Thank you for attending our manufacturing optimization summit.

Build Better 2022 has concluded.

View our last event’s agenda below: 

A recent report shows that 20 cents of every dollar spent in the manufacturing industry is wasted, which adds up to $8 trillion of economic waste. There’s simply too much waste, and too few solutions — which is why we’re hosting our third annual Build Better Manufacturing Optimization Summit.

This half-day virtual event will bring together engineering and operations leaders to share best practices and innovations on leveraging manufacturing data to create an optimized infrastructure, so we can all reduce economic and product waste, and build better products.

Anna Shedletsky, Instrumental, CEO
03/03/2022 1:00 pm
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Build Better 2022 Agenda:

1:00pm PST
Welcome and Opening Remarks

Speakers: Kane Hsieh (Founder of MachinePix) and Tobias Harrison-Noonan (Director of Business Development and Solutions, Instrumental)

1:10pm PST
First-Generation Product Master Class with Milo Werner

Speaker: Milo Werner (Former Tesla and Fitbit)

Moderator: Chris Luecke (Manufacturing Happy Hour Podcast)

The path to shipping a first-generation product comes with a unique set of challenges — and Milo Werner, former NPI leader at Fitbit and Tesla, has experienced her fair share. Having launched more than ten game-changing consumer products across her engineering career, Milo is now General Partner at The Engine, and joins Build Better to discuss the hard-won innovations for those dutied with their delivery. 

Milo will join Chris Luecke for the Manufacturing Happy Hour Podcast, live from the Build Better manufacturing expo. Their discussion will cover the small victories, major hardships, out-of-the-box solutions, and best practices for bringing first-generation products to market.  

1:50pm PST
Anna Shedletsky, Instrumental, CEO
The Criticality of Manufacturing Data as Infrastructure

Speaker: Anna-Katrina Shedletsky (CEO, Instrumental)

Tableau, Excel, Zendesk, Salesforce. Each of these tools represents a type of data infrastructure built for a specific need – yet none were built with manufacturing in mind.

Engineers use manufacturing data and last-minute heroism as they play the parts of data scientist, inspector, forensic investigator, and whatever else the build requires.

As companies strive to build better products under increasingly challenging conditions, manufacturing data is paramount. Manufacturing data infrastructure needs to be created to capture, categorize, and synthesize multiple data sets from across your line so remote engineering teams can continue to innovate and deliver quality products. Instrumental is launching our new Metrics feature to solve this problem – by bringing in all of your disparate build metrics into one actionable hub. Whether you are capturing data from voltage tests, drop tests, antenna performance, anomaly inspection – Instrumental can turn your data into corrective actions. Register now for the full recording of our virtual manufacturing trade show. 

2:20pm PST
Lessons From Building the World’s Most Reliable Products

Speakers: Dave Nazzaro (Insulet Corporation), Michael Sternowski (L3Harris), and Matt Ohline (Intuitive Surgical)

Moderator: Samuel Weiss (CTO, Instrumental)

Reliability is paramount when someone’s critical safety or infrastructure is on the line. Whether you’re building an intravenous medical device or a tactical radio, the product must work 100% of the time.

The teams who build these products achieve their missions because they operate differently. We’re bringing together a panel of experts on building mission-critical products who will discuss tactics and best practices for finding and fixing every issue before their products hit the field. Join Dave Nazzaro, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering and Advanced Technologies at Insulet Corporation, Michael Sternowski, Interim Director of Quality at L3Harris, and Matt Ohline, Senior Director, Automation, Equipment and Test Group at Intuitive Surgical, for a live panel moderated by Sam Weiss, Instrumental CTO and ex-Apple engineer, for actionable takeaways for leaders who want to level up their product reliability. 

