GA 324 | From Software Engineers to Face Shield Manufacturers with Radek Pietruszewski

I've learned so much as a software guy kind of dipping my toes into manufacturing. And even if, like, I never actually work in manufacturing, like the lessons from this and just the fun will stay with me.

Today I'm excited for a pretty, pretty special episode. You know, last week we had Jeff Koss on one of my great, great lean thinking friends. He shared how Koss tailored had pivoted to producing face masks and face shields and, you know, to support this COVID 19 pandemic. And so today I have a very, it's similar but also very different guest. His name is Radek and he comes from Poland. And so Radek is a software engineer. He creates software for a living. And he and his colleagues, when the, I guess when the peak of the crisis hit there in Poland, and they also were short of ppe, like many folks were in the world, their healthcare workers were short of ppe. And so they figured out a way to produce face shields and using some resources that they had in their local community, they called it a hackerspace. I think in the States we might call it a makerspace. So I don't want to ruin it, but just one little. These software engineers figured, came up with the idea and a week later were producing face masks and they went on to produce over 55,000 face shields in the course of around one month. So it's pretty amazing what they did. And so, so very inspiring. And Roddick is just, as you'll hear, is really humble and really kind and obviously extremely smart. And so I just think you're going to really take a lot from this episode. I know I sure enjoyed chatting with them. So we are going to link to many things, including some pictures and videos and websites where they kind of show you physically what they did. That's going to be over@gembapodcast.com this is going to be episode 324324. So be sure to go check out the show notes for today and be sure to connect with Roddick and say thank you for everything that he did. And he says he spends most of his time on Twitter, so we're going to put that his Twitter link in, in the show notes as well. Again, GembaPodcast.com look for episode 324. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Roddick, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.

Oh, you're welcome. We were talking before we hit record. I said, boy, your audio sounds really good. And see you explained, I guess you have a Podcast. Tell us about your podcast. I know it's not related to Lean, but who cares? Tell us about your podcast.

It's a podcast with the dumbest name I could have think of and it's called the Podcast.

The Podcast. Okay.

It's literally the Podcast fm.

Nice, nice. What's it about? What do you talk about?

Being my co host who's also kind of my boss, kind of my friend. It's complicated. We talk about anything really. So often it's technology, sometimes it's marketing, or sometimes it's just our hobbies. It's a weird thing. Recently we talked about my adventures in manufacturing, I guess.

Well, yeah, that's what we're going to talk about.

Yeah.

Okay. Well that's really cool, man. Really cool. So what part of the world are you calling in from?

I'm calling from Poland.

From Poland. Okay, well, so yesterday I talked to Jeff Koss. He has a company in the state of Washington here in America and they make furniture for airplanes and stores and it's actually kind of like Nordic looking style furniture. Really nice. And anyhow they pivoted to produce face mask and also face shields, which I know we're going to talk about with you. So it's really interesting back to back, you know, one company in the state of Washington and now some software engineers in Poland doing very similar things. So let's talk a little bit about how things are going in your part of the world with COVID 19 in Poland.

Not too bad it seems like. Seems like things are fairly stable now. The daily numbers have been pretty stable for month and a half, so not great, but also not, not terrible. So that's good.

Well, and hopefully this, this episode won't come out until June where we're recording this on May 5th, but we've got several podcasts in queue already. But hopefully by the time people are listening to this, things are even better than they are today. So let's, let's hope for the best. Well, Radhik, I really appreciate you reaching out. I think we connected I guess over link first I believe and came to find out is really interesting story that you guys have learned how to get into the manufacturing world, but doesn't sound like manufacturing is your background. So maybe let's start there. Tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us about your background and then we'll get into your manufacturing experience.

Okay, so I'm a software engineer. That's what I've been doing for the past decade and more. I work at a small Polish company making software that Helps businesses get more organized. It's called nozbe. Couldn't be like anything to do with manufacturing, though. My reading habits are pretty broad. And just so happened that last couple of months I've been reading, actually rereading about lean manufacturing and Toyota production system. Listening to your podcast, I discovered it just by browsing for manufacturing related podcasts.

Great.

