Espotel's new office in Lahti !

Espotel has had an office at Lahti for a short while now. Reason to open the office was based on two important things : First of all, we have long time customers in the area, and secondly a key person moved there. Thus it was an easy decision to open an office there, and start looking for more Customers and more personnel there.

I made my first visit to the office yesterday. It's actually quite fast to drive to Lahti, didn't take too long, just a bit over an hour actually. The motorway is fast but not that interesting though...

Right now we have just one person working at Lahti, but he's more like a one man band, able to play all instruments, and can do prestudies, software, automation and electronics design as well as project management too. Jouko even has a small lab there to do minor electronics assemblies and tests. 

The office location is in Salpakangas Hollola, with a short distance to many existing or potential customers in the area. We don't need a fancy Espotel Tower in Lahti yet, a down to earth approach is quite fine at the moment...

The first goal at the moment is to interview and select suitable new Designers to Lahti office, and of course to get more local customer base. We can offer work towards Lahti with Jouko being the local contact person and work being done at Espoo, Jyväskylä or Wroclaw for example. Next year it's likely that we'll have 3-5 persons working at our Lahti office.

R&D Subcontracting is local Service Business, and now we can serve our Customers at Lahti much better than before !

Early bird gets the best Consultant !

I've worked a while in the Customer interface for R&D Subcontracting company. It means also discussing of the Customers new needs, possibly starting projects and resource needs. The usual story is, that there's an urgent need of some kind, sometimes even a formal RFQ for a project. Quite often a prestudy, Feasibility study of some kind and sometimes a straight ahead Project offer or On-site Consulting offer is needed straight ahead. And the need to start the work is almost always : immediately. Or after a random decision making time of 2 - 8 weeks, and then after the decision the work should start immediately...

Well, that's just fine and one way of doing work and handling subcontracting. No problem there. When the task actually is ordered, the most suitable Project Team is then nominated or the best available Consultant is assigned to the work. Usually some of the personnel is fixed in the offer, but that is also subject to other projects and assignments starting. First comes, first served, unless there's some special reason to handle things differently.

But is it the only way ?

No. There are some customers willing to open the future a bit more. Telling, that there's a resourcing need or project starting for example within 3-4 months. And there's going to be need for some special skills if any. And then I can make a reservation for that need in good time and in advance. It's not binding, sometimes the need goes away for any reason, and the Customer is free to order the work from anywhere else or do it themselves, or the project may not have good enough Business Case. But if the work starts, I've been able to assign the best available personnel from a larger pool, as there's more time to decide that some person is kept in a shorter project to be available for the possibly coming project from our dear and important Customer ! If the project or assignment then starts, we can serve the Customer with our best offering and the passions of Designers and needs of the Customer meet as well as they ever can. If the task didn't start, then there's no hard feelings, that's just life.

So : get the most of Your Subcontractor by opening up Your subcontracting Road Map. Even a bit. It's not binding, it doesn't cost You anything, and You can only win. Of course, with all R&D subcontracting, it requires some Trust and good personal relationships, but it's worth to think about.

Even the legendary Irish High King Brian Boru had to inform his vassals well in advance to get the best possible warband to meet the raiding norsemen !

Rigid and non-agile subcontracted projects - where do they come from ?

Everyone wants to be Agile these days, and that's absolutely good !

But for the last 15 years or more, the trend in subcontracting in Finland has been towards more text in Frame agreements and more rigid purchasing terms for projects. And little mentioning of anything Agile... A lot of this culture originates from the Big N. It has (had ?) quite powerful and strict puchasing department and they have had interest and money to invest for legal departments costs to make up an agreement template that covers just about any risks and problems one can imagine. Now that the N has changed a bit, many of that talent pool involved in making that contractual jungle happen are available for other companies, that eagerly take what the big N got to develop during it's Glory Days. That's one legacy from the great days of the telecom boom, that is less frequently in headlines.

(Sorry, the pictures have little to do with the text, they just look good... Let me know if You recognize the hardware in pictures !)

But the thing is : The big N is also a highly competent in handling subcontracted projects in practice. There are seldom problems when the contracted projects scope changes. As they always do to at least some extent. It is understood that it may also change the costs upwards - not always of course, sometimes the change is for smaller and sometimes there are non requested costs that shouldn't be invoiced at all. There is usually enough engineering talent present to understand what's going on and management balls to make actual decisions and spend money when there is a reason for it. So, even if the contracts make really agile project models rare, changes can still be handled in projects.

But taking that culture along with the template for miles long Frame agreement is much harder... It's more easy to duplicate the paperwork and frame agreements to other companies than the cumulative engineering know-how and management competence from tens of years of developing world class products...

There are situations, where there is a strict Frame agreement, and lot of emphasis on getting the Project Order stuff done rigidly on paper. But also difficulties in handling the situation when the understanding of a projects content is updated. Because there are always holes in the Projects definition, its deliverables and overall things change and understanding of the needed end results do just change.