2:50pm PST
Cloud Infrastructure Panel with Google, SAP, and NVIDIA

Speakers: Simon Floyd (Google Cloud), Alok Kapur (SAP), and Piyush Modi (NVIDIA)

Moderator: Stephen Nellis (The Information)

As we enter the third year of the pandemic, there is an entire generation of engineers who haven’t gotten to spend significant time on the factory floor. How has this impacted their ability to build better products more efficiently? What tools have emerged that nimble engineering teams are utilizing to continue to ship products on time? 

Moderated by The Information’s semiconductor and supply chain expert, Stephen Nellis, join a live panel discussion to answer the question: Why should electronics leaders think of their manufacturing data as core infrastructure?

They’ll be joined by leaders from Google, SAP, and NVIDIA on the acceleration of digital transformation in a time when engineers of all experience levels haven’t set foot on a factory floor in years.

Build Better is a one-of-a-kind manufacturing conference that gives attendees a chance to ask questions to our presenters live – so sign up today!

3:35pm PST
The Advent of Hardware DevTools and What Makes a Great One

Speaker: Kane Hsieh (founder of MachinePix)

Accelerated by the pandemic, there’s been an emerging category of hardware developer tooling for everything from PCB layout, assembly optimization, and logistics management. 

As one of the premier investors in Hardware DevTools, Kane Hsieh founder of MachinePix, will share the core elements of what makes a great tool and what hardware developers have to look forward to as this space continues to mature. This unique presentation is just one of the many reasons you should attend our virtual manufacturing trade show. 

4:00pm PST
Breakouts
Sustainability: From Intention to Execution

Speakers: Bill Carter-Giannini (Ronin Product Development Labs), Dan Kennedy (Ronin Product Development Labs), Nichole Rouillac (level), and Kyle Wiens (iFixit)

Sustainable design methodologies that anyone can use to build better products for people and planet. Let’s discuss making sustainable design tools accessible to all so they can be applied to even the smallest organizations, or at any scale. Redefining your success, by focusing on the most critical items and implementing the 80/20 rule with an eye toward EVT/DVT/PVT.

Whose Data is it Anyway?

Speakers: Dave Trail (Arch Systems), Rajeev Bhalla (Clip Automation), and Carl Hung (Season Group)

Moderators: Philip Stoten (SCOOP) and Terry Arbaugh (SEACOMP)

The manufacturing process generates a lot of valuable data, a lot of it latent and untapped. Design data, product data, process data, worker data, product telemetry, return data… Everyone in the process can benefit from this data, but who gets to decide who does? The answer really matters. 

Data transparency may feel like a radical shift in an industry that has traditionally not shared data between suppliers, EMS providers, and brands. But manufacturing data is the fuel that powers the optimizations of the smart manufacturing ecosystem. Every stakeholder in the ecosystem should contribute to capturing that data and have the ability to derive insights and value from it. 

In this discussion co-hosted by Fast Company writer and SCOOP founder Philip Stoten and VP of Sales and Marketing at SEACOMP Terry Arbaugh, the panel will explore the ownership of data, best practices for sharing data today, and the mutual value that can be achieved by the judicious collection and open sharing of operational and process data.

4:35pm PST
Breakouts
How to Attract the Next Workforce with Automation and Robotics

Speakers: Jake Hall (Manufacturing Millennial) and Chris Lueke (Manufacturing Happy Hour Podcast)

With the silver tsunami of thousands of Boomers retiring from the manufacturing workforce and the lack of future younger generations entering manufacturing, companies are scrambling to fill production demands, keep equipment running, and automate their organizations and processes. As a whole, we must work together to engage with the general public to change misconceptions of manufacturing and drive awareness to new solutions such as digitization, automation, and robotics. In this breakout, we will discuss how manufacturers are finding success in:

  • Engaging with existing workers on upskilling and job satisfaction.
  • Leveraging robotics in new ways that is beneficial to manufacturers and the workforce.
  • Adapting new types of automation from the Smart Factory
  • Building excitement in the next generation for manufacturing careers.
5:05pm PST
Closing Remarks

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Anna Shedletsky, Instrumental, CEO
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky
CEO and Co-Founder of Instrumental

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the CEO and founder of Instrumental Inc., a manufacturing data company creating the first end-to-end optimization platform for product teams building electronic devices. Instrumental combines AI-powered defect and anomaly detection, failure analysis tools, complete issue monitoring and reporting, and production-quality in-line tests into a single end-to-end optimization platform.