And then a couple months later, this. This crisis, this pandemic hit. And I'm. I'm a member of this, this association, this club. It's called the Warsaw Hackerspace. Okay. And it's a group of tinkerers. It's mostly programmers, actually software engineers. And it's a place where people come to just hang out, work on their projects, usually software projects. But you also have a workshop. We have a SCNC mill, we have a laser cutter. We have a bunch of machines, many of them really done on the cheap. Like the CNC mill we have is actually a 1981 Bridgeport.

Nice.

Bridgeport Series 1 MDI.

Oh, nice.

Converted by just a bunch of geeks with new motors, new controllers, everything, because that's what we can afford. And this opportunity hit and we were thinking maybe we could do something about it. And we saw on the Internet people were talking about 3D printing face shields, and it just didn't seem like the best method to do this. Right. If it takes two hours to print one holder, then how many can you make? Not that many, unless you have a whole farm of 3D printers. But our landlord is a printing company, actually printing cooperative, and they've been quarantining themselves and they have a die cutter, and normally they use it to build, you know, make cardboard boxes. And we thought, well, why can't, why couldn't we repurpose it to just cut whole face shields? And that's what we did. We made this design that only involved two pieces of pet foil that have been die cut. And this way we could build hundreds of these face shields per day. And it took us five days from start, from nothing, from an idea, through like 40 prototypes, laser cuts to die cutting, like 200 face shields per hour.

So if folks aren't familiar with die cutting or whatever, like talk us through, like, what does it look like? I know. All we have are our words. We can't show pictures or anything right now. So. All right, talk to us about like the process itself, like, what does it look like?

So there's a couple of types of die cutters, but the one that we have access to is it's like there are two parts. There's a wall on which you mount a die. And a die just has a bunch of knives cutting a shape and maybe some additional features to push out the cut feature. And there's a table, and on the table you can make a little fixture for setting up. Usually it will be cardboard. And then it will make this motion that will close the table and push it with couple of tons of force onto the die and then it will return. Right. And there will be some features to push it out on the table. And with some tweaking, you can also use it to cut and shape a little bit of plastic foil. Like thick plastic foil with PET foil. So we did that. And it just opens and closes. And with some technique, you can do it almost continuously. If it's cardboard and you have a skilled operator, then you just change out the blanks and the cuts products every three seconds or so.

Where did you get the raw materials like the plastic?

That was actually kind of interesting because not having anything to do with manufacturing. How are you going to get a literal ton of pet fo? Because we knew we were going to make thousands or tens of thousands of these, so we were going to need a lot of plastic. And we had no experience calling up factories to buy it. And PET foil during this pandemic became a scarce commodity. And it's very difficult to get it because people are building sneeze guards and all sorts of things with it. So if you just go to a random distributor, they don't have it, it's sold out. So you have to go straight to factories which don't promote themselves on social media to be reachable to just a bunch of geeks, you have to really find them. They're just part of the industry and we weren't or aren't.

So you reached out to them anyhow?

I guess, yes. And secured a couple of shipments. Had to get it from multiple ones.

How did you. Not the probe. But this takes money, right? You know, I mean, what kind of. I mean, how did. How did you navigate through that?

So we bought the first roll, just a single roll, like 100 kilograms of plastic, with just our own money. Okay. And then when we validated the design, we validated that it's going to work. We laser cut tens of prototypes. We sent them out to medical professionals around Warsaw. They told us, this is great, we want this, this is going to work. And then we started going to social media, promoting, asking for help, asking for material, asking people to promote this and spread this, to get the material.

Did you like ask for fundraising, anything like that or kind of.

Yeah. And people came and people donated. And thankfully, the material is not very expensive. Like, it's just pet foil. So it costs us something like $0.40 to make one face shield. And when we started, the demand was so high that the market price for a face Shield was like $25.

Oh, my gosh. That's a pretty good margin.

Yeah. Of course, we didn't sell it. Like, we gave everything away for free. We just, you know, did everything pro bono.

Wow.

But, yeah, like, to date, we have produced 55,000 face shields.

Oh, my gosh. And then this is like a month, right? Yes, 55,000 face shields.

