or not a person has done tightened the right number of bolts in the right sequence within the given period of time as the conveyor is moving and it records the fastening data, the torque and angle of the thing, of the fastening. And the reason for that is if you double hit on a bolt, you'll achieve the same torque, but you won't get the same number of rotations. So you can then determine that the operator didn'tighten four bolts, he tightened three, and one of them he hit twice.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: One of the innovations that Arcx has done is that you created a really unique screen in the industry which can show all kinds of different information depending on where you are in the process. Can you tell our audience a little bit about that?
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Yeah. So at the time, and we want to say this was about ten years ago, we leveraged HTML five and Javascript long before people were doing this, because we saw this as a lightweight solution. We saw this is where the industry was going to go at the time. A lot of web developers were becoming more and more readily available. It was becoming a standard. HTTP and HTPS protocols were becoming predominant. So we modeled our whole architecture around that. The ability to add content and control things had never been done before. When you go to a web page, you're expecting that users can navigate through web pages, but it doesn't actually actuate or listen to real time hardware. So what's novel about our systems is we can talk to hardware at fairly high speeds. We're not a deterministic control, but we don't need to be. When people are involved, nothing is deterministic. So the ability to have ubiquitous connectivity to multiple different platforms, nut runners, socket trays and so forth, process equipment, now it's becoming more dominant where we're connecting to resistance measuring devices, voltage meters, because of the EV market, all of these things are now becoming integrated to our systems with simple plugins.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: And we're going to talk about EV and EV automation systems in a minute. But I want to also kind of reiterate that we're talking a lot about final assembly, right? And we're talking a lot about a lot of the changes in final assembly, right?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yes. So we work everywhere from a vehicle, primarily automotive, after the body comes out of press, like it's stamped and it's pressed and it's painted after that point, that's usually when we get involved, because those are historically robotic systems, the stamping press and the robots to paint things. But then after that, as soon as it comes out of the lifter, we are anything to do with assembling stuff. Final assembly is becoming more and more challenging, and primarily because you're getting a high mix of features for the operator. So what's happening is for the automotive manufacturers to distinguish themselves. They want to give a lot of options to the users, the interiors, the color and everything else. But sometimes these options aren't even defined until late in the process, like after the vehicle is painted. So there's a very short window from the time that the vehicle or the body or the shell comes out of stamping till it hits the final line. So all of these things have to be done extremely fast. And because there's high variability, people are expecting to build, let's say, eight black cars with eight black interiors, and all of a sudden, a white one comes through. But he was so used to grabbing the black handles from behind him.
For me, the analogy for me is I'm used to driving home all the time, and that one time my wife says, go pick up stuff on your way home kind of thing, I end up at home and go, darn, I was supposed to stop somewhere else.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: No, that's great. And one of the topics that I wanted to talk with you a little bit about is some of your EV automotive customers, and a lot of them are new to manufacturing, is that correct?
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah, very new. So let's just say that a lot of the companies are revolving out of the west coast market, for obvious reasons. I'll leave the names out of it for now, but they've taken a very computer science or computer industry kind of approach to things. So as an example, if you have the more midwest companies, they have more the incumbent systems, they're slower to enter this market, more deliberate, more controlled. But if you look at the west coast company, there's a lot of money going in. So there's a lot of investment going in. They're all computer centric companies, but they don't necessarily know how to build a car. They can't really buy that expertise in a timely fashion. And the other thing is they're trying to mix the mentality of writing software to things.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: And so a lot of these companies are under huge pressure to perform. Right. Not only to perform for their own management and their own stakeholders, but their customers. And that's one of the reasons that you're in a lot of these EV companies as an expert for final assembly, right?
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yes. A lot of them have stakeholders. From their investments, you can see that some of these companies have investments of $4 billion and up, but they're also trying to innovate and trying to beat the competition to getting something out onto the market. They're all shooting for different verticals in the market, whether they're lower end or they're the high end stuff. So they have stakeholders, they have people that want to see the stock price grow and everything else. So there's a lot and a lot of pressure. You see some companies, again, to be nameless, they have sprints, which is a computer industry term for how you start developing new features. They have sprints in the order of 8 hours where a typical computer company would have two to three weeks, a couple of developers, and working on a sprint, a series of features. It's fundamentally driven much harder than what you would expect normally.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: And so how do you get involved in all these EV plants? I assume because Arquex is in a lot of plants, they have kind of a word of mouth thing.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: It's mostly word of mouth. So what's interesting is, because of these companies, and I mentioned this before, they are poaching or borrowing people from other plants more. The incumbent plants like the Toyota four, GM. And what happens is, when these people are younger, they've been trained in Toyota TPS as an example, but then they love the allure of going to the west coast, that lifestyle, working hard, working for companies like Tesla, it's a feather in their cap. And everybody knows that once you work at Tesla for a few years, you can pretty much go anywhere you want, right? So they pay their dues. It's a hard life.
