Winn Hardin: [00:00:06] Hello everybody and welcome to Manufacturing Matters, where we talk about the technology that’s changing the automation space and really affecting our lives around the world. And today, I’m lucky enough to be with an old friend of mine, Dave Spaulding. Is it president or CEO?

Dave Spaulding: [00:00:20] President and CEO.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:21] President and CEO of Smart Vision Lights, who is I believe North America’s number one lighting supplier at this point, which is pretty impressive. Originally founded by Matt Pinter for those of you who might know Matt’s name, engineer ex parallel. He’s quite the man, and Smart Vision Lights has really led the way in a whole lot of innovations. You know what, before I go down that road, two things. So first of all, we’ll talk a little about SVL here real quick. But I want to give you an idea of what we’re going to talk about today. And I’m really excited about this conversation with David because David is doing at his business what we tell our customers to do in industrial automation, right, which is to leverage automation to be able to harden your supply chain, bring your manufacturing more to your local domestic market, and also increase the rate of innovation. Because when you control your supply chain, your manufacturing process is pretty much from end to end. Then you have the ability to do special things on the fly. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Thanks for joining me today. Are you having a good week so far?

Dave Spaulding: [00:01:23] It’s been great. You bet.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:25] Beautiful.

Dave Spaulding: [00:01:26] Sure beats being in Michigan back in the snow.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:29] Yeah. If only for a couple of days. We’ll let you stay. You can stay. All right, so kick us off. Tell us a little bit about Smart Vision Lights. What makes you guys special?

Dave Spaulding: [00:01:37] All right, well, Smart Vision Lights was founded, as you said, by Matt Pinter and Bobby Seagraves back about 17 years ago now. And I think one of the things that makes us special is we have a guy who is a really good engineer who happened to be in the machine vision industry now for probably 30 years. And he just has a knack for design of new products and has a love for lighting. And that’s what got him into this business.

Winn Hardin: [00:02:06] And that’s Matt we’re talking about.

Dave Spaulding: [00:02:08] Matt Pinter. Yep.

Winn Hardin: [00:02:09] Yeah. And I mean for half a second I wasn’t sure if you were going to say Matt and Steve Kinney, because you’ve got a number of big names over at your company.

Dave Spaulding: [00:02:17] We do. We’ve got, I think, some of the best machine vision engineers that there is in the industry.

Winn Hardin: [00:02:23] Yeah. And he’s pilfered a lot of semiconductor people too. That’s what makes David such a strong, Smart Vision Lights such a strong company. So tell us a little bit about where you’re at in this process. I think it’s been going on for a few years in terms of bringing your production back to the States. So lay it out for the audience.

Dave Spaulding: [00:02:42] Yeah. So 2019, just before or pre-COVID, we decided to do some vertical integration at Smart Vision Lights and kind of start taking some of our manufacturing of some of the supplies coming to us in our own hands. You know, we saw lead times creeping out. We saw costs of shipping going up, and those kinds of things made us take a look at what do we need to do to be more competitive and be faster to market. So we decided to bring in some of that work ourselves and do it right on our own shop floor.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:24] So what does that entail exactly? Tell us a little bit about, because we’re used to machine vision camera makers, board makers,  other accelerators, especially in the physical space, not necessarily software space. But we’re used to them, you know, sending boards over to Slovakia, having them assembled over there, you know, you’re getting the dye from from China, from Japan. You’re putting those on boards over in Slovakia. It’s coming back to the States for distribution, whatever the case is. How is Smart Vision Lights, as much as you can share, how are you doing it differently?

Dave Spaulding: [00:03:57] Yeah. So that is one of the things that we took took in house right away is the SMT. So we put an SMT facility in and took someone with about 25 years’ experience from a very large manufacturing facility across town to get that started for us. And within about nine months, we had an SMT facility up and running at our location to supply all of our circuit boards and LED boards right off our own shop floor.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:33] And if I understand you’ve also got a nice line set up, not just one but a few, of CNC’s going crazy over there, making the enclosures and prototypes as well as production and prototypes.

