Global Supply Chain Impact from COVID-19

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Matthew Putman, CEO and Founder of Nanotronics, joins us to discuss the global supply chain impact from Covid-19 and what it means for the business world.

Danny:

Hey, I’m Danny Gonzales with IndustrialSage today. I have the CEO of Nanotronics Matthew Putman. Thank you Matthew so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Matthew:

It’s great to be here. Thanks.

Danny:

So today we’re going to be talking about a lot of things that a lot of manufacturers are very concerned about. Obviously in the industry and in the world we’re going through Covid-19. It’s disrupting a lot of supply chains, it’s disrupting a lot of lives. There’s a lot of issues and challenges going on, and so what we wanted to do is just spend some time here with Matthew who is again the CEO of Nanotronics just to get an understanding kind of what you guys are doing, how you guys are responding and maybe share some ideas around there and just some insights around the supply chain, and what you guys are seeing.

Matthew:

Sure, we’re very lucky even though clearly Covid-19 affects us all in kind of devastating ways. The thing that we’re sort of unique and is interesting is that, we’re a science and technology company that works in a lot of segments of technology. So we work with companies in genomics, companies in semiconductors, companies in autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. So we get to see action of a broad view of the challenges that people are facing and there are a lot of similarities between these right now. and it’s really making people consider how we build things in a different way.

Danny:

Absolutely. So before we get too far down the road on there, for those who aren’t familiar with Nanotronics, you tell me a little bit about who you are, your company. I know you guys do some manufacturing where you’re manufacturing, all that good stuff.

Matthew:

So Nanotronics makes a combination of artificial intelligence software and that software is used for controlling factories. Now, we actually have our own factories where we make robotics, we make a super resolution microscope. So we have a way of doing analytics and analysis, but not in a lab somewhere, but on factory floors themselves. So we are a factory in Brooklyn, New York, in Hollister, California, in Akron, Ohio. We have these facilities where we build things, but most of all our customers build things. So we’re part of a supply chain, we tend to be very distributed though. So we do everything from machining our parts to assembling them, to adding the software to it. So we’ve seen the value of trying to shrink the supply chain in order to make us less vulnerable and working with our customers that have fairly close proximity to us to make them less vulnerable as well to things like Covid-19.

Danny:

Absolutely, so obviously you said Ohio, California, New York, those are the three States right now where there’s pretty much a shelter in place, it’s locked down for better. How are you guys handling that?

Matthew:

Because we have cared about this idea of going start to finish. I like everybody else supply chains mean things to us too. We have customers all over the world and we do have some suppliers, but we can continue to build things. We don’t stop because we’re not having to get things from all over the world in order to build our robotics. Now, that’s nice for us in a way. We can keep going on strange things like staggered ships. Trying to keep our staffing healthy through all of this and of course to ship things that are contamination free for our customers as well, but we can at least make things and we can make them for some crucial areas right now. Things like companies that make masks, companies that do gene sequencing, that’s what they call PCR that is important for tests for Covid. We’re lucky that we can actually still be involved with that, but we see the suffering certainly through our customers and it’s of course hard for us too, to try to figure out how you balance these things of safety and long term planning with short term urgency.

Danny:

So to be clear too, you guys are considered an essential business, so operations are still able to be open in all of those States, as you mentioned you guys are supplying or helping with supplying a lot of those critical supplies. How much of that were you doing before this versus after? Has any of that changed?

Matthew:

Strangely enough, we were working on this stuff for years and years. So our customers were working on something called UVC, which are UV-LEDs that worked for purification. They’ve been extremely expensive in the past. So you don’t see them in every hospital, clinic, office. We’re looking to make those less expensive. This is a project we’ve already been involved with for many years. We work with the largest company of hard drive manufacturers that power of the cloud. Without the cloud, we don’t have this conversation in here. These are things that we have been involved with for a long time and are lucky to have those connections. Of course we push it harder and faster than ever right now, and so our team is I think working harder, sleeping less, feeling the urgency right now in ways that we didn’t before, but it’s something we’ve cared about for a long time.

Danny:

How are you addressing, let’s say your workforce without obviously, essential, very essential. We need to keep these pieces moving so that not only you guys can help supply chains down the line and so on and so forth, but in regards to maybe illnesses that might happen, how are you guys kind of safeguarding your labor force in your facilities and what does that look like?

Matthew:

Well, you had mentioned when we started this, that while we’re talking, things are changing.

Danny:

Yes.

Matthew:

And it’s for sure that we have to adapt to all of these changes and pivot with it, but by the time anybody is hearing this, my answer may be completely different.

Danny:

Very true.

