Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Get some experience, travel, work in different places, go overseas. If you can work in Germany or Japan, then go do it just for the experience, right? And then come back, get that diversity experience, and then figure out what you want to do. You'll be so much more useful, so much more attractive as an employee.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Robot industry podcast. My guest today for this edition is Ben Garvey, and Ben is president of ingenuity and based out of Halifax. And Ben, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Thank you. Very pleased to be here.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: And can I ask you maybe how you got started in automation and engineering?
[00:00:43] Speaker A: So I took a few of the usual automation courses in college. I did mechanical engineering, took robotics, programming, controls, that sort of thing. Sure, that was back in the. Things were pretty primitive in those days compared to where we are today. And my first real foray into automation challenges happened around 2000 2007, when a colleague and I brought an audacious claim to a local fishing company that we could automate a manual process for them. And this was what their business depended on. It was the extraction of clean meat from a particular species of mollusk that's popular around here. It was a bit of a gamble for us. We really didn't know how we were going to do it.
We were persuasive, and they actually gave us enough rope to do a rough prototype, and we did a kind of a manual, clunky thing that we walked them through, and sure enough, they said, let's go, let's get this done. And two years later, we ended up with a scaled up multiple versions of this unit hammered away offshore on several boats. And that was a real crazy ride all the way through, and it revolutionized our business. It allowed them to triple their processing, and it really jump started our automation team as well.
We didn't really know what we were getting into at the time, to be honest. And it became a big flag for us in many ways, good and bad. Some hard lessons.
We didn't maintain control of the automation side.
We produced quite a nice little package for them in the end, and those machines are still flying along. But the reliance on subcontractors to actually complete the automation side of things was a real lesson and revealed a gap in the team that I've sought to fill for a long time after that. But that was it. It took a few more years of growing and maturing as a company. In those days, we were six, seven, eight people before we could scale up. And eventually we got there. And as we looked around with all of our kind of normal clients, everybody was struggling with staffing issues, with production issues, the same stuff you hear everywhere. And so we realized that we had to be more effective at this. We had to solve these problems. And not many folks were doing it out here in Atlantic Canada. And so it was really a fortuitous trip to the Hanover Messi that really rekindled the fire for me. Really kind of opened my mind to the possibilities out there. And then I came back and said to the management team, I said, ok, we're doing this. We got to do this. And we had a couple of fortuitous hires. We found some good folks and landed a couple of lucky contracts, maybe, and boom, now we have an automation team. It's rocking and rolling out there. They're growing hard.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: And so what are some of the trends and technologies that you're seeing in your business? And maybe we can kind of talk a little bit about the tour that we just had. I mean, these are people walking around with their dogs and such, so they can't, unfortunately, we can't take pictures of some of the stuff they see. But you do have a lot of really interesting applications that maybe a typical robot integrator in North America just wouldn't.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Have on their, you know, we do a lot of stuff as well as automation and robotics. We're doing a lot of product development. We're doing solutions for various industries, from medical devices up to military hardware. But your question of trends and technologies that we're seeing is very apropos. We see that across all kinds of industries. Right. And they're very noticeable. I'd say every single industry is grappling with things like labor shortages and high labor costs. In Atlanta, Canada in particular, we have a fairly traditional industry base out here. A lot of resource based stuff. The costs, there's always temporary foreign workers that are brought in to handle these seasonal industries. Those costs have skyrocketed. They're becoming politically unpopular to bring in. It's a struggle. So it's really tough for employers to find people there. And of course, next generations are not, they don't want to work in fish plants anymore. They don't want to stand in the woods or in a mine. And there's challenges there. So the labor shortage thing is universal. It doesn't matter what industry. The other thing we're seeing a lot of is a huge push across all industries to decarbonize and improve sustainability. That's not a buzzword anymore. And it's driving some amazing innovations, some great technology research and development, some crazy schemes and some questionable policies as well along the way. But in general, I think the objective is good, and people are starting to take it seriously, which is good to see coming out of COVID I think the other thing every industry we're working with is struggling with supply chains and supply chain stability, and we're trying to reshore things here as well. It's always been a challenge, but it was, boy, was it ever. We're still seeing turmoil there and then related to that. And this is more automation related, but the interconnected and intelligent manufacturing chain. Right. Getting everyone into this upstream and downstream exchange of relevant information so your materials arrive just in time. Any disruptions are known beforehand. Clients