In this episode, we examine how COVID-19 is having the effect of accelerating designs especially in medical applications, and the impact this has on design engineers and we will look to offer some solutions
In this episode, we speak to John Bowman, Marketing Director at Anglia Components, and David Pearson, Technical Director at Anglia Components about how COVID-19 is having the effect of accelerating designs especially in medical applications
Hello,
and welcome to this the latest in electronics specifiers Podcast Series. Today we will examine how COVID-19 is having the effect of accelerating designs, especially in medical applications, and the impact this has on design engineers. And we'd like to offer some solutions here to discuss this topic and suggest some of those solutions. Oh, john Bowman, marketing director of Angular components, and David Pearson, technical director of Angular components. JOHN, if I could start with you, you say you have observed a strong shift in the engineering community from we could too, we must. So can you just explain that in a little more detail?
Yeah. Thank you very much. Yes, it's certainly something that we see the increasing rates of collaboration amongst the engineering community is, it's really accelerating their adoption of so many of the technologies that, you know, I think most people have been aware of for quite a few years. And previously, some of these features. When we look at things like facial recognition, air quality sensing, they've been on probably on the list of desirable features within a product, but almost waiting for a demand waiting for a home, that actually means that that product is absolutely needed. So with subjects like air quality, for for many years, now, there's been significant data published, that that explains just how poor in some of the city areas, the air quality actually is. And we've known about the links to asthma, et cetera. And there have been specialist companies involved in doing that. And it's come to the attention of many other manufacturers in diverse fields that have got equipment that is actually placed within fitters, and they thought we could put air quality sensing into our product, is there actually a demand for it? What's going to be done with that data that we're collecting. But of course, people are now seeing with the direct links between COVID-19 morbidity rates and the air quality in the environment that people are living in. There's this distinct correlations with the morbidity rate, and it becomes something that is essential, we need that data, we need to understand we need to map across the UK across the world exactly what kind of environmental exposure people are receiving within their communities in order that we can make them safe places that extends beyond the outdoor air quality to indoor air quality, it looks at the massive deployment of sensors. We've spoken for quite a few years now about smart buildings and smart cities, some of that terminology has now been changed to safe buildings, safe cities, and this compulsion that everybody has towards the deployment of electronics to actually make communities significantly safer. that extends all the way through, of course, into the medical equipment that you mentioned, make, whereby so many driving factors for the design of that equipment is about being able to scale up, it's about adding safer interfaces for both the user and for the patients. It's about in home telemedicine. That again, has been a very popular topic for for very many years. And there have been notable examples of equipment that has been able to be used in the home by the patient reporting back to the GP or the clinical caregiver. But of course, now we need to reduce the pressure on hospitals and GP surgeries. The driving trend here in this medical grade equipment is to get good quality products on a very large scale, that enable people to be effectively diagnosing at home monitoring the health at home. But that data that's generated, of course, has to be transmitted through the healthcare institutions to the to actual clinicians that can act upon that data. So the scale that we've seen is, you know, 10 times 20 times 50 times I was speaking to a customer recently, and they're laboratory grade equipment has seen an increase from 100 units a year to 5000 in 15 weeks for nominal scale ups is going within there and of course that results in some serious addressing of the design methodologies that are used. And factors such as designed for high volume manufacturing, which had never been on the agenda of the medical equipment manufacturers now becomes one of the most important parts of their design considerations as they get you units and new interfaces for those units out into into the market.
Okay, and you just mentioned at the beginning there collaboration within the engineering community, are you talking about collaboration within a company collaboration with the engineers in your own company here, what sort of collaboration, you thinking of it.
So that the collaboration really is widespread? It's yes to all those examples that you gave. It's also, amongst peers, we see a lot of collaboration. So companies that perhaps would have been considered to be competitors, they're actually able to work much more closely together, it's no longer about the IP, protection, etc, that there's significant amounts of more sharing of technology to enable them with the combined expertise and resource to deploy new design significantly quicker. We've also seen a big uptake within the angular design partner community whereby some of the expertise that is required for people that are coming in from, say, non medical arenas actually need the guidance and the support of a tested and trusted design partner that has expertise in those particularly areas. That's very much the case with sensors as well. So a lot of the time with the deployments of sensors, there is a specialisation, particularly around the analogue front end on the outputs that are coming from the sensors, how we power the sensors, and people can't afford the time to invest six months in learning about that technology, they want to get right at that curve to have something that's ready to deploy. As soon as possible. It comes back from the not not, we could, but we must. So it removes a lot of the traditional barriers, and then the collaboration that comes in from there is probably most seen, if we look at things such as COVID-19, rapid testing solutions, all of the published examples of products that is going through clinical approvals right now has been a collaboration between universities, people within industry, people within computing that are able to add artificial intelligence to some of the processing that's happening very rapidly. So people with multidisciplinary skills honed in very different environments are pooling, that knowledge, that experience to enable better, safer products to get out to the places that they needed.