Matthew:

Right now I’m trying to make sure that social distancing is something that can happen, not just outside of our offices and factories, but within them as well. So we have people spread out. We don’t have more than two people working in a room, in a single room together. Even though we have a couple of hundred people, we try to space them out in this type of way, we have them in different buildings where possible. We have them on different shifts than they would be before we have some working from home that can, that aren’t touching our machines themselves and have the chance to work from home. It’s constantly being addressed while making sure that we can keep moving along as a business.

Danny:

Absolutely. What about the morale? How has everybody, Is it a call to arms saying? What does that look like?

Matthew:

I’ve absolutely been amazed by the dedication of the people here. We’re accomplishing and I say we, I mean it’s the team really is accomplishing an enormous amount. I worked on a project last week, where we had two of our roles solutions architects that work on new problems that were sending me updates on a new type of masks that we’re doing: a face mask for a customer that will allow that to be scaled faster and their shift was far over. They could have gone home, they stayed late. I don’t expect that of anybody. I mean people need to be with their families right now. People need to be safe, but it certainly does seem to be a call to action for a lot of them. And some of that is also, they’ve been doing projects for years that they could maybe see happening in six months from now. Now, we are pushed to get them done in a week and then two weeks.

Life seems shorter now. I don’t mean that in as desperate a way as it sounds. I don’t think that we’re, I do think we will survive this, but we are thinking in shorter time spans now and I think there’s a certain amount of excitement that their work will get out faster than before, and that doesn’t apply to everybody. If they are sick, if they’re scared, if their family isn’t well, you deal with it in entirely different ways, and I have to really work on being sensitive to that.

Danny:

Absolutely. I mean, that’s a, I imagine a difficult balance. what has it been like for you? I imagine things are going nuts, phone calls, if things are constantly changing, I guess Trump passed the, and I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head, but it was the Production Defense Act. Based under the fact that they can nationalize and mobilize manufacturing to build and you’re hearing of contracts being rolled out. Their stories of I think with GM, GM and Ford talking about how they’re going to go and possibly shift the line and start producing, manufacturing ventilators and whatnot, is that what some of that would affect you guys?

Matthew:

I mean that’s old school war mobilization. That is incredibly positive to see rather than shattered factories. We’re actually starting to work with a couple of companies that their production was lower and they had done or they had done something else in the past and now they can work on things like UVC that I mentioned earlier. We think the government should support that, other private investors should support that. We certainly will, and it has to happen faster than before. We’ve seen this in war times before, but this is not a single country now. This is the way the world is working and the way that we have to come together, even if we can’t come together physically the way we used to, our businesses can come together in order to try to figure out both how to deal with the health issue right now, how to deal with supply chain issues, but also to deal with invention. There’s incredible opportunities in synthetic biology right now, for creating new types of vaccines and treatments. This wasn’t something that captivated the public’s attention in the way that it is now. It’s a mobilization in this regard as well. So there is a chance for things to happen even as we suffer through it right now.

Danny:

What are you going through, looking forward I guess in the next who knows, 30, 60, 90 days, name a timeframe. What do you think? What are some of the learnings, you just mentioned there that you’re starting to see some more innovation that you otherwise wouldn’t in this space. What are some of those other things you think that the industry is going to learn and be able to take away from this.

Matthew:

I do want to say that I do think the innovation was happening. The innovation wasn’t scaling as fast as it should. That there were barriers in the way, sometimes just barriers caused by society in general. By realizing some of it’s bureaucracy, some of it’s institutions, and sometimes it’s just our will to do it. So let’s just stasis in how we think. So those are things in the areas of synthetic biology and the areas of material science, advanced materials and in the things like additive manufacturing, and I think when it comes to supply chains to reduce the way we think about supply in general, I think it was Matt Ridley, the geneticists writer, who was in the House of Lords who I admire greatly, who said, not in a negative way at all because trade has brought enormous amount of wealth to nations but he said that, “There’s not in a computer mouse, not a single human on the planet would be able to make this.” There are so many components, that this requires an enormously large supply chain. But what does it mean to create a factory? What does it mean to be localized in order to be able to make something, not have something that is out of our control that we won’t be able to make if we can’t, if we have to socially distance. I think we’ll learn that lesson here and start to try to think in those ways.

Danny:

I think it’s interesting. I mean the whole fact that it’s a global economy, the whole globalization aspect piece all the way from your customers to the supply chain piece. Do you think that’s going to shrink over the next several years?

Matthew:

So what I think and what I hope let’s say .

Danny:

I hear you there.