can press, I want one of these things, and they'll get a pink one of these things on the production line that's also doing ten other colors or styles at the same time. So we're seeing a lot of that even in traditional industries out here. White label manufacturing is common in these areas, whether it's for pharmaceuticals or food. And so we're seeing the ability to shift packaging chains, packaging modes a lot that's coming in more and more as the equipment is able to handle it. Another theme we're seeing, of course, is the impact of AI. Right, generative AI. Everybody's trying to figure out what that is yet that, combined with the whole sense of anything as a service, whether it's a robot or ordering your dinner or getting your dog walked, anything is available as a service now, even out here in Nova Scotia. And that's really changing business models and challenging stuff, too. Combined with generative AI, it's a challenge to all of the existing business models, especially in a traditional world like we're in. Out here, we're used to kind of small c, conservative approaches to stuff. So when you see these disruptive things coming through, it can upset businesses and keep people guessing.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: You've got some interesting on your tour today, and I'd love to give my listeners a little bit of a feel for the tour. Well, we're in your boardroom right now, and there's lots of really cool things that you're showing that you probably can't show every average person. But one of the things we just walked through was your chip lab, right, where you are actually making your own circuit boards. Can you tell me a little bit about what that does and how maybe that gives you a bit of a competitive advantage?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
Let me back up a little bit here. The whole company is based around kind of five programs, so we have what we call our discovery program, which I'll talk about in a minute, which in many cases is the first entry into the program where we're workshopping a particular challenge with a client, and then we'll move to usually one of the four other core programs, which the industrial marine program. That's kind of where we came from. Mechanical engineer. I started doing a lot of stuff in the marine industry, launch and retrieval systems for ships, oceanographic equipment, winches, onboard processing, things like that.
The second program we're running is called product Innovation Program, where we do a lot of product development folks, whether that's consumer products or industrial products, a lot of user interface, a lot of packaging of electronics. And that's where our capability of the electronics team is generally most popular, where we can build up embedded controllers. We can take your university level college projects and turn them into a scalable, marketable, buildable product that has robustness, that has reliable firmware, that meets emissions requirements, that can then be mass manufactured. So that's the product development program.
Next to that would be our aerospace and defense group, Aerospace and Defense program, where we'll be working on control goods projects for mostly canadian, some us, some uk military clients, usually on defensive board, shipborne sonars, those sorts of things. Winch controls, harsh environment stuff, a lot of really harsh environment stuff. We've done some stuff that goes to space. We've done some stuff that goes in mines.
It runs the gamut. It's crazy how wild it is, which is great, fun. Fourth program, of course, is the industry 4.0, which encompasses all things, automation, robotics, and controls, which is a huge area of growth for us right now, too. So very broad, whether it's a medical device to a semiautonomous tank cleaning robot, or HMI, or controls work, a large crane or a winch. As you saw, we've been developing some mixing and dosing systems out there for carbon capture projects. We've been delivering SCADA systems for integrating process management data for battery manufacturing facilities. An interesting one on the floor that we didn't talk about is a bit of a cartesian robot system that we've developed for a local startup who has a very cool proprietary biosilk material that they lay down in a three dimensional matrix in a very prescribed way to build a material for the growth of tissue replacement. So it promotes tissue growth for skin grafts. For example, when they came to us with a benchtop kind of lab scale demonstrator that could do a square inch or so of the material, and they wanted to scale it up to be kind of ten to 15 inches in one shot. So great challenge. And the team pulled together a scaled up version of a cartesian robot that can build that custom. So it's the whole gamut. It's so amazing, the range of stuff that goes on here.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: It must be really complicated when you get all these different things from all these different sectors and to take an engineered approach to solving these things. Is that something that you've developed too?
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it is. It's tough. We agonized over for quite a while.
What do we follow for process here? And you can see on the wall, it's hard for folks to see, but I'll show you the graphic. We do have a pretty solid design control process we'll start. That's a good time to come back to the discovery, which is quite frequently the first step. So we'll get an idea of what the general requirement from the client is from our first conversations. Typically do a discovery process with them where we'll bring in three, four, five. However many is appropriate. Engineers, techs, designers that are familiar with either the technology in question or the challenges in question, or that have personal interest in the challenge. We'll spend a couple of hours workshopping it with the client and we'll try to understand the business case, the risk drivers, the technology. What's the definition of success? Who's using it? How has everyone else tried to do this? What are the competitors?