Okay, so, so effectively, you could have a couple of companies both looking to supply those products, and actually working together almost saying, you know, with engineers saying, look, you know, we just solved this problem, going to a competitor saying, you know, if you haven't solved it is a possible way through this problem.
Yeah. That that's sharing of the knowledge and the expertise and dividing it up into the parts where people have specialisation bringing it all together. for mutual benefit. Okay.
I mean, David, obviously, in that context, are you working with your design engineering, customer base? I mean, there must be some complex issues, maybe for you to to work with these engineers, given some of the challenges that john has just instanced.
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely a challenge. So we you know, as you know, we have a bigger engineering team here. A lot of those guys have got expertise in many of the areas that john spoke about there with sensor technologies, and IoT technologies are all really needed to enable these next generation of products. And to enable customers who've perhaps got an existing product today isn't connected, that they want to connect in the future. And sort of touch on I guess, what john was talking about that with collaboration between engineering, we're also seeing companies collaborating, where they may have a product that's deployed in a market in a wide, wider field of applications where they haven't got sensor technology deployed. And they're partnering with other sensor technology companies to bring those two together. So they are two distinctly different products and integrating the two features together. So we're getting involved in that with our own engineering teams. As john mentioned, we have the angular design partners, which is really kind of to help our customers where, you know, they have maybe a gap in their knowledge base, or as john said, they want to accelerate the design from from six months down to a to a shorter period to get that product deployed out in the market. There's a lot of technologies that cross over into these applications. You know, we've sort of touched on the sensors and the IoT side of it, but there's also low power, microcontrollers, and, you know, other products that are in the systems. So it needs a very broad base skill loads, you know, skill sets,
which,
you know, we're fortunate as Anglia. I think not, not through luck through careful planning over the years. A team of engineers multi disciplined, and you know, with expertise in certain areas. So we've got guys who are experts in sensors, we've got guys who are experts in low power microcontrollers, we've got some IoT experts here as well. So, you know, we're
very well positioned to help our customers when they, when they have these challenges. Okay, but how are you overcoming the issues at the moment where obviously, you can't actually go into a meeting and have a face to face and talk to design engineers? So how are you coping with, you know, getting across sometimes what might be complex technical information to help them when, you know, you can't just sit down with them face to face and explain it?
Yeah, that's been a challenge. So at the start of lockdown, obviously, we all moved quite rapidly to TVs and zoom, but all the various other different platforms that many of them actually heard of. zoom back in March. And so you know, so we, we had to move quite rapidly to those platforms, you know, we, I'd say probably from the engineering community, within our customer base, they didn't move so quickly to that platform, I think they were kind of doing their own thing in the background. And then they realised very quickly, actually, we can't get people to come in and see us and help us with these designs. So we're going to need to use some of these platforms. And it's quite an interest, I think you can convey information very clearly and easily over teams in zoom, you know, cause you do lose that kind of personal interaction part of it, that's very true, you know, when you can just finger straight on a component on the board and say, yes, do that. Okay, yeah. But that that can be challenging. But on the flip side of that, I would say those meetings with engineerings, are more businesslike and more professional and more focused, centred around what the problems are. So you tend to kind of I've seen, between doing face to face meetings and doing teams in zoom meetings with with engineers, you tend to get to the crux of the problem much quicker with a teams and a zoom call, you have the challenges of solving them, you know, we've got a lot of development tools that we send out to customers. So we're still maintaining that throughout, you know, throughout this issue, where the difference being we're not sending them now to the company address, we're sending them to the engineers home address. So so we're still, you know, supporting those engineers out there with the development tools, with calls like this to, you know, to get to the crux of the problem, you know, our suppliers, you know, I've been very, very helpful in all of this. We've had some calls where there's been Angular engineering, the customers, engineering teams, and our supplies engineering teams. So you've got, you know, the expertise that level as well, you know, these some of these engineers who worked for the spies were the guys who were involved in the original design of the products. So you know, what, they've probably forgotten more about it than then we know about it, you know, so it's very, very simple. We were managing,
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Yeah, I'd certainly say on the software, firmware side of things, you know, the supplies are, you know, very, very useful that they very, very often supply reference code that we can share with customers, a lot of the demo kits that we supplied, come with a whole library of, you know, demo code and, and everything engineer really needs to kind of get up and running, I think, is when they move to that more, that more advanced level in their design. So getting their products up and running is fairly easy now with the tools that are available, moving to that next level where you want to use the product in a particular manner. That's where you need that kind of, perhaps that additional support side.