Anna-Katrina holds two degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. Before founding Instrumental, she led system product design for the first-generation Apple Watch program, and contributed to several generations of iPod mechanical design.

Simon Floyd
Director for Discrete Manufacturing Industries at Google Cloud

Simon is the Industry Director for Discrete Manufacturing Industries at Google Cloud. He is responsible for defining industry needs, new solutions and facilitating opportunities for Enterprises to innovate across their value chain.

Simon has 30 years of experience in product design, manufacturing, and industrial software. Prior to joining Google Cloud, he led Industry Services Delivery for Manufacturing, Retail, and Automotive at Microsoft.  He has held senior roles at Cadence Design Systems and Actify defining solutions for engineering and manufacturing.  Simon commenced his career designing industrial products throughout the Asia Pacific and North America.

Simon holds a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from Monash University Australia and has patents in solar power generation and product lifecycle management software.

Chris Luecke
Podcaster and Media Maverick

Chris Luecke is a Podcaster, Marketer, and self-proclaimed “Media Maverick” in the manufacturing industry. As the host of the podcast Manufacturing Happy Hour, Chris interviews leaders in the industrial sector to simplify and explore the latest trends and technologies impacting modern manufacturers. After an 11 year sales career at Rockwell Automation, Chris now helps manufacturers tell their story to their ideal customer audience through videos, podcasts, and social media.

Stephen Nellis
Reporter at The Information

Stephen Nellis covers semiconductors and hardware for The Information, a tech-focused premium subscription publication, from its San Francisco bureau. Before that, he spent five years at Reuters covering Apple and semiconductors, where he broke news on Apple’s car project and dove into the company’s growing dependence on China’s supply chains. He also covered the growing conflict over advanced technology between the United States and China with stories about U.S. government efforts to prevent Chinese access to advanced chipmaking tools such as extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Before joining Reuters, Stephen spent two years at The Information in its early days. Before that, he was the technology editor at the Pacific Coast Business Times in Santa Barbara, California. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Stephen hails from small-town Missouri.

Michael Sternowski
Director of Advanced Manufacturing for Communication Systems at L3Harris

Michael Sternowski is Director, Advanced Manufacturing for Communication Systems of L3Harris Technologies. Communication Systems covers a broad portfolio, including tactical and airborne radios, night vision technology, and defense and public safety networks.

Michael assumed the position of Director, Advanced Manufacturing in 2019. They are responsible for driving manufacturing excellence for 6 manufacturing sites in the United States with a focus on the incubation and deployment of technologies to attack costs of poor quality and drive productivity.  

Previously, they served as Senior Manager, New Product Introduction leading a team of process engineers responsible for launching next-generation tactical radios. 

In February 2016, he was selected to serve as Deputy to the Chief Global Business Development Officer focused on managing day-to-day operations and reporting.

In November 2013, Michael was product line manager for a family of international handheld and airborne products.

Michael joined L3 Harris Technologies in 2004 and entered the mechanical engineering department. From there he held roles of increasing responsibility in product line management and international account management.  He is a graduate of the L3 Harris rotational development program.

Michael has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Villanova University.  He also received a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Rochester, Simon School.