Dave Spaulding: [00:04:46] Yes. So that’s the whole idea, right? We believe that our X factor is speed. So having the capabilities of making our own circuit boards and our own housings and other metal components. We can do that ourselves. So again, taking the lead time out of things and some of the cost out of things, being able to control those much better. But yeah, we went from being able to do prototypes in typically months into weeks. And even we’ve done it in days. So take a concept, a design, a concept, a custom design from a customer that says, “Hey, we have this great idea. It’s not anything we’re finding in the market. Is this something you guys can do?” And we can design that out. We can run the circuit boards. We can 3D print a housing, make sure they fit. Once we do, we can send that print over to a CNC machine and have that milled out in a matter of hours and put them together and send a customer literally a completed product within days.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:54] That’s fantastic. I mean, the question of how you handle custom lighting configurations is a challenge for folks. Any custom configuration. It’s hard to get back all that NRE, all those engineering costs. You know, unless you’ve got a customer with some really deep pockets. You’ve got an extensive product portfolio, pretty much A to Z in terms of machine vision, industrial lighting systems for high-precision and scientific applications, not the halogens or something crazy like that, but at the same time you’re still developing custom lights for when the application fits and the customer fits and fits your portfolio.

Dave Spaulding: [00:06:34] Absolutely.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:35] And I was going to ask what has that meant, but you’ve already just kind of laid it out for us right. You can take it almost in a couple of days, if necessary.

Dave Spaulding: [00:06:45] So we did just win a project, a couple of different projects, most recently one with a European customer who said, “I have a product I need. I don’t see it in the market. We’re giving the opportunity to you and to one of your friendly competitors to offer us what you think is a good product.” And we sat down, had lots of engineering meetings with them, and we won that business because we were able to get a product to them in a very quick amount of time. And they told us, they said, “You know, nobody can do this.  The reason you’re getting this business is not only a superior product but you did this so quickly.” And we were on a very short time frame that we were able to win the business. And we had that with another customer in the United States as well. They had a product that they needed some lighting for. And again, the same thing. They thought they had something, but they came to us and said, “We need a little bit of tweaking done to it.” We made some customized processes done to it and had them a light in a matter of weeks, a couple of weeks, and off to the races they went.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:01] Happy customers. Volume buyers, volume orders. That’s fantastic.

Dave Spaulding: [00:08:05] Yeah, we like that.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:06] And a lot of this came from, for folks who haven’t been up to Norton Shores, Michigan, just north of Grand Rapids, where Dave and the SVL crew are based, from a fairly extensive expansion project, probably also a little on the expensive side I’m going to guess, up in that area you’ve expanded, doubled your campus size, I think, pretty much over the last five years or so?

Dave Spaulding: [00:08:28] Yeah, we did. So we moved into this facility that we’re in today  in 2019, and we built out about 30,000 square feet, and the first couple of months of 2020, we said it’s not big enough, we need to vertically integrate. So we doubled that business, doubled the size of that building and put in the CNC facility.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:51] Is that the second building or are we looking at both now?

Dave Spaulding: [00:08:53] They’re connected to each other. So it’s all one long building now.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:57] I’m looking forward to seeing that in a few days when I get to go up and see the office.

Dave Spaulding: [00:09:00] We’ll see you there in February.

Winn Hardin: [00:09:01] And for anybody who goes by, make sure you swing by the golf simulator. It’s not to be missed. Does it also do swing analysis? Because that would be really helpful. I got some issues.

Dave Spaulding: [00:09:13] I haven’t tried that because my issues are beyond what that can help me with.

Winn Hardin: [00:09:17] This is why we need AI. Fix my chipping. I got a real issue. Got a real problem. Get the yips sometimes. So I understand that there’s been some impressive news not just on the new product line. I know you guys have been spewing out, you know, the DoAll two years ago was a big deal, which is kind of the most flexible VGR lighting system I’ve ever seen before. Can do just about everything. I don’t know if you want to talk a bit about that, but then there’s the, what do you guys call the invisible strobe now?