And I mentioned we're software engineers.

Yeah, you're software engineers.

Right, Right.

Oh, my goodness, this is incredible. Now, are you sending them? Are they primarily just going to there in Poland or across the world or Europe or who's your customers?

So initially we started just asking around among friends and whatnot, and people said, okay, you know, if you can get me a couple dozen, that'll be great. Right. And we started just driving around mostly hospitals, big hospitals in Warsaw. It's a pretty big city. So, yeah, there's. There was plenty of demand there. And sending out a couple of hospitals around Poland where we have friends. But eventually we set up a form. It's Covid hackerspace, Pl. Where people just could say, okay, we need this many, and this is our data. And since we're the hackerspace, it took one guy, like, two days to set up a very simple CRM to manage.

Well, the software should be easy for you guys.

Come on. But it really was necessary because it's hundreds. It's like a thousand orders at this point. So it's plenty.

Wow.

Would be unmanageable in just like an Excel spreadsheet with the amount of time as volunteers we have. Yeah. And then we asked for help for like, okay, hey, does anyone know courier companies, like, shipping companies? Can you provide us with cheaper or free packages? Because we sent out like, 40 packages a day, and they came, and that was great. So there was another kind of piece of the puzzle that allowed us to. To make that 5,55,000 face shields for something like $15,000.

Wow. Wow. So what was the timeline from when you first had the idea that. And I mean, not just a. Oh, that'd be kind of interesting. Like, you really decided, let's try this. What's the timeline from when you decided to try this to where you delivered your first official batch? Not the prototype, but, like, we are in production now. What was that timeline.

Okay, so I think it started one Sunday where the idea came. On Monday we checked out. We asked permission of our landlords, hey, can we use your machines? They said yes. We checked it out, fixed up a couple of things. Tuesday we started designing and prototyping. Thursday, I believe we had the kind of final prototype delivered to medical professionals and ordered a die from a die maker who makes a by hand essentially. And we happen to have die cutter die maker at the same building. So that's easy.

Nice.

So that was my first experience, not just playing around with cad because I've been building stuff as a hobby, but working with someone who knows their stuff and knows this production technology. And he told me, okay, you need to change this, this, this and this, because that's not gonna work on it on a die. So there was some more tweaking and on Friday we got the die from him. And Friday night we started die cutting. And after weekend, on Monday we started shipping out first parts.

Wow.

Wow.

So that's incredible.

Seven, eight days.

That's incredible.

And then the continuous improvement started.

So talk about that.

Yeah. So at the beginning I messed up the die design because of my inexperience. I forgot about certain things that are different when you laser cut versus when you die cut and didn't correct the design for that. So I learned my lesson in manufacturing. If you make a proper tool, this one wasn't that expensive. It was like $250 the die and you mess it up, then you gotta get a new one. So as I mentioned that the face shield was two parts and the smaller part came out broken. It didn't work. So for about a week we still laser cut dose. So it was die cut the big part and laser cut the small part. Laser cutting is way slower of course, so we were limited to something like 100 pieces per hour.

So yeah, bottleneck was definitely your laser cutting process then.

Yeah, yeah. Then it took like half a week to get the fixed up die and then we immediately sped up to 200 parts per hour. But then there was a number of problems with this process. So the face shield had a number of little holes and the knives on the die that would cut those holes, they would get clogged up. And there were so many features, we didn't have experience with this technology. So we didn't think that with this many features, this many circles and little helper features on the face shield, the plastic is going to get stuck to the die. So you have to stop the machine and pull it out. Right. It doesn't just come back to the. To the table. So we would fight with this, improve it a little bit. And then what happened is that we got an email from an injection molding company here near Warsaw who said they would like to make face shields pro bono. And they designed and they made the die for the face shield frame, the part you'd put on your forehead and a customer kind of rubber strap, but they need kind of the window part. So we thought about it because we had a design that didn't need injection molding or 3D printing, but they said they want to do this pro bono. So we didn't know if we are to trust them at first, but we thought, okay, worst case scenario, we're going to lose $200 on a new die, but let's design just the window for their part and team up. So we did that, and they started injection molding the frames and the straps, shipping them to us. We'd die cut the windows, which would be just the outline and four holes for locating and mounting. Much simpler design from our standpoint. Right. And then since we had the contacts, the CRM and the shipping, we'd ship that. So immediately by doing that, we sped up the die cutting from 200 parts, initially 100, then 200 parts per hour, to 400 parts per hour.