Milo Werner
Former Tesla and Fitbit

Milo Werner is a General Partner at The Engine. Before The Engine, she was at Ajax Strategies where she was a Partner, leading mid-stage investments across energy, transportation, agriculture and industrial applications. Milo joined Tesla in 2007, at a critical stage in the company’s trajectory, where she led New Production Introduction, launching Model S powertrain (battery, drive unit, and all the stuff in between), dual motor, drivers assist and, most importantly, Model X. The company grew from 200 to 12,000 during her tenure. In addition to Tesla, Milo ran New Product Introduction at Fitbit, launching four factories in China and transitioning the company to fully automated production, and led engineering and product for micro-grid company Zola, a startup providing distributed energy to over a million families in Sub Saharan Africa. Milo earned a B.S. in geology and civil & environmental engineering from the University of Vermont, as well as a M.S. in civil engineering and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She sits on the boards of the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, AxelHire, Infinitum Electric and is a Board Observer for Lime.

Dave Nazzaro
Senior Director of Hardware Engineering and Advanced Technologies at Insulet Corporation

Dave Nazzaro is the Sr Director of Hardware Engineering and Advanced Technologies at Insulet Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. For the last 17 years, he has progressively risen through the ranks, having worked for various organizations, including Fluident, Apple, and now Insulet.

Dave was on the product design engineering team responsible for the development and launch of the first generation Apple watch. At Insulet, he currently leads Electrical, Mechanical, and Materials Engineering Groups. The team supports advancements within current platforms, with a core focus on new product innovation.

Kane Hsieh
Founder of MachinePix

Kane is a Partner at Root Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund that invests in technical teams at the earliest stages. He primarily invests in better tools and software for engineering teams. Kane also runs @machinepix, a popular engineering content account and newsletter.

Samuel Weiss
CTO and Co-Founder of Instrumental

Samuel is the CTO and founder of Instrumental, a manufacturing data company that uses machine learning to find anomalies on consumer electronics assembly lines. He has degrees in mechanical engineering and mathematics from MIT and Stanford University, and went on to work as a Product Design Engineer at Apple. During his three years there, he led the development of the Taptic Engine, a new kind of micro-mechanical vibration motor. Samuel spent significant time on some of the most advanced and most rudimentary factory lines in Asia. He has experienced the pain of solving complex mechanical system problems under tight deadlines, and is passionate about using machine learning technology to modernize manufacturing.

Matt Ohline
Sr. Director of the Process Engineering Endoluminal Business Unit at Intuitive Surgical

For the past 7 years, Matt has lead Intuitive Surgical’s Automation, Equipment, and Test group, which is responsible for the manufacturing equipment supporting the da Vinci robotic surgical system’s instruments, accessories, and endoscopes projects.  For many of Intuitive’s products, production volumes reach into the millions per year and quality requirements are extreme – resulting in many exciting challenges.  Prior to joining Intuitive, Matt taught Mechatronics in Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering Dept., and co-founded two medical device start-ups:  Neoguide Systems and Treus Medical.

Alok Kapur
Global Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success at SAP

Alok leads a global business development team driving growth through strategic alliances and partnerships across SAP’s entire product portfolio, and for core strategies such as Industry Cloud. Alok and his team have an amplified focus on newer innovation areas like AI, ML, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, etc. and the implications for SAP, and the enterprise software market.

Alok has over two decades of experience in the enterprise software arena at startups and Fortune 500 organizations. Alok’s focus during his time in the technology industry has been on building businesses from the ground up, identifying product and partnership opportunities, opening new global markets for organizations, and growing existing and new revenue streams with an entrepreneurial drive. Prior to joining SAP, Alok held a variety of senior roles at Microsoft, Motricity and Experian.

Alok holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pune, India, and an MBA in Business Strategy, Marketing, and Information Technology Management from the University of California, Irvine.

Piyush Modi
Business Development & Chief Strategist at NVIDIA

Piyush Modi is responsible for Global Business Development/Strategy for Industrial Sector at NVIDIA. He is actively engaged with major industrial companies and related research labs to conceive and realize Industrial AI enabled solutions. He is focused on developing business and ecosystem around real time deep learning training/inferencing platforms, architecture and related algorithms for the Industrial use cases spanning inspection, predictive maintenance, video analytics, logistics, automation and Conversational AI.