And that's where we get pulled in. So they already know us from places like Toyota, and then they go there, hey, can you help us out? We got a new process, a new thing, and fundamentally, our marketing is word of mouth. I would have to say 80% to 90%.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: As a marketer, that makes me sad. But I am glad that you had so much success. And I was going to ask you, is it plant management, is it project management who usually reaches out to you?
[00:08:53] Speaker A: It's usually the engineers. So I talk about this several times, it versus OT, but we really cater to the OT people, the engineer that has a problem that they have to solve, right?
Where the marketing comes in and help with collateral and everything else is, that's when the upper level decision makers, the people who decide on the money, that's when they need to see collateral, they need to brochures, they want to be able to go to our web page and say, oh, these guys are legitimate, or whatever. We've already bought the mindset of the engineer because we know how to solve his problem. He's comfortable with us. What we haven't bought at that point is the decision makers, the people that hold the purse strings, and that's where the marketing element really comes in. So I wouldn't sell yourself short.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: I wanted to kind of ask you too. Give me an example, maybe of what a common concern is for them, like, what's keeping them up at night, these manufacturing engineers?
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Traceability. There's a lot of times when they have to worry about, oh, they've installed a battery or a part, and they're worried about recalls. So recalls is a double edged sword. One is the perception of a recall is very bad for a company, right. It goes to their quality. But the other thing is, it's very expensive. So the concept of having four nines or five nines, you hear about this, of their quality is, it's hard to get really a straight answer. So I can ask the same question to three or four different engineers in these various plants, and I go, why is quality important? Right. And so some will say more esoterically, well, if somebody's very happy with their car, they're going to give it to their son or daughter when they graduate school, and they're going to go move from a Corolla, they're going to move up to Alexis, and they're going to stay entrenched, as an example, in the Toyota product line, and then their kids are going to love it, and it's going to last forever. Right. Others would say, well, we can't afford a recall because that costs us money. Right. Or we can't afford reworking at the end of the line even before the car has left the line, because, again, that costs us money. So it depends on who the stakeholders and what they perceive quality is to them. But I think it encapsulates all of those things, from the customer perception of the company to the actual cost of building the vehicle. I think it's all encompassing.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Thank you for that. And so what are some of the big changes to ev final assembly versus kind of your traditional market? Because you've been in that market for a long, long time, too.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah. There's fundamentally less parts that go in the car. Right. But I would think if I had to pick one single dramatic thing other than traceability, right. Because that applies to all parts, whether it's an airbag or a battery, or whether it's electric vehicle or an ice gasoline engine, I would say that the energy stored within the car due to the battery. Okay. And the reason for that is the battery comes semi charged. It comes anywhere from 50% to 80% charge when it's installed in the vehicle. So the safety concerns about using isolated wrenches and bolts and everything else.
At that point, it'd be hard pressed to call it a grenade, but it could technically be a grenade, whereas on a gasoline, the gas isn't applied to the vehicle. It's not filled into the vehicle until the very last steps on what they call VP line or the vehicle process line.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: And so what are some of the small changes that you're seeing in EV.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Plants other than traceability and the safety concerns?
I'd have to think about that a little bit.
So it sounds silly, but there is a younger crowd building cars. Okay. And so one of our customers, it says the reason they like our product, it had more sex appeal for the younger workers. So in the old days, they had, let's say, a seven segment display that told the assembly sequence number of the car. Now we have a ten inch version and a 21 inch version screen, and it shows more graphically what they're doing and what the process is. And the younger audience takes that in. They're used to edge to edge glass. They're used to iPads. They're used to being able to slide and swipe on their phones. So they're taken to that. So management has already identified that as something that encourages workers. So they don't feel like they're working with old legacy technology. They feel like they're now working with new state of the art technology. So I would consider that a minor change and more aesthetic, but it's catering to the younger workers.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: So could you give me an example of maybe something that, hey, we're building this electric car, and maybe the wire harness is changing this morning, right? How does that work with your system?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: So, in our system, obviously, sometimes the changes are not so drastic, like model changes and wire harness changes. They have to be vetted and everything else. But what happens is they have to be running changes. So all of a sudden you can have 100. Like, let's say a plant is building 500 cars a day with attack time of, say, a little minute and a half or something. So all of a Sudden, they got the first 200 cars was one wire harness, and then at break or at lunch, they switched over the bins to the new wire harness. Now, all of a sudden, you got to have traceability on those. But you're still building the same car. Right.
The other issue is. Yeah, so you need traceability. You got to make sure the operator knows. And then what's also very important, what our system allows them to have, is quality alerts. So they immediately are given documentation, line side on all the screens to say, hey, there's a model change coming down. We can identify which car they have to spend a couple of seconds more, and they can bring up a document on the screen to show what it is. So nobody's running around updating binders and making sure everybody on the line has read the binders. We can identify real time, which operators have read the quality alert or the notification or the Eco and have implemented it and understand it.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Nice. And that is really an interesting thing, which doesn't happen in old school automotive. This is kind of something in new school automotive, right?