Okay. And john, you know, I think you're the customer base of Angular is small to medium sized enterprises. So how are you getting the message out to them that, you know, this expertise is available, you know, you're able to help them with this acceleration in the design process,
a big part of how we're able to connect with as you mentioned, A large community of small medium sized enterprises has been through the digital marketing angley has been very active in digital marketing for for many years now. But what we have found is through through engineers being generally working from home, certainly at the PC for the majority of their time, then the take a break that we see on the digital marketing, the demand for digital marketing, the hooks that customers look for. But in all of the digital marketing and accelerates the rate at which we're doing it theming it around particular application areas where we know that a customer will have a need for combination of technologies, if we can get that message through whilst being applicable to a wide customer base as well. That's been one of one of the key ways in which that message has got out there. Picking up on what David was saying about the whole benefits of the virtual meeting platforms that we're all adopting. David's absolutely correct this, the efficiency that we're seeing those meetings means that they are shorter, they're succinct, they're very to the point, they're delivered around an agenda that has been established and agreed with the customer. And when we take out some of the traditional barriers to getting many meetings, many successful meetings carried out together all the travel time, that's now been given back to us, combined with the efficiency at the timings of the virtual meetings means that the volume of customers that we can touch has gone up significantly. So during the working week, we will be holding 10 to 15 times more meetings on a virtual platform. And we were face to face with customers. And when we combine that with some of the other barriers, which would be getting the specific expert resource that is needed, be it from ourselves, so so from colleagues where me and David may be engaging with the customer. And we know that that needs for us now to bring in one of our colleagues that's got expertise in an area that has just come up through the exploration with the customer. synchronising diaries in the past was always a challenge for everybody. Of course, now it's it's what's your daily schedule? Is there a 20 minute slot within there? Well, we can actually do this, or even we can immediately seems as the platform that we use, we can dial up a colleague, take them straight into that customer and give them immediate access to the resource that they need. If it goes beyond the Anglia community, and we bring in our suppliers, we no longer have to think about this chap that's an expert in law and networks. He's based in France, when will the next be coming to the UK? Can we get some of his time? Can we put a little shedule together so he can justify that trip to the UK? alternatively, we can give him 30 minutes notice from his home in these and he can be straight into that customer as well. So many of those traditional barriers have been removed. Certainly for me, personally, I see the way in which we're supporting customers. Now, the advantages of these platforms outweigh the disadvantages. Okay, and then but yeah, we missed that social contact with customers. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, efficiency is absolutely paramount importance.
Okay. So just on that point about being more businesslike, from from, from the word go, there is a process in place where the customer design engineer comes to you and says, This is my problem. And then you start to, if you like, tease out all the other issues that surround the the issue before you actually sit down? Or is it? Or do you start the discussions with the customer from that, that that starting point.
So we would normally start with an exploratory discussion, if it can be covered by emails, etc, web web, people have quicker access to getting that information across, we within our own community, then review that and come up with a structured plan, breaking it down into the key areas where the expertise is needed. And then putting, I guess, in the old days, we call it a schedule of works. But our replacement for that is actually having the people on the virtual meeting that can deliver during the course of that and with the screen sharing capabilities, we're actually able to demonstrate things from presentations, be it from circuit diagrams, block diagrams, application notes, reference designs, were in a normal face to face meeting, it would perhaps have been seen as stemming the flow of the conversation, if you like is now very relevant and at the heart of how we're experiencing these meetings. So screen sharing, just a couple of slides can actually sum up very quickly what we might have in in a face to face meetings and I will send you something on that later and you'd get home it'd be seven o'clock at night and you'd send something over and and again, the immediacy and the relevance. That information has been slightly attenuated within those timescales.