Where's the IP? What's the patentability of this? What's the real unique nugget here? And we'll throw a lot of stuff at the client and we'll really challenge them and they'll challenge us back. Then we'll take all of that away for a few days, do some research, do some brainstorming, kick it around the table here, maybe talk to a couple of other folks in our network, and then we'll get back together again for another kick at the can with a client. And usually the output of that is a range of options to pursue for the next stage. And so we're derisking in a way at that point we get to know each other a little bit. We understand a little bit more about the technology. It allows them to see our process, allows them to see our differentiators that we like to talk about. It's a bit of a try before you buy, although we do charge for that process, it's usually a fixed fee. It's cost recovery, really, and we get to know and build some trust. The client at that point can take our output, which is usually a report with a bunch of options, budgets, schedules and can take it. Sometimes they'll just take it back to their funders funding for the next stage. Sometimes that's all they need is that particular report. Other times it leads to okay, we're going to do this, we're going to go all the way or we're going to go to this piece, then we're going to review, then we're going to the next piece review. So it's a great way to process where they're involved. You get this very collaborative approach early on and hopefully nobody's disappointed in it. It seems to work.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: I was going to ask you about how you reduce risk, but apparently you reduce risk very early on the project, right by this collaborative method to say here's what we think and here's what we know and here's your report.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly right.
That is our key tool to reducing risk. The other key tool of course is just transparency, is here's where we are every week, here's what we're doing, here's what the firmware guys are chewing on, here's what the programmers are on. What do you think of this UI? Most clients really appreciate that level of back and forth. The OD one will say don't bother me until you're done and then I'll tell you if I like it. But most of them want to be involved and most of them want to see. And that's how we reduce risk really is that initial discovery and then the ongoing discussion.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: And so kind of typical of automation integration research house, being so close to ocean you get a lot of things and being close to food, so you do get quite a big mix.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: It's a huge mix, yeah.
There are commonalities to a lot of it. A lot of it. Like you said, we're close to the ocean, close to food production, so there's a lot of harsh environment stuff. It's rare that somebody comes to us and says I need a device that'll do this and it doesn't have to be waterproof and it doesn't have to take shock and it doesn't have to fly and doesn't have to work at -30 usually everything has to have these massive environmental and physical requirements to work. So that's kind of been become a niche of ours is integrating things into a harsh environment and that's a real kind of developed skill from working in the ocean really, which is one of the harshest environments going. But you can transfer that down to mines. You can work in the woods with it. You can work in food production where the cleaning chemicals that are used every shift are really quite harsh on materials.
They can eat the plating off of a robot, for example. As we've learned the hard way, as we saw today.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
So let's talk a little bit about staffing. Of course, we're kind of talking about staffing on the other side.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: For your clients. Hey, here's automation. You should use this to attract and retain. But how about you? How about for your company, when it comes to this is a giant sandbox, people must love working in it.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
Thinking about staffing.
It's a double edged sword. It's a great sandbox. You're right. And as you walked around, I'm sure people are enjoying what they're doing here. People do like to come to work here because we work on some really neat stuff and it's constantly changing. So if you're the kind of add fellow like I am, who just wants more challenge all the time, then it's a great place to work. That said, it's a consulting engineering business. So there's always this pressure. You're never any better than your last job. Doesn't matter how many successes you had last year. Right? How's the job today going? And so that's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure on the team that we try to shelter them from. But a little bit of pressure is good, too. So you need people who are going to thrive in that environment, and not everybody can. So there is a challenge there.