Because you basically eliminated that laser cutting process, right?

Yes. And then eliminated a bunch of features that were necessary since you didn't need to die cut parts, just mount it on, like, solid plastic so the die would be much more reliable. It wouldn't get stuck, and the shield would just go back to the table.

Yeah.

So instead of taking 18 seconds, like, that would be the attack time for die cutting.

Your cycle time.

Yes. I'm sorry.

No, it's okay. Yeah. Anyway, so let's. If we were to kind of draw like a little process map of this, you know, within lean. I don't. Again, I don't know how much you've studied it, but we often talk about, you know, cycle time, takt time graphs or TAK time is the rate of demand, like what the customer wants. So, like, Toyota has a tack time of, you know, in normal times, obviously of 60 seconds. You know, every 60 seconds, a car is coming off of an assembly line. So their tack time, 60 seconds. So then they try to balance all of their individual processes. Processes to be no more than 60 seconds. Right. Otherwise, if you had a process over 60 seconds, then that cycle time is greater than tak time and we're going to have a problem unless we put more resources on it. So. So if you thought about that, what. What are the. What are the cycle times for the individual processes?

As for injection molding, this would happen at a different facility.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure.

Right. But I believe that they were able to mold two frames every 15 seconds and six straps every like 20 seconds or something. Something like that. And then initially we'd take 18 seconds for one window, the transparent part. We'd go down to 10 seconds, and then we doubled the die. We got a new die with two windows, and so we effectively halved it. So cycle time was, you know, one cycle of the machine would create two parts.

Yeah. Say five seconds now. Every part every five seconds or something like that. As far as that process goes. Now, what about, like. So there's assembly and packaging and whatnot. How did you work through that manufacturing process?

I wish I measured exactly the cycle time for those processes. So speaking of lean, the part that was the greatest inspiration to us was just the process Kaizen, and making each process faster and faster. Not always formally measuring it, but just simple things like fix what bugs you. We'd make. Yeah, yeah, exactly like we would have. So what we did was to simplify shipping. We'd make packets of 25. So if someone asks for 10, we just get them 25. If they ask us for, you know, 120, we'll give them 125. This would simplify packing. And the injection molding company would send us packs of 25, and we'd make packs of 25 of the windows.

So your lean terms, your pitch might have been 25. You know, we're going to move 25 a time down our process.

And, you know, very simple things, just, you know, silly things we've optimized. But sometimes it took us a week to figure that out. Like, we'd count out 25 parts and then use a little bit of paper tape to make it into a packet of 25. And then someone realized, okay, why don't we just weigh it? Like, each part has consistent weight, so that's way faster. So each little process got a little bit faster, a little bit faster. I wish we got to the level of lean where we would have gotten to proper flow. We didn't do that for a couple of reasons. One is that we did this as volunteers. So it was very hard to coordinate people to always have a proper team and do things at the same time. So we did end up batching, unfortunately, and couple of times we did get cut by it, like making 200 defective widows because the die cutter operator didn't notice that one of the holes got clogged.

Yeah.

And then we'd spend so much time drilling through those holes to fix up.

So. So it sounds like you are a believer in one piece flow. So I don't. So. So last week's episode that, that folks have listened to, hopefully was again, was with Jeff Cost. And again he's at this company in Washington. And these guys are prolific lean thinkers. I mean, they're arguably one of the best lean thinking companies in the world. Okay. And. And he's, he's told a story about how they were making, you know, face mask and face shields and whatnot. And his company is very familiar with one piece flow. Right. They're very familiar with all the waste that that is in manufacturing processes. And he explained a story that they too fell into batch mode, you know, initially when they were first getting going. So don't beat yourself up, you know, that, that you were batching because one of the best lean thinking companies in the world also fell into that trap. It's so easy too. Right. It's natural to batch for whatever reason. Right. So don't be. But it's interesting that you recognize it at least. So are you still. So it's May 5th here when we're recording this. Are you still producing face shield or have you stopped?