Okay. I saw a piece on your website the other day with, I think some new Binda connectors for medical solutions. And I think one or two more, for instance, David, just on on that, you know, are you looking at products, bringing in products that help, you know, effectively help you support engineers even more in their, in their endeavours, if you like, but couple of others that I think john mentioned in an article, the title is intelligent Cloud Connect terminal and an Omron part as well as human vision components. So you kind of identifying those are saying to engineers, hey, you know, we've got these solutions.
Yeah, so it's something we've always done. As john said, we've always had a good digital marketing campaign, we've obviously put more focus on that over the last sort of 889 months, you know, as people have been at home and not been able to access them so easily. So a lot of the products that we've pushed forward to customers now, where they solve some of the issues that the customers are experiencing around, you know, developing developing products to serve COVID related problems, whether that be healthcare or social infrastructure, and things like that are derived from products that were already existing, but maybe hadn't found their killer application yet. Yeah. So if you take the example of the the Omron part, so you mentioned, envision component. So that's a product which has been around for for a few years now. It's found, you know, applications in advertising, you know, out of home, advertising, retail boards, and things like that. But that's now kind of finding its way into COVID related type applications for access control, for example, where maybe you want to restrict access to you to your building, and want to monitor people who are entering your building for their temperature or signs of possible infection. And you know, why not have other components as well like the the 60, thermal sensors for doing that. So they can actually monitor now the temperature very accurately, if somebody's entering your building, if they don't pass the correct temperature threshold, then it's sorry, we're not letting you in. Obviously, it protects them protects the staff, you know, and everybody on site. So that's a product that wasn't really kind of designed initially for that application. But it's finding a new niche for that application. The TELUS product, the intelligent Cloud Connect, I guess, is kind of more of a broad, broad market products as for IoT, so one of the biggest challenges Now as for customers is connecting their devices, to, to the IoT to share that data collect that data, john sort of mentioned that, you know, we're seeing so much activity now with sensor products, where products are being loaded with different sensors, whether it's measuring air quality, the temperature of some danger in a building, and things like that. And all of that data, needs to be collated and sent somewhere for monitoring for analytics and things like that. So you know, IoT has been around for a while. But I think we're seeing an acceleration of it now, in customers who perhaps hadn't considered it before, because they're now collecting all of this data, they're not only wants to process it, within the application setting, they want to process it, you know, remotely, and share that information. So you know, that what Alice has come up with, is really, they've looked at the problems that the customers have got connecting to the internet, because it sounds easy, just get a device connected to the internet, in in practice, is three elements to it, two of them are fairly, relatively easy. And the third one, which is really their connection to, you know, the service that you're going to use the cloud service, whether that be Amazon, Amazon, web services, or Microsoft, that's the difficult bit, there's a lot of steps in that there's a lot of, you know, things that need to be set up as a lot of,
you know, issues in terms of how you're billing it, you know, because you've got lots and lots of different devices out there. What TELUS have done with this product is very innovative, they've taken all of those issues and modernise them into a ready to go off the shelf product. So that that's, you know, we're finding some really good opportunities with that where customers know they need to do this, but they've kind of held back from doing it because they maybe don't have that knowledge resource in house. And they perhaps, as john mentioned earlier, they've perhaps said we could do this. And now they're saying we should do this, but they've got that gap in, in, you know, in the knowledge base. So whilst we can support them with our engineering teams, another support, I guess, is coming from the suppliers where they're making these products much easier. and implementing implement and deploy. So now that we've seen some really good product innovation from suppliers, where we we work with, you know, a great bunch of suppliers, we you Have suppliers with expertise in certain sections, ie we only really mentioned Tyson on there. But we obviously we work with a lot of devices and an S t as well, you know, I've got some very innovative, innovative products that are finding their ways into these products, we tend to find with, with customers as well, as john alluded to earlier, where they've got multiple technologies embedded in their devices, you know, to enable all of the different things they need, the connectivity, the sensors, the low power, the energy harvesting, things like that. So it's about bringing all of those technologies together and showing the customer what what's available, because one of the, I guess, probably one of the biggest things we see, I guess, when we're talking to engineers, is they're, they perhaps haven't got the same knowledge of what's available. And nobody wants to deal with it, perhaps not, they've perhaps not identified the correct platform or technology to enable them to do that. I think that's where our engineering guys can help, because they've obviously got broad knowledge of the lines that we carry. And indeed, our suppliers, you know, jump on cause they can introduce these technologies as well.