And we're on the east coast. This is not the center of industrial development. It's not the center of R D. It's not the center of manufacturing. So finding people and getting them out here is tough at times. We've done fairly well, I think we've had some great returnees to Nova Scotia after Covid or during COVID and we've certainly benefited from that. And a significant portion of our automation team in particular, learned their skills elsewhere in central Canada and the US overseas. But I will say that's starting to change. We've got more and more students coming from local universities now who are picking it up, who are traveling a bit, seeing what's going on, coming back, going, okay, I like living here, but I want to do the work I was doing in Detroit or Ontario or BC or the bigger manufacturing center.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: And you've got some really cool companies that you're doing work with all of the world, and you're putting things into space and underwater and mines and food. So there's almost this really cool resume of things that you're doing and doing for. And some world class companies, like, especially with batteries.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's a big attraction for people. They can come and learn and work on some really cool projects right away. It's generally not hard to get people excited, especially technical people. There is sometimes a little bit of, okay, we're training people and they get some great experience and then get cherry picked away by big us companies with deeper pockets. But that happens anywhere, and that affects us as much as anybody else. So we have to fight against that. And we try to do that by just making it competitive and making it a fun place to work and enjoying what we do. Right.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: And so if you're a parent listening to this conversation, do you have some advice to helping get your kids involved in robotics and automation?
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the biggest advice is do it. Just jump in, don't hold back. Jump in, get in. At early stages. There are so many opportunities out there for hackathons, for get a Lego robot and just start messing with it. Don't hold back. There's YouTube videos, unbelievable YouTube videos. Now, that stuff that's available now is incredible online if you want to use it. So the other thing I would say is just get out, get some kind of educational designation. It doesn't have to be a degree. You don't have to go get your biomechanical or your robotics degree. Go get a two year diploma to start and get some experience. Travel, work in different places, go overseas. If you can work in Germany or Japan, then go do it just for the experience, right? And then come back, get that diversity experience, and then figure out what you want to know. You'll be so much more useful, so much more attractive as an employee. And then the only other thing I would say that comes to mind right away would be get good at networking, industrial networking. So many of the little niggly troubleshooting problems are related to understanding the damn network.
Not the mechanics or the actual robot, or the interface with the vision system or the Scadus. It's the network.
Industrial networking is the Achilles heel of all this, right? Especially with cybersecurity risks. So if you understand cybersecurity, you understand industrial networks, and you have your basics of robotics, programming, and robotics and communication systems down, you're going to be completely invaluable to anybody.
They'll be lining up for you.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: So can we talk a little bit now? And thank you for that. I think it's really interesting I think the idea about project management, there's so many things like end of arm tools, design software, control software, if you understand beckoff, or just PLC languages in general. All of a sudden, for someone like you, it's like, oh, you can design a arm tool. Jeez, come on, let's chat more, right? Oh, yeah. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the side programs that you get involved with. Like you have a captive supplier partner here in your facility.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah, we work on a whole bunch of different levels with a bunch of folks, and we have a few products of our own that we've developed now that we're selling to. So we're doing some light manufacturing, I guess you'd call it in house, but we'll engage with folks in whatever level they feel comfortable. So for the automation clients in particular, usually it's a fixed firm. We need a machine to do x, and we think it needs a fanuk or a Yascawa or whatever, and we work through it and deliver them the scatter system, the palletizing system, the vision system, one lump, good way you go, and then look after ongoing maintenance and expansion in the future. Other times it's more esoteric. It's a startup or a company that has an idea, they need a little more necessarily handholding, but they need a little more bouncing of ideas back and forth. They need a little more collaboration. They could take one of our guys 10% of the time to help them actually for an extended period for years to help them get this product to market kind of thing. And so in those cases, if we like them and if we think there's a good market, we'll partner with them. We'll do preferred rates, or we'll do an equity thing, or we'll do future consideration, royalties, licensing, whatever works there. In other cases, it's just a straightforward, okay, we're going to help you solve this problem, and it's r and d, and let's see where it can go. So we'll engage on all kinds of different levels. It's good fun.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Well, it's very creative of you to be able to take that approach and to bring out some of your own products. And did you want to take a minute and talk about any for your own products?
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Sure. They're kind of neat, actually. Of course, I think they're neat because they're our products. But we're doing some subsea actuators now, which are pretty neat, which are deep water, 1000 meters deep linear actuators, closed loop linear actuators, that are very useful for subsea vehicles. Anytime you need high force, like 2000 pounds in a very controlled way, deep water, these are rock solid, robust, military grade sort of things. On the opposite end of that, I'd say another product we have a sister company we've developed is called fever Med, and they do gravity fed intravenous drip monitoring. Turns out that between 30 and 50% of the time, gravity fed iv bags run dry without anybody noticing them. Wow. This is a problem. That's crazy world. So we were approached by an anesthesiologist who gave us this challenge and said, let's figure out how to solve that. We developed a product together, marketed it, did an MVP, got it on the market. And you can see some of the pieces from that on the table.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Is that what that is?
