GetScale’s (YC S15) QC System Protects Factory Workers and Hardware Companies

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/24/getscale/

by kg4lod • 11 years ago

31 15 11 years ago

kg4lod4• 11 years ago

Hi HN. I'm Jonathan, one of the founders. I'll monitor this thread all day to answer questions. Thanks for taking the time to read about us! It means a lot to everyone here at GetScale.

jcr3• 11 years ago

Do you think your camera system could (eventually) support some combination of Computer Vision and Machine Learning to identify (some) assembly mistakes in real-time and provide feedback/warnings to the assembler?

My thought is improving yields by reducing defect rates caused by those hopelessly imperfect humans (like me) might be a great selling point for some types of manufacturing.

kveykva3• 11 years ago

We've discussed this possibility of this and I would really like to make an attempt when we have more data!

The practical application is this is sort of an 80/20 proportion though. Currently we see fairly significant improvements in some situations just by the system being there. Factories will pre-test units before passing them over to our system in order to demonstrate better quality, when prior to installation they weren't testing a majority of units at all.

It'd still be really cool to try, haha.

kg4lod4• 11 years ago

That's a really neat idea!

You are describing a type of machine called an AOI (automated optical inspection). It is a common piece of equipment in electronics assembly lines. But AOI equipment is very expensive (~$250k+) and only works on a specific set of products. For example, it doesn't work well when the product contains soft or flexible surfaces, or has a highly non-planar shape.

GetScale terminals can be interfaced with AOI machines in the factory to collect and store the findings along with our human-led inspections and catalog everything by serial number and we do have ambitions to add AOI-like capabilities to our hardware down the line.

Sounds like you have a project in mind. What are you working on? ;-)

kveykva3• 11 years ago

Hi, I'm Colton - another of the founders. I'll also be here to answer questions!

jbapple2• 11 years ago

The article notes that:

All information is permanently archived on GetScale’s servers, which saves workers from being held responsible for mix-ups that aren’t their fault.

This is presumably meant as a way to try and fix the issue referenced in the article's title and hook:

He realized that many line workers have very few legal protections, and if something goes wrong while an order is being produced, they often end up absorbing their employer’s losses by taking wage cuts or deductions even if they aren’t at fault.

Is there any actual evidence that in legal regimes with inadequate worker protections, increasing transparency of the workers' labor efforts improves fairness or pay for the workers?

kveykva3• 11 years ago

What we're really solving is a level above this. We're not integrated with the factories deeply enough or have enough buying power to force a factory to improve worker pay or conditions directly.

Instead we can provide insight to the OEM - verified information on the status of what they're paying for. Avoiding miscommunications that can push losses onto the factory (and subsequently negatively impacting the worker).

kg4lod4• 11 years ago

That's a very thoughtful comment!

You're right in that if the factory wants to misbehave and the owner/GM is a tyrant, you aren't likely to directly impact worker treatment (we have in-house auditors in China that can check on the factory for you if you have that specific concern). Fortunately, the overwhelming number of factory owners/GM's are fundamentally decent people caught up in difficult circumstances.

Typical contracts are structured 30% deposit and 70% when it ships. Margins to the factory aren't 70% so they wind up quite leveraged. Most of the scenarios I saw came out of the factory not understanding or executing on the customer requirements correctly. If they build units and the customer rejects them, they have to cover those material costs so they can repair or otherwise try again. This tremendous financial pressure causes otherwise good GM's to cut corners every possible way they can to try to keep the lights on.

GetScale impacts worker treatment in several ways:

(1) it eliminates waste and errors that result from misunderstandings in customer acceptance procedures. After deploying us in a factory you just don't encounter thousands of bad units because the factory is confirming against the exact acceptance procedure as you go (instead of build a lot, ship, customer receives and rejects).

(2) it is possible to audit your suppliers and if you do that, GetScale provides the ground truth of which workers were working at which stations when and for how long (down to the millisecond!). Since you have to login-logout to do any work our records are very accurate.

(3) it enables you to vote with your dollars. Without invasive monitoring (like GetScale) it is very difficult to determine which factories are "good" because reputation is easy to coopt and places like Alibaba can be bought. GetScale data collection is automatic and the data is held off-shore (in the US). We already see factories in China using GetScale as a selling point to foreign clients since it provides quantitative proof of their compliance and performance. A factory that is willing to be open about its performance and let you document workers on the line is the factory proud of its worker treatment, not the one trying to hide it.

As to studies, I have seen some in both the psychology of management literature and the manufacturing management literature, but as to specific citations I will need some time to dig them out of my research notes.

In any case, I hope I've answered your concerns. If I missed anything, please follow-up!

jbapple2• 11 years ago

The owners who are "fundamentally decent" are the ones abusing the workers?

Of the three ways that GetScale "impacts worker treatment", the first doesn't mention workers at all, the second only improves record quality (not worker treatment), and the third depends on foreign buyers to demand good treatment of workers (which there is no evidence they'll do) and does nothing to address the single abuse mentioned in the article, higher water bills for "unproductive" workers.

This story seems set on the idea that increasing productivity (benefiting the owners directly) will increase conditions for the workers. I think it's great to increase productivity, but the link to worker conditions still seems like magical thinking, and as a result I find the linked article deceptive.

abbasmehdi• 11 years ago

All of the photos in the article show consumer electronic devices. Could I use it with, say, furniture manufacturing / aftermarket car parts / leather goods manufacturing?

kg4lod4• 11 years ago

That's a really good observation!

We think GetScale works great for anything that:

(1) Is valuable enough to warrant a serial number (unique ID)

(2) Has unit margin of at least a few dollars

(3) Is complicated to build or inspect, or has to be held to an extremely high aesthetic standard (e.g. luxury goods)

That covers almost all of your examples. One counter-example might be T-shirt manufacturing.

pjc50• 11 years ago

Interesting. So there's two parts:

- a set of communications tools for enabling the assembly workers to have good assembly instructions. This is an iterative process as the design engineers watch the assembly.

- video is now cheap enough that you can video all the assembly and trace QA failures to a particular step.

There's a generally humane tone to the writeup, one of giving people the right tools to do a good job. If it can improve DfM that's great. The number of devices I've had to take apart with ridiculous numbers of screws or blind clips is too high. On the other hand, who among us would accept continuous surveillance every second of being clocked on?

soggypenny• 11 years ago

Currently Upwork freelancers who are hired for hourly work get monitored for time tracking called the Work Diary[0]. My understanding is that this is a well-received value-add for their platform.

[0]https://support.upwork.com/entries/23141928

GetScale’s (YC S15) QC System Protects Factory Workers and Hardware Companies

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