Prior to NVIDIA, at Sentient.ai as a VP of engineering, he led a team to build the industry’s first distributed AI (Deep Learning and Evolutionary Algorithms) platform to serve the model building pipeline needs for E-Commerce, Financial and Industrial verticals to harness dark compute cycles from 1000s of GPUs available globally.

Previously, over 20+ years of his career he has held CTO, Sr. VP, and Head of Research Lab positions at companies including GE Global Research, BT, Ribbit, IP Unity, and AT&T Bell Labs, to deliver major industry forming outcomes leveraging Speech Recognition, VOIP, IoT, and Deep Learning technologies.

Piyush holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Speech Recognition) from Rutgers, New Jersey, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, India.

Bill Carter-Giannini
Co-Founder and CTO of Ronin Product Development Labs

Bill is co-founder and CTO of Ronin Product Development Labs. His superpower is connecting the dots between disparate data points to define strategic paths to efficient execution.  Listening and adapting are core elements of Bill’s development approach that lead to highly successful outcomes. Prior to starting Ronin, Bill worked at a number of small design firms, startups, and not-so-startups (Fitbit and Amazon) throughout the SF bay area.

Bill’s management focus includes investments in the passion of his team – allowing for a growth mindset at all levels.  Ronin’s overarching goal is to be a leader in product development focused on improving the lives of people and the health of the planet. To this end Ronin invests in education, process framework and network development, and manufacturing execution, all with a strong willingness to share to deliver a larger impact.

Bill is focused on building teams where highly talented leaders and engineers are able to plug into their superpowers and identify a direction, create a path, and have the support and coaching necessary to achieve their definition of success. Clients as collaborators are the end benefactors of the continual improvement and iterative learning environment being actively built at Ronin.

Dan Kennedy
Studio Principal and Partner at Ronin Product Development Labs

Dan Kennedy is a Studio Principal and Partner at Ronin Product Development Labs, an international engineering consulting firm with a strong presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. With over 20 years of product development experience and driven by a strong passion for creative collaboration, Dan leads Ronin’s sustainable design team whose focus is on developing circular economy solutions for a diverse range of clients in areas including consumer electronics, waste stream recovery, and renewable energy.

Nichole Rouillac
Founder and Creative Director at level

Nichole is the Founder and Creative Director at level. She has deep experience taking complex new technologies and shaping them into forms that foster emotional connections between consumers and brands. 

Nichole’s expertise in manufacturing means production feasibility is considered from day one, and her minimalistic approach leads to timeless designs that delight users and live seamlessly in their environments.  Her work has helped create new industry categories and propelled products into the global spotlight. 

As a mother and female leader, Nichole strives to bring balance to her own business and to the practice of industrial design at large. The products designers create touch millions of lives – women must have a bigger impact on shaping them. Her passion for creating a diverse and inclusive industry led her to serve as Chair of IDSA’s Women in Design SF for a number of years.

level was listed as #03 in FastCompany’s Most Innovative Design Companies of 2021 and Nichole and level’s work has garnered wide recognition, including design awards such as IDEA Gold, Red Dot, iF and Spark Platinum. Before founding level, Nichole was Creative Director at HTC, and led teams at One & Co. and NewDealDesign. www.leveldesignsf.com

Kyle Wiens
CEO of iFixit

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of iFixit, the free repair manual. He’s dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. The Right to Repair campaign has, so far, successfully legalized cell phone unlocking and tractor repair. Kyle regularly speaks on design for repair, service documentation, and the environmental impact of manufacturing. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Wall Street Journal.

Philip Stoten
Fast Company Writer and SCOOP Founder

Philip Spagnoli Stoten started his career in electronics as a PCB designer in the 1980s and held numerous roles in manufacturing including Production Director of a UK plc making industrial computer equipment. Midway through his career Philip switched to journalism and content marketing. He founded EMSNOW and SCOOP and he currently write for numerous industry and business publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company.