We've slowed way down the pace of new orders. Slowed down from something on the order of 10, 15,000 per week to maybe 1 or 2,000 per week. So we are able to mostly get back to normal, get back to our day jobs and maybe one evening a week we'd make a batch.

Yeah.

That would last for another week. And then there will be someone that every other day will come in to ship those out. But it's still possible that there will be more demand, if only because those face shields, they get foggy over time from disinfecting, like they're not too resistant to alcohol and they get scratched up. So after a couple of weeks, you might want a new one. But even if no one wants anymore, then I'm very proud of what we've done. Because the problem was not so much about money, it was about the lack of supply. Like the demand was so high that, you know, quote unquote, real industry just needed a couple of weeks to set up, you know, proper professional production lines. I know in Poland there have been shipments of some PPE from China. Well, that also takes weeks to figure out. So those are crucial weeks with lots of demand and no supply. And so we've supplied.

Yeah, you know, what did you learn from. And I don't mean, oh, I got better at die cutting. I mean, like, what did you learn about. What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about your, your friends, your colleagues, your community, the world? Like, what did you learn through this experience?

You know, I definitely got a lot of appreciation for manufacturing. Like, there are, there's a lot of challenges in it that are just very different from the kinds of challenges I face at my day job as a software engineer. Just completely different kinds of problems. And it's just if you're a software engineer and you're building a product, if you have 20 users or 50,000 users, it almost doesn't matter. Like, you can run that many on one computer, right? It's not a problem. It's just abstract numbers. But a significant portion of those 50, 55,000 face shields that we've manufactured went through my hands. And I got cuts on my hands to prove it. And I have an intuitive understanding how much work work, how much material, you know, how difficult it is to, you know, just things we wouldn't think about, like how to manage waste because there's leftovers. And yeah, we would just pile them up because like that's what we would do in the workshop and then throw away. But if you make 55,000, like, that still comes out to tons of waste and we didn't have space for it and it's difficult to deal with it. Right. So the meaning of scale is very different in physical manufacturing world versus with when kind of producing virtual things, bits.

And bytes over the Internet, right? Yeah, yeah.

It's really satisfying to build physical things. I know this because I've been playing around just building simple things, laser cutting, 3D printing, milling for my own. But at scale, you also get appreciation of both the fun and sometimes the hard parts of physical things. But it's satisfying that it's tangible, for sure. That's nice.

For sure.

And, you know, I've been reading up on lean manufacturing over the last couple of months, kind of just, just for fun. Like, it's just stuff like that sometimes piques my interest. And I've been trying to find parallels for software engineering that, that would be applicable to, to my own work. And I found some. But after this project, I, I would, you know, the meaning, the, the value of one piece flow, like the meaning that I got real understanding what it means, that it's, it's a sin to overproduce, right? Yes. Like, I hate. I heard the Explanation of it. Yeah, but I never before like drowned in face shields.

Yes, yes.

And just through living just a little bit, just for a couple of weeks, just as a volunteering project through some of these things, I noticed a lot of parallels to completely different industry with very different constraints than manufacturing that are actually applicable. Like lessons from Lean that slightly changed are actually applicable to my own work. Yeah. And that's very satisfying.

I know you said you've listened to some of the podcasts, have you? Back in the archives, we've had Richard Sheridan from a company called Menlo Innovations. They're based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, here in America. Have you heard of this company?

I don't think I have.

Yeah. So I'll send you a link to the podcast. And we've done multiple things with Richard and his company, but their software developers, software producers as well and, and, and, and, and very into lean and, and you know, agile, whatever you want to call it, you know, and, and yeah, so I think he might really enjoy. Well, he's super. First of all, an amazing human being, is one of my favorite people in the whole world. But he's. I think you would really appreciate hearing this. I'm going to send him this podcast for sure. But, but I think, I think you'll appreciate him. And for the things that they're also learning and how lean and just continuous improvement applies. They do things like they work two to a computer sounds crazy, but they have two software developers sitting at the same computer with one keyboard and one codes and one watches. And then after a few minutes they switch off and the other one codes and the other one watches. And you think, oh boy, this is so slow. Why would they do that? They could have double the productivity. But Richard goes on to explain that they know never produce defects ever. Like this doesn't happen.