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yes. And real time. The ability to push these changes down to the line immediately, and then after a 15 minutes break, they've changed all the wiring harnesses out to the new ones, and they've started building the new ones as an example.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: And you can not only deliver text to the screen, but you can deliver, like, movies and animated drawings and all kinds of dynamic, rich data.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: We can, but because the tac time, Tac being spelled ta K T, is the pitch time, because we have fairly short tac times in most cases. Video is not usually a good media, but we would still make video available for training prior to the shift start or prior to the assembly line start. But the ability to quickly grab content or an abstract of what needs to be done is still available. But, yes, we can do both video and static images.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: The product you're producing is indeed a smart device on its own.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Right?
[00:15:59] Speaker B: It has cameras, it's connected. So who's in charge of the assembly tasks?
Is it the mes system of the car manufacturer, or is it the car itself? Is that a weird question?
[00:16:10] Speaker A: No, actually, it's a novel question, because historically, the equipment used to build and test cars was very smart computer based pc systems. But now, with the advent of autonomous driving, GSP, which, a global safety package that Toyota installs, their car, all of these things, the computers within the car are becoming much smarter. There are automotive companies now that are actually using the computer in the car to define how the car is built, whereas before it would be an offline computer or something that plugged in and knew how, told which parts to put into the vehicle.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: So traceability, in some ways, can be the MES system that the car manufacturers operate, but it can be the car itself.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And then a lot of times that information, the quality data, how the car was built and everything else can now technically travel with the car forever. And so you don't have to rely on back end systems.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: What about batteries and EV? And, of course, batteries can be like, you kind of intimated, can be a very explosive discussion. And so is there anything that's really changed in assembly? Because batteries are such a complicated issue?
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I would have to say, the use of varying different types of adhesives and how these batteries are cooled and how they're made structurally, the battery now is becoming a structural component of the car, not just a standalone thing. So if you look at hybrid vehicles, the battery pack is installed, right as a module because it's kind of almost an afterthought. But when you have a pure electric vehicle, it becomes fundamentally the structure of the vehicle. So how many bolts and screws you put in, how you take it out and install it. And again, I think the biggest things are going to happen in the form factor of the battery, whether you're using an 18 650 cell or some of the larger ones that Tesla is starting to move towards, and then how you glue it and how you get the heat out, those are fundamental to what's starting to change in the market.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: I know it's kind of a, you're one of these people who know a lot about a lot in the EV final assembly. Is there any other things that are happening that might be interesting to our audience?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: I would say the move towards autonomous, know, everybody talks about it, but I think the thing that's not talked a lot about is if you look at some of these vehicles, they're now getting over the air updates in your driveway. So I have a Tesla Model Y because I buy cars of my customers. I also have a Corolla, but I'm getting over the air updates every two weeks with new features. And as I get older, I'm having harder and harder time seeing the screen. But I got an update two weeks ago that I can change the font size of my screen. So these are all features that are being added. But historically, I would have to go in to a dealership and maybe I would get an update, but probably not. They would talk me into the next model car. Now, my car is an appliance. It's like my phone. I get updates that make my product, make the ownership of that product more relevant on a day to day basis, and then keeps me sticky to that car. And I talk to all my friends, hey, this is what I got. This is the update I got today. I got another little game on my thing. And so I feel good about my purchase, that the vendor hasn't abandoned me. They're continuing to innovate that product, and I get it for free. And so they want me as a customer. Long time.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: That's great. Thanks, Faizal. Thanks for coming on the podcast today. Did we forget about anything?
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Not that I can think of at this moment.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Faisal, how can people find out more about your system? And we forgot to maybe mention a brand name of the system that you're manufacturing.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Well, we've pretty much called our whole architecture grid grid because everything is connected, has interconnectability from all our devices, and we see that as a grid across the shop floor, all the way to back end systems to and on systems. So we're ww dot arcx.com. Feel free to look at and contact us if you have a problem you're trying to solve.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: And how can people get a hold.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Of you again, from the website, you can call
[email protected] or just simply go to the website and there'll be links there for info. And we're more than happy to talk to you about questions as being kind of a mentorship role in this industry. I'm more than happy to talk to people and exchange ideas and solve problems. If we can't solve your problem, we'll at least try to point you in the direction that somebody else can.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Great. And I'm going to put some of this contact information in the show notes of the episode. So thanks again and we will talk to you soon. I'd like to thank and acknowledge our partner a three the association for Advancing Automation. They're the leading trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control, and motors, and the artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. Are and if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast, you can find me Jim Barretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Today's podcast was produced by customer Attraction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to thank our team, Chris Gray for music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, and my business partner, Janet.