Terry Arbaugh
VP of Sales and Marketing at SEACOMP

VP Sales & Marketing at SEACOMP where we design and manufacture hardware for industrial, medical and consumer product innovators. I have over 20 years of product development and technical sales and marketing experience. Co-Host of the best Hardware room on Twitter Spaces (formerly on Clubhouse) on Thursdays at 7pm PT.

Dave Trail
VP of Sales at Arch Systems

Dave Trail (He/Him) is VP of Sales at Arch. He is an accomplished industry professional with over 25 years of experience in electronics manufacturing equipment, machine connectivity, and manufacturing execution systems software (MES). Throughout his career, he has been a pioneer and proponent of the evolution of manufacturing from Industry 3.0 to 4.0, big data analytics, AI/ML, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT).

While working with most of the largest global manufacturing corporations, Dave possesses a vast knowledge of the challenges manufacturing companies face and the opportunities inherent in evolving their organizations to capitalize on tomorrow’s technologies today.

 

Jake Hall
Manufacturing Millennial

Jake Hall is a Business Development Manager for Feyen Zylstra, but is better known as the Manufacturing Millennial.  His passion is to advocate manufacturing, automation, digital transformation, and skilled trades by helping revolutionize the way people and companies present through social media.

With 32,000 followers and 10,000,000+ views on his content, he ignites conversations about the latest in manufacturing and automation to excite the current and future workforce on the impact this industry has.

Rajeev Bhalla
Co-Founder & CEO at Clip Automation

Rajeev Bhalla is CEO and co-founder of Clip Automation, who are redefining the way automation is developed and deployed in the manufacturing world, with a focus of covering data to insight that drives value. Rajeev has more than 25 years of automation experience, including Vice President of Automation at JUUL and six years in operations at Apple.

Carl Hung
President and CEO of Season Group

Carl Hung is the President and CEO of Season Group, a global EMS delivering value to OEMs through full stack design and manufacturing services in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Carl’s career started in the Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, where he worked intimately with aerospace, automotive, medical devices, computer hardware, music, security, safety, industrial, satellite, telecommunications and niche consumer companies.

Rustem Feyzkhanov
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Instrumental

Rustem Feyzkhanov is a Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Instrumental, where he creates analytical models for the manufacturing industry, and AWS Machine Learning Hero. Previously he worked at Astro Digital where he created analytical models on top of satellite imagery.

Rustem is passionate about the use of cloud infrastructure for AI/ML applications and is the author of the courses and book “Serverless Deep Learning with TensorFlow and AWS Lambda” and “Practical Deep Learning on the Cloud”. Rustem also presented at O’Reilly Software Architecture, AI DevWorld, MLOps: Production & Engineering and numerous conferences and meetups on the topic of using cloud native infrastructure for Deep Learning training and inference pipelines.

Also, he is a creator of a few popular open source repositories on GitHub about AWS infrastructure and usage of it for deep learning applications. His current interests include using serverless for AI/ML applications, solving challenges when building production ML workflows using AWS infrastructure.

William Greenbaum
Solutions Team Manager at Instrumental

A mechanical engineer by trade, Will worked at Apple as a Product Design Engineer on a wide range of products from the Apple Watch to Mac desktops. He learned how difficult it is to get a new product to market and now uses that experience to make it easier for everyone else. After more than 2 years at Instrumental, he is excited by Instrumental’s growing abilities to connect different types of data and eliminate the need for Excel in day-to-day life.

Tobias Harrison-Noonan
Director of Business Development and Solutions at Instrumental

Tobias Harrison-Noonan grew up as a mechanical engineer at Apple, and experienced the waste and inefficiencies of hardware development as they brought multiple generations of Apple Watch and iPhones to market. At Instrumental, he sets out to solve those inefficiencies through a combination of assembly data, cloud infrastructure, and machine learning that help hardware engineers find and fix issues faster. And now, in the era of remote work, we’ve become essential to our customers’ development process.