Dave Spaulding: [00:09:45] Hidden Strobe.

Winn Hardin: [00:09:46] Tell us a little about it.

Dave Spaulding: [00:09:48] Yeah. So a couple of years ago, we came out with what we call the DoAll light. Matt Pinter again saw the need for the robotics industry, growing like it was, like it is, and saw a need to put a light on the end of a robot, robotic arm, that can do more than one or two inspections. We have six different lights built into that light. So instead of having to have two or three robots doing five or six or seven different inspections, we have one light that can do that on the end of a robot and do multiple inspections. So that’s been great. It’s really picking up. And people are coming to it. They’re finding out about it. They’re testing it. They’re liking it. It’s working. So it’s becoming successful. Yeah, just last year at Automate we introduced Hidden Strobe, which is taking the strobe off from the factory floor. When you get into an environment where you still have workers in the area, some of them are complaining about headaches because of the strobing light and that sort of thing. So we felt as if being a safer environment, a safer product would be a good thing on the factory floor. And we’ve got some very nice customers, large customers using that now as well.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:05] So it’s basically just such a short strobe pulse that the eye doesn’t register. That’s outstanding. And of course, for those who don’t know, SVL was one of the first light companies if not the first company to bring the driver inside pretty much across their entire product line. And then did went to overdrive. They’re the folks, guys who were driving the strobe even more, above accepted limits in short time periods, handling that thermal load without having light degradation and failure. And then now we’ve got the super-high-speed MOSFETs that are driving this beast of a Hidden Strobe. Are you going to be rolling that out across — how many product lines currently right now leveraging that tech?

Dave Spaulding: [00:11:44] So right now we have that pretty much in our Lightgistics, our logistics products. But we’ll be moving that out through more of the products as it makes sense.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:53] Now I heard some other whispers of something else. Some other big news coming from SVL. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What’s up?

Dave Spaulding: [00:12:00] So just a few months ago, we signed a letter of agreement to do business with a company in Japan called Leimac, who is also a lighting manufacturer. And they just saw a product in our logistics products that was something they were very impressed with. And they said, “Hey, we would like to come together with you in a partnership to offer that in Japan.” And so we’ve done that. Those steps have been taken. The agreement’s been signed. That’s in progress. They showed it at a Japanese show just a couple of months ago. And it was a hit there. So we’re really looking forward to doing more work with Leimac as a partner and expanding that partnership likely both ways in the months to come.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:49] Cross-pollinate a little bit. So the portfolio is going to grow even further.

Dave Spaulding: [00:12:53] It sure is.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:55] Hard to believe. I wish we could get catalog business from you over at Tech B2B because that would be a very profitable project, a sizable product offering.

Dave Spaulding: [00:13:04] It’s getting bigger.

Winn Hardin: [00:13:04] Absolutely. Well, David, thank you for taking some time out today, joining me on Manufacturing Matters. I really appreciate it. Anybody wants to learn more about Smart Vision Lights, Lightgistics, that whole product line optimized for logistics, the Hidden Strobe, the DoAll, all the other innovations that SVL has been a leader in the light space for, go to smartvisionlights.com and you’ll see everything you need. I believe they’ve also got some really cool intelligence built into the website. Help you figure out your application, understand it a little bit more, with proper light selection. Or you could just get the DoAll and you’ll be covered no matter what it is you need to do, 2D, 3D, whatever. So check that out, and if you’ve got any questions or you’d like to join us here on Manufacturing Matters, you want to see some old episodes, go to Manufacturing-Matters.com. You can find our podcast on every major platform. And until our next episode, I hope that you’ll continue to do all that hard work out there and to realize that manufacturing still matters here in the U.S. and around the world. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.

Dave Spaulding: [00:14:01] Thank you sir.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:02] Have a good trip.

Dave Spaulding: [00:14:02] Thank you. You too.