#12 Matching Technologies to Supply Chain Needs

Supply chains benefit from digital technologies. But with all the tools in the market, it’s confusing to match them with practical needs. How can you know what’s relevant, without making it your second job? In this episode, we discussed these challenges and ways to overcome them.

Understanding what product to build is hard, and in hardware, it's even harder. Nohtal pivoted his hardware startup and made big bets on an entirely different market, which paid off. Nohtal explained how they identified what product to build, and analyzed the lessons they learned along the way.

Chris Luecke is a podcaster and founder at Manufacturing Happy Hour and Business Leader at Fiix software. We talked about driving digital transformation in the manufacturing industry and overcoming challenges in making it happen, how can companies lnow what to focus on, and more.

Nicholas Nadeau is the CTO of Halodi Robotics, a company that builds humanoid robots for different purposes like safety or medical treatment. We talked about different considerations that they needed to take into account and how they applied them while designing robots that should operate among humans and interact with them.

How can additive manufacturing (3D printing) change the manufacturing world? Yash Bandari is the Business Development Manager at Additive Technologies and Co-founder of Meltio. We talked about the actual applications of additive manufacturing, specifically about metal and large-scale additive manufacturing, where you should consider additive over traditional technologies and where you shouldn't.

Niels Jul Jacobsen is the CEO of Capra Robotics. Niels has tens of years of industry experience, so it was particularly interesting to hear his perspective on how recent supply chain disruptions deeply affect hardware businesses. Niels sees unique ways in which supply chain challenges affect product design and manufacturing today, and tells how he and his company, Capra Robotics, adapt to them.

Eric Harding is the Co-Founder of Remora, a company that builds a device that captures carbon emissions from semi trucks. We listened to their incredible story that started from academic research, the engineering challenges and considerations and the take on carbon emission reduction and EVs.

Hall is the co-founder and CTO of Gridware, a startup that builds a fascinating device that can prevent wildfires by early detection. We talked about the challenges of building such a device, dealing with supply chain shortages, domestic vs offshoring, how the device works, the different technologies they use, and more.

Dylan is the founder and president of Cortex Design, a product design + manufacturing firm. Dylan talked about common mistakes of product builders and innovators that drive up timelines and costs, and tactics to avoid them. We also talked about building strong relationships with suppliers and getting the best results from your manufacturing partners.

Picnic is a 6-year-old startup that automates custom pizza preparation. The team faced many challenges in their journey from prototyping to production: lots of integration of different skillsets, supply chain challenges, getting the product to market, making it manufacturable and more. We talked about the challenges and lessons learned from getting their system to production.