Of course it's not a requirement to be a world-class expert in order to start subcontracting a project. It's also the subcontractors work and responsibility to guide the process so that end results are available within the agreements. We should be in it together. R&D subcontractor gets a decent profit during development and the Customer gets truckloads of money when the products start shipping. When things go as they should. 

So what about Agile projects ? They do exist of course, but in the end they are not possible to be done in that mindset. You cannot give a fixed price, deadline and content for an Agile project that doesn'n even have a first product backlog available. And still it's widely understood that an Agile project model is often efficient and gives best bang for the buck in many cases...  So how is that kind of project even possible and how can they be agreed upon, guided, followed and delivered ?

It requires trust and good history between the companies, It requires more engineering wisdom or Product Management capability and less legal department involvement. And is this really a big risk for the Customer ? An open order book for doing anything for the subcontractor ? No. Because subcontracting is so strongly trust business, that a subcontractor just cannot break the trust and still prosper for any longer time period. If You don't deliver value for the customer, so that the results feel good even if the costs always are slightly too much, the happy story of the subcontracting company just  comes to a sudden end. (like happens to that T-34 in Portinhoikka...).

More important than a strict legal paper is subcontractor that has been and wants to still be around for a long time ! And understands the basic facts behind that.

But that my dear readers is a subject for another writing :)

Espotel Wroclaw office just got 5 years old !

Of the Espotel's total ~300 people, 70 persons are working at our Wroclaw office. The office is located quite close to Wroclaw airport, so You only need to get Yourselt to Wroclaw and You are almoset there.

The office location is not that fancy (well, none of our offices really are), but we like to keep a low profile, and concentrate on the essential :

And inside it looks like this :

It all began five years ago, when we had a golden opportunity to open our first non-Finland based location. Actually the search had began at least a year before that. At that time Espotel had already several offices in Finland, but none abroad. We had been searching for the right location and visited several possible sites in different countries and cities. As always, opening a Design Center requires several things to click : the location must have right kind of work force available and there should be good customer potential. It's beneficial if the location is in same time zone and culturally close. And it wouldn't hurt if we can improve our cost efficiency when providing services to Finland also.

Well, Wroclaw met all these goals, some better and some less so, some things have come as a surprise, positive ones really. The golden opportunity refers to the fact that we immediately had one largish and kind of friendly Customer available to start working on a new site from scratch. That made the investment decision easier, but by no means was enough to start the work. We also had a strong belief, that we are able to find other Customer in Finland for the service as well. But what has really been a bit of a positive surprise is the amount of Local Customers we have been able to find ! The Wroclaw operation started so that all the Customers were from Finland, but at the moment there is way more Local Customers. Which is a very much healthier situation. We are also able to support some of our Customers more globally now.

So, we are serving a lot of Central European companies that have operations also in Wroclaw locally. Those companies could never have been reached by operating in Finland also.

So, how has it been ?

Well, it always comes to getting the right people to work. 

First of all, the location has been a good one. Wroclaw is a really good location because of it's pool of talented engineers. It's a big University city, and one with strong embedded design focus also. And because of that, there are also several well known companies and their Design Centers, doing really demanding R&D projects. And thus a healthy pool of competent and experienced designers as well as fresh graduates also. There is also some competition of the best people naturally, which is sometimes less nice... At the beginning we had one Finnish guy working for half a year at Wroclaw, recruiting designers and most importantly, hiring the Site Manager. And since then the development of the Wroclaw site has been his responsibility. 

Culturally Poland doesn't feel too different to Finland. A Polish engineer is hard to tell from a Finnish one. Both are very much focused on facts and getting things done and problems solved. Of course there are subtle differencies which should be understood also. But nothing really spectacular or fancy. We both have our history in between superpowers, and it's left it's marks to people's minds. But now we are living a peaceful and modern times which hopefully continue to be so...

So does everything always go well ?

Quite well, but of course there are hiccups and learning to do. Neither does everything always go smoothly when doing projects within one country or one site purely. The longer the distance gets, the more work it needs to get people stay on same page. In my opinion the success has less to do with whether we do a project from Wroclaw to Espoo, from Kuopio to Espoo or from Espoo to Tampere, than it has to do with getting a right mix of people working on a project. We always need a good and well communicating technical lead designer or project manager close to customer, and then we should have focused teams working on a project. So that either the whole project or a clear part of it can be designed and tested on one location. Not everybody needs to be a Senior Expert, but there must be enough Seniority  within the project, and on location, to make the Delivery successful. Not Rocket Science, but sometimes hard work, especially when there are only a few people available and several projects needing to start :) That's when the Companys true Values are tested.

Anyway, Wroclaw office is our second largest one and doing great work, so I'll open a bottle of 5 year old Red Wine to celebrate it tonight !