Matthew:

I tend to be one of the last Utopians around. I want replicators to exist as in the “Star Trek style Replicator.” So the very nature of looking at utopian Sci Fi is not about isolationism or nationalism. It’s about a Federation. It’s about everybody working in peacetime; at the same time, by doing that, having this self-sufficiency. So I think that we will notice, and I hope we will notice that Korea, Italy, and China have all suffered the way that the United States has suffered, but also recognize that it has disrupted the way that we can do business, across those different countries. Though we should be united in mission but at the same time be able to build on our own.

Mineral resources right now are heavily owned by one country. Rare earth materials are heavily Chinese owned, even outside of China. It’s important that the United States realizes that we don’t have these rare earth materials and tries to build with what we do have or tries to collaborate with China on this. So there are a lot of things that should come to mind as necessary in order to have this kind of distribution of manufacturing. That maybe we didn’t all realize in a hyper globalized world. It’s still going to be a globalized world, but it is one where we need to start being able to take care and build things and know what we are building right here in the United States.

Danny:

Exactly. It reminds me actually, I had a question that an international business professor asked me, way back when I was in college, I think it was senior year, and they asked it was the question, “Globalization, is it good or is it bad?” What is it, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, “I don’t think you can say one way or the other, “whether it’s good or bad.” But it certainly we’re seeing right now a big challenge obviously.

Matthew:

It’s probably a trick question in a sense. I think that people that fall on an extreme of these two things are missing the subtle points.

Danny:

Exactly.

Matthew:

At the same time realizing that the globe is a small place is necessary. So globalization, meaning working with our human neighbors and the rest of the planet, still remains important. So Nanotronics tries to do this as well. We’re located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York and the Brooklyn Navy Yard used to be the largest manufacturing center in the New York Tri-state area until the 1960s. This is where war ships were built for both World Wars. And it went without much manufacturing at all. And in a global economy, the way that we’re talking about there were some towns all over the place that did different parts of the supply chain.

I’m from Akron, Ohio, where they made tires. There were cars made in Detroit. This is the way that the war, even within the United States worked. We’re doing something about taking distributed manufacturing and putting it back in the city. Putting it in Brooklyn, where they used to be. We’re looking at Manhattan from our offices. Used to be exactly where the hub of manufacturing was and we’re in one of the older buildings, that used to be for the first iron plating was done and we’ve made a very modern structure. It’s being put together right now where you have production. So this distributed production that does everything from making the parts to testing, adding computation and shipping them, to above that having the best R&D engineers, that are working on AI and they need to look down over the factory floor, watch the things that are being made, which by the way those jobs are as high tech as the R&D engineers.

Everybody has their hands on the product and on a certain high tech way of doing things. But they can try their artificial intelligence, which will eventually go to companies that are making autonomous vehicles and quantum computers and all of these exciting things. They can see it on us making our products, our microscopes, our automation and robotics. So it’s a way to completely close that loop. If people come into our factory, they will see hopefully a blueprint, not only of what more Nanotronics factories should be at some point, but the way that you should be able to make almost anything. So it’s a path towards this ultimate small distributed system like the replicator that we talked about, but at least a small factory that a startup company can grow into in the way that we did.

Danny:

Excellent. Well, certainly interesting times right now, very strange times. I think what I’m hearing has a lot of hope. There’s a lot of hope that we’re going to come out. We’re going to learn from this. I want to thank you and for what you and your company is doing, your employees are doing to be able to help, to be an answer to the challenge that’s going on. Not just like immediately, but in the future. I think that what you’re talking about how people are taking that call to arms so to speak and saying, “We’ve got to help, “do this innovation, “this piece that we were working on before “and we can put it in the market “and help get masks out, “help get all these critical supplies out.” That’s super important right now.

Matthew:

Well, thank you too. I mean you’re here interviewing me about this today when people are hunkering down and I appreciate you doing that.

Danny:

Well, thank you. Hopefully, helped to be a little part of the solution but I think that what you guys are doing is fantastic. Thank you. We want to get this out to other manufacturers, other companies so they can, share some hope, and also just share some ideas and thoughts like, “Hey this is where things are going, “this is where we need to be thinking.” And go from there.

Matthew:

Great.

Danny:

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matthew:

Look forward to getting to know you better.

Danny:

It’s going to be awesome. All right, well, that was, I really enjoyed that episode as we cover some topics and talk to Nanotronics about their response to Covid-19, what they’re doing, they are an essential business and they’re helping with critical supply chains and a lot of critical supplies for the medical space, for just really all across different supply chains. So, you’re seeing this a lot. We’re going to be interviewing some additional companies as well throughout the week to hear about their responses and what they’re doing to help, to really share some best practices, really share that hope. And I think there’s a lot of learnings that we’re going to come out from this that’s really going to be able to apply to tomorrow and beyond. So thank you for watching. We’ll be back soon with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching or listening.

 

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Sponsored by Optimum Productions