[00:23:18] Speaker A: All this mess on the table is from that product? Yeah. It shows the whole evolution from original mechanical prototypes to first breadboards through to first printed circuit boards, through to first injection molded casings, then an evolution through to new injection molded casings, 3d printed housings, that kind of stuff. So real combined, electromechanical. And that one was doubly complicated because it is a certified medical device as well. Right. That's now being used across Canada. We have distributors, and we're looking at getting into the states now as well.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: And this is millions of product.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: Because there've got to be so many iv bags.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Not yet, but I hope we're getting there. That's the goal. Yeah. I mean, there are something like 8 billion gravity fed iv bags a year used worldwide. So if 50% of those are running dry, that's a problem. That's a big problem. So, yeah, we think there's a market there. We think there's some value to be added, for sure.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Ben. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. Have we forgotten to talk about anything?
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Well, we have another product line, which is a whole line of mechanical connectors for the subsea mooring and lifting market. So that's just another line of products that we haven't talked about. But we're very active in the lifting and handling markets there, too. So it's good fun. So who would use that?
So, think about the markets that are hot right now. Offshore wind, for example. If you're out installing wind turbines and you need to lift heavy gear up high, this allows you to lift without getting people near the hook. It's a much safer solution. Rapid allows you to make a connection really quickly. That's on the larger versions. The smaller versions. We're seeing adopted by launch and retrieval people. So if you have an autonomous underwater vehicle that you send off on a mission, when the mission is done, it needs to come back to the mothership. And so you're left with this mothership and this yellow submarine floating next to it. And you've got to get the yellow submarine onto the mothership somewhere easily and somehow. Easily. And typically that uses cranes and people in small boats and fingers and hooks and stuff getting in the way. Yikes. And so, yeah, people get hurt. The very expensive vehicle gets damaged if big hooks hit it, that kind of stuff. So this unit allows you to have a very rapid, conical, easy to hit target that you can just drop a connector in, makes a connection, lift the device. Easy peasy.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: That's very cool. And it's kind of neat that you're doing things that save labor, save fingers, save lives, maybe. So it's kind of a fun thing for you and especially for your staff to work on.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's inspirational in a way. We really quite enjoy it. It's fun to look back.
You get lost in it sometimes when you're in the weeds, of course, and you don't remember why you're doing this stuff. And it is really fun. And we're coming up to that time of year where we all sit back and go, okay, how did the year go? And this year, yeah, we're looking back and going, hey, we made a difference in quite a few people's lives here, which is really rewarding.
I'm really proud of the team for what we've achieved.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: And that's yet another reason for get your kids involved in the automation industry, because it's rewarding on so many levels. It's interesting you know, what's coming down the pike for product know, especially with companies like yours, you're in all kinds of.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Got it. You got it. It's happening. It's happening here. Believe it or not, it's happening here in eastern Canada.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Well, we love Halifax. We're her visiting family here. And it's a beautiful, beautiful city and a beautiful province, of course.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Cool. Well, I'm glad to hear you like it.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: So when you are not saving lives and building cool automation and products, what do you like to do?
[00:27:14] Speaker A: If I'm not at work here, I'm a sailor, really, I'm a boat guy. I'm outdoors a lot of the time. I love travel, but I'm always building know, messing with my fingers, my hands, building something, trying to fix some problem.
So I'm usually either at work or in the basement buildings company or wandering in the woods or out on a the those are the places you'll find.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Me and Ben, thank you again. And how can people reach out to you if they want to find out.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: More about know any of the usual ways? LinkedIn is always good. You can find us on our website.
I get a lot of emails, so give it a try. Call me. That's fine.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: And what's your website address? Sorry.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: So ww dot Ingenuityinc Ca so enginuityinc ca.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Thanks again for coming on the podcast.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Hey, thank you, Jim. I really appreciate it.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: 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. 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 so production, and my business partner, Janet.