I guess one of the key issues there, though, you mentioned a couple of years. I mean, the other thing is security now, especially with medical, and indeed IoT, as well. And as you said, you know, we've got analogue devices and SD micro, and I think, maksym. microchip, they've all they've all got their certain twist on, on ensuring security, is that something that comes up in the conversations?
Yeah, absolutely, you know, that we all know that, you know, we all want our own personal data to be securely and, you know, not shared with, with with everybody. And, you know, that is definitely, you know, one of the things that customers are looking at, it tends to come quite early on in the conversation, you know, because it will really influence the selection of the components that you serve. So, for instance, if I were designing a product with a microcontroller in it, you know, there are microcontrollers, which have secure encryption embedded into the data that they're, they're handling. So you know, that that conversation needs to be needs to come very early on in the conversation, when you're looking at things like the TELUS solution we were talking about, that's kind of a given in those types of applications, because they are transferring data over a cellular infrastructure. So there's already a level of security there, you know, our phone calls are now secure, rather, they're no longer hear about news of the world, or whoever plays newspapers or phones. You know, so a lot of that infrastructure, and that provisioning for security is already there in those type of applications is perhaps more where you've got the on site, the standalone application, where it is processed the data inside where security becomes important, and then of course, as you transmit that, over the IoT. So yeah, it's definitely something that is spoken about a lot.
Okay. And, john, you mentioned earlier about, you know, companies that maybe were shifted from making 100 products to suddenly 5000 in a short space of time, you know, how do you as an angler adapt to that and you know, ensure you can supply the customer with the parts necessary.
We, inherent within the angular model is a commitment to inventory, which can help, of course, short term with those very early spikes in demand. So we've almost got a built in buffer, if you like that, that can help the customer with that. And then we, we combine it with a really thorough understanding of the rate of scalar. We forecast several quarters ahead with them as well, we deal with the challenges of not getting air freight and sea freight and everything else and work our relationships with our suppliers, ensuring that all the concise information about the COVID critical application is communicated to the supplier we find they every every single one of our suppliers, they will have their process for expediting COVID critical supply, overcoming any of the logistics challenges. And with a combination of our commitment to inventory with long pipeline of inventory as well, looking many, many quarters ahead. We try and iron out as many of the bumps in the road as are possible. We we take mitigation steps effectively communicate with the customer efficiently at every stage of the process. We will be telling them right now of any q2 problems that they might be experiencing so that we've built into it the ability to plan ahead, whilst coping with volumes that are massively ramping. There's a lot of data coming in and things within Anglia are constantly feeding the information through processing it, sharing it with the suppliers and getting through to the people in the customer service. teams that can actually make things happen on a prioritised basis, the key to it is accurate information at the start and that, that work with the customer, is the only way to unlock the true picture as to what the needs are going to be. Okay,
I guess it has necessitated a slight shift on your part in that, you know, when you talk about, somebody says, Well, you know, we started designing with a customer, I think I'm right in saying, you know, you might be looking 12 months down the line, maybe a bit more before that, that becomes a product, and therefore, you start selling parts into it. Whereas, now you're talking, as I say, going from 100 to 5000, very short space of time. So, you know, I
know, you said, You've got buffering product, but I guess it does entail, you know, shifting your business model, if you like, or your modus operandi to meet these these demands. Certainly, the decision making is an awful lot quicker. As part of the decision process, we will of course, putting any recommendation forward, one of the very first things we do is we check for availability, as well as longevity. And within the angley live environment, a lot of that information from suppliers that perhaps customers would have to go through many different web searches to get to we've put everything related to any any components, including its product change, notification processes, etc. That's all from one page within Angular live, the customers can access that information, where necessary would then go beyond that, talking right through to the business units within suppliers to get the 10 year plan to understand from there, and we also scour the global inventories where there may be other distributors in different parts of the world that that would have inventory available. So we will then have that moved around within a supplies network so that it can get to the point where it's needed. But absolutely at the start of the process on the new design with customers, the most important thing that's been established this year is readily available in volume.
Okay. Okay. JOHN Bowman and David Pearson from angry components. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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