

GetScale’s (YC S15) QC System Protects Factory Workers and Hardware Companies - kg4lod
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/24/getscale/

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jbapple
The article notes that:

> All information is permanently archived on GetScale’s servers, which saves
> workers from being held responsible for mix-ups that aren’t their fault.

This is presumably meant as a way to try and fix the issue referenced in the
article's title and hook:

> He realized that many line workers have very few legal protections, and if
> something goes wrong while an order is being produced, they often end up
> absorbing their employer’s losses by taking wage cuts or deductions even if
> they aren’t at fault.

Is there any actual evidence that in legal regimes with inadequate worker
protections, increasing transparency of the workers' labor efforts improves
fairness or pay for the workers?

~~~
kg4lod
That's a very thoughtful comment!

You're right in that if the factory wants to misbehave and the owner/GM is a
tyrant, you aren't likely to directly impact worker treatment (we have in-
house auditors in China that can check on the factory for you if you have that
specific concern). Fortunately, the overwhelming number of factory owners/GM's
are fundamentally decent people caught up in difficult circumstances.

Typical contracts are structured 30% deposit and 70% when it ships. Margins to
the factory aren't 70% so they wind up quite leveraged. Most of the scenarios
I saw came out of the factory not understanding or executing on the customer
requirements correctly. If they build units and the customer rejects them,
they have to cover those material costs so they can repair or otherwise try
again. This tremendous financial pressure causes otherwise good GM's to cut
corners every possible way they can to try to keep the lights on.

GetScale impacts worker treatment in several ways:

(1) it eliminates waste and errors that result from misunderstandings in
customer acceptance procedures. After deploying us in a factory you just don't
encounter thousands of bad units because the factory is confirming against the
exact acceptance procedure as you go (instead of build a lot, ship, customer
receives and rejects).

(2) it is possible to audit your suppliers and if you do that, GetScale
provides the ground truth of which workers were working at which stations when
and for how long (down to the millisecond!). Since you have to login-logout to
do any work our records are very accurate.

(3) it enables you to vote with your dollars. Without invasive monitoring
(like GetScale) it is very difficult to determine which factories are "good"
because reputation is easy to coopt and places like Alibaba can be bought.
GetScale data collection is automatic and the data is held off-shore (in the
US). We already see factories in China using GetScale as a selling point to
foreign clients since it provides quantitative proof of their compliance and
performance. A factory that is willing to be open about its performance and
let you document workers on the line is the factory proud of its worker
treatment, not the one trying to hide it.

As to studies, I have seen some in both the psychology of management
literature and the manufacturing management literature, but as to specific
citations I will need some time to dig them out of my research notes.

In any case, I hope I've answered your concerns. If I missed anything, please
follow-up!

~~~
jbapple
The owners who are "fundamentally decent" are the ones abusing the workers?

Of the three ways that GetScale "impacts worker treatment", the first doesn't
mention workers at all, the second only improves record quality (not worker
treatment), and the third depends on foreign buyers to demand good treatment
of workers (which there is no evidence they'll do) and does nothing to address
the single abuse mentioned in the article, higher water bills for
"unproductive" workers.

This story seems set on the idea that increasing productivity (benefiting the
owners directly) will increase conditions for the workers. I think it's great
to increase productivity, but the link to worker conditions still seems like
magical thinking, and as a result I find the linked article deceptive.

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pjc50
Interesting. So there's two parts:

\- a set of communications tools for enabling the assembly workers to have
good assembly instructions. This is an iterative process as the design
engineers watch the assembly.

\- video is now cheap enough that you can video _all_ the assembly and trace
QA failures to a particular step.

There's a generally humane tone to the writeup, one of giving people the right
tools to do a good job. If it can improve DfM that's great. The number of
devices I've had to take apart with ridiculous numbers of screws or blind
clips is too high. On the other hand, who among us would accept continuous
surveillance every second of being clocked on?

~~~
soggypenny
Currently Upwork freelancers who are hired for hourly work get monitored for
time tracking called the Work Diary[0]. My understanding is that this is a
well-received value-add for their platform.

[0][https://support.upwork.com/entries/23141928](https://support.upwork.com/entries/23141928)

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kg4lod
Hi HN. I'm Jonathan, one of the founders. I'll monitor this thread all day to
answer questions. Thanks for taking the time to read about us! It means a lot
to everyone here at GetScale.

~~~
jcr
Do you think your camera system could (eventually) support some combination of
Computer Vision and Machine Learning to identify (some) assembly mistakes in
real-time and provide feedback/warnings to the assembler?

My thought is improving yields by reducing defect rates caused by those
hopelessly imperfect humans (like me) might be a great selling point for some
types of manufacturing.

~~~
kg4lod
That's a really neat idea!

You are describing a type of machine called an AOI (automated optical
inspection). It is a common piece of equipment in electronics assembly lines.
But AOI equipment is very expensive (~$250k+) and only works on a specific set
of products. For example, it doesn't work well when the product contains soft
or flexible surfaces, or has a highly non-planar shape.

GetScale terminals can be interfaced with AOI machines in the factory to
collect and store the findings along with our human-led inspections and
catalog everything by serial number and we do have ambitions to add AOI-like
capabilities to our hardware down the line.

Sounds like you have a project in mind. What are you working on? ;-)

~~~
jcr
I was trying to avoid running off into the endless weeds of details and
acronyms and talking, but oh well... ;)

I'm not very familiar with the more advance microscopy based AOI systems used
on silicon and chip level manufacturing (e.g. wire bonding checks). I'm also
not familiar with advanced AOI used in robotic assembly. On the bright side, I
am familiar with the comparatively "simple" form of AOI used on PCB assembly
lines.

With PCB's most of the AOI identification and spatial orientation issues are
solved through Fiducial Marks [1] and pattern recognition. Some PCB AOI
systems even read/record chip/board lettering with OCR, as well as handling
Bar and QR codes. Most of the rules and routines controlling the AOI are
consistently derived directly from the PCB design files, so there is little
need for custom setup programming on each new PCB run.

That last point is critical; The rules and routines are automatically and
consistently _derived_ from the authoritative data sources. Manually writing
every tiny step in the AOI automation routines for each PCB design would never
be time/cost effective, so it has never been done.

Given sufficient example 2D images, 3D scan models, or CAD files, doing the
object recognition and spatial orientation with OpenCV is reasonably straight
forward, even without fiducials. The extremely tricky part will be
automatically deriving rules and routines for the GetScale AOI-like
capabilities from authoritative data sources. If the human assembly task is to
attach the top cover and secure it with four screws from the other side, you
should __never__ need to manually write the AOI routine for checking the
existence of a screw in each of the four corners when viewing the bottom of
the product.

I'm sure you're really busy, so I think I'll stop here. ;)

If you want to know about the projects I'm working on, email would be a lot
better for me. My address is on my HN profile page. Also, I spotted a few
places where your website could use a little TLC, and it's better to point
them out through email rather than publicly.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker#PCB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker#PCB)

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abbasmehdi
All of the photos in the article show consumer electronic devices. Could I use
it with, say, furniture manufacturing / aftermarket car parts / leather goods
manufacturing?

~~~
kg4lod
That's a really good observation!

We think GetScale works great for anything that:

(1) Is valuable enough to warrant a serial number (unique ID)

(2) Has unit margin of at least a few dollars

(3) Is complicated to build or inspect, or has to be held to an extremely high
aesthetic standard (e.g. luxury goods)

That covers almost all of your examples. One counter-example might be T-shirt
manufacturing.

------
kveykva
Hi, I'm Colton - another of the founders. I'll also be here to answer
questions!