PS. Excellent wine, and just in time for our Downton Abbey evening...

Techology 2017 exhibition

AUTOMATION • ELKOM • HYDRAULICS & PNEUMATICS • MECATEC • FINNTEC • TOOLTEC • JOINTEC

Technology 2015 exhibition is over and somewhat analyzed, so now it's time to think about next exhibition 2017. Is there still a place for the exhibition and how to get a message through there ? The Technology exhibition used to be just Elkom a few years ago, but since there's been added some other events as well, without the visitors really increasing significantly. Meaning that each of the events are a bit on the downward spiral. Looking at this years exhibition shows clearly, that three days for this event is way, way too much. There was quite a good attendance on Wednesday, some people on Tuesday also, but Thursday was a complete waste of time.

Espotel had a really nice booth this year :

Problem with an Engineering house in any exhibition is what to show for the visitors. And also how to even describe what the booth stands for and what are we selling... This time we had some really nice Customer references visible, Orion Diagnostica's go -device, Aidon's electricity meter, iCare's eye pressure meter and C2 Smartlights device. Of course we weren't selling those, they were there to show what kind of complete products Espotel has designed for it's customers. 

Because as interesting as Engineers actually are, the Products that we have developed for our Customers are usually even more interesting.

We also had our Production Testing platform Procket in important role and some demo systems showing emerging technologies, to motivate our Customers into adapting the latest technology to their products. This year the main focus was on Lora -radio demonstration, which included Arm Mbed and IBMs Bluemix as part of the end to end IoT -system. 

IBM and ARM also had persons available on our booth, to tell more how the ARM mbed and IBMs Bluemix can be used to connect Your products to Cloud cost efficiently and rapidly.

ARMs Neil Jackson and Espotels Jaakko Ala-Paavola also gave a speech on the subject : 

So, we had a good time, and had a lot to show on the exhibition. And there was a good amount of people visiting our booth. Mostly existing customers who came to visit and talk about things going on or having just started. Some new interesting possibilities did emerge as well. 

But, the big question is this : Is it worth the money and time spent ?

There's no easy answer to this. Counting the costs is easy, but counting the gain is a lot harder. Three days, with 2-3 persons on the booth costs, and there other direct costs as well. On the gain side there is positive visibility for audience visiting the exhibition, some actual new projects and a lot of time spent discussing with our Customers. 

The major problem with Exhibitions of any kind is, that they are perhaps a bit old fashioned events. Do You actually get something worth spending Your valuable working time by going to the event as a visitor ? I'm not so sure. Of course as a host on Espotel booth I'd like to think so and we did our best to provide real content for our Customers. But would I go to the Exhibition if we didn't have our own booth there ? Perhaps. But I guess I'd prefer a shorter morning coffee -type of event on some really focused interesting subject. On the other hand the exhibition is an important social event and as such also valuable. 

So, if I'll try to predict the future : 2017 there will be an Espotel booth on Technology Exhibition. Hopefully the event will be only two days. And we'll try to come up with ideas to make the visit to our booth even more rewarding to our Customers. Perhaps we'll arrange scheduled Technology demos on our stand and definitely we'll be even more visible with our network and partners. Because it takes expertise from several players to create the success stories that Finish Industry needs these days and in the future. 

Should we ask the Customer ?

Doing subcontracted design project to a Customer is always a tricky business. On one hand, the Customer always knows their own field much better than a Subcontractor could ever do. On the other hand, the Subcontractor is selected and used for their expertise on the subcontractors own field.

So what should be the Subcontractors attitude to providing ideas in how to make the product ?

 For there is always a myriad of alternative ways of deciding the details and even the broader design selections. Should the subcontractor just ask for all the details on what to do ? Or should the Customer be told how things are done ?

In my mind, the correct way is : Be a proud professional, whether You are in the Subcontractor or Customer role. Do appreciate, that You have unique knowledge and competence, but so do the others involved in making the end product truly valuable. In Subcontractor role, it is not Your responsibility to understand everything related to how and where the end product will be used. But it is in Your responsibility to get a good understanding together with the Customer, and then be proactive in providing innovative design solutions that meet the real-world needs. Because it is this combination of Professionalism that really gives Subcontracting a value over doing things in-house within our Customers ! We are experts in the field of our design work and the Customer is really expert in their own business. These must be combined and it requires that the Subcontractor doesn't just wait for ready answers and doesn't just ask quistions on how the design details should be done.

The Subcontractor must give innovative ideas that are based on understanding the target of the product being developed, and being a professional in his/her own field of design.

So is this difficult, or is it so far from where we are now ?

Not really. It just requires this : In stead of asking from customer how a screw hole must be done, try to get an understangin what the hole is needed for and propose how it should be done. Maybe there really shouldn't even be a screw hole but something totally different !