Right.

Their products are literally perfect when they were. When they're released. And so there's lots of parallels between the software world and in continuous improvement right at large. So it's so interesting to hear, but I think. I'm not sure. Richard. I'll put Richard to the challenge. I don't know if he has ever went out and produced face shields or produced a physical product. So it's interesting hearing how people. Because I think a manufacturer would do well to go and understand software.

Right.

And see what you do well. So I just feel like it's important for people to broaden their horizons. Right. Get out of your little silo, your little part of the world and go venture into something totally different and see what you learn from it, right? Because you're going to learn something, I guarantee it.

That was actually the piece of my insight that I wanted to share. It's exactly this. I feel like I've learned so much as a software guy kind of dipping my toes into manufacturing. And even if I never actually work in manufacturing, the lessons from this and just the fun will stay with me. And I think manufacturing people would be really well off dipping their toes into software a little bit. Like, I watch these YouTube videos, seeing how people do machining and setting up production lines, and I see so many instances where my light bulb as a software engineer just lights up that, oh, this is actually like, it will be so simple to make this easier. Just a little bit of code. I'm not talking about complicated systems, just if you could have basic coding skills, just some scripting, just know how to connect a few pieces together. It's really not that hard to learn, like, basic coding skills. And it could save you a lot of time, money. Yeah, well, even if not, it's fun.

Yeah, well, for sure. And it's wiring different parts of your brain. Right. New neural pathways are being created. Right. When you learn different things. And you never know when those pathways. Pathways are going to interconnect one day. Oh, so good. This has been such a fun episode and so honored and proud. I mean, I don't even know you, but I'm proud of you, you know, and so thank you for doing what you did and thank all of your colleagues there. In America, you called it hackerspace. I think the term that we use here in America sometimes is maker spaces, and it's similar thing. You know, they have all this equipment and then you can come in and you can rent time or you can belong to the club, so to speak, and. And they'll teach you how to run machines and things like that. So. Sounds similar to what you're talking about. I would love to see that grow, you know, not just in a. In the world, you know, where everyone had access to this type of equipment and saws or whatever it might be, you know, and maybe there's classes and, you know, we're teaching people how to do things they don't know how to do. I think this would be a wonderful opportunity.

I agree completely.

Radek, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

I mostly hang out on Twitter radxp. R A D. Exp. I also have my own podcast at the Podcast fm and there's more info about this project on Hackerspace Pl that's the official hackerspace website. And on our social media we shared some videos of the die cutting process, for example, which is quite fun. Like seeing kind of the speed with which even an amateur operator just moves those blanks to cut face shield windows.

Well, let's do this. I want you to send me all the links that you have to your websites, to your podcast, to your, your Twitter, to everything. And we're going to put this in the show notes. So this is going to, so folks, just go to GembaPodcast.com this is episode 324 and we'll link to everything because you're never going to spell Roddick's name correctly in LinkedIn or Twitter, but we'll link to it. So all you got to go, just go. Gemba podcast.com324 so well, again, thank you so much, Radek, for everything that you've done and super, super inspiring. If anything that I think may be a key takeaway for me is just people just need to not have fear of taking action and trying to see what you learn, you know, because so many people sit around and say, oh, you know, there's not enough this, not enough that. Well, go do something about it. You know, go try, go back, build some, some people together and see what, what you and your community can do. You don't have to do it alone. You didn't do it alone. Right? And, but I think that's maybe a lesson that we should all just take away from this, is that, you know, hey, if Roddick and his software engineers can produce what, 55,000 face shields in a month, then there's not much the rest of us can't do as well. So, so thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. All right, well thanks a lot, lot. Take care and be well over there in Poland. Okay?

All right.

All right, take care.

Bye bye.

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