Building a knowledge base in a startup with Unifize
Michael delves into the distinctive aspects of working in a compact company setting. He underscores the pivotal role of relationships, whether with colleagues, suppliers, or clients. Highlighting the importance of human-centric approaches in startups, Michael contrasts this with the rigidity and compartmentalization of vast corporations. His reflections shed light on the balance between the personal touch and systematic workflows in different company sizes.
Transcript

00:00 - 00:14
The thing about working at a small company is that it's the you know, it's about relationships, both with your coworkers, but with your suppliers, with your customers.



00:14 - 00:40
Right. When you have your people, the importance of people over systems becomes much more important. There's always there's always that balance, right? You can work for these huge 80,000, 80,000 person companies like Raytheon, where you have a very clearly defined role. It's very rigidly boxed. You only know the information for your particular project that you need to know.



00:40 - 01:07
I mean, literally your design inputs don't tell you anything about what you're actually working on in some cases for for good reasons. At a startup, it is it is very much about, you know, what is my what is my working relationship with my quality engineer, what is my working relationship with my suppliers? Right. Because at the end of the day, for a small company they live and die on, on relationships.



01:07 - 01:44
As far as the that ties into compliance, I mean, the thing is that everybody has to hold everybody accountable, right? We don't have the overhead or the or the systems that accrue over time that a rigidly enforce a set of standards as determined by the company. Right. And, you know, regulations are written from, at least in my opinion, from the sense that if you're doing everything right, everything that you should be doing, if you're doing a good job, you know, you will be very close.



01:44 - 02:07
If not already compliant with most standards. There was very few gotchas I've seen there in a tripped up. But the key thing is, is that you need to communicate right? I don't have a walking corpus of, you know, ISO 60601 in my head, right? I can't know everything about it, but between all the people at this company we do.



02:07 - 02:32
And so being able to communicate clearly with each other and being able to have information in a way that's easily accessible, that is flexible processes, is it is the strategy that you need to maintain, Right? If you try to enforce a rigid system on a start, it's just not going to work. There's no way, right?



02:32 - 02:40
You you know, there are days where I'll put on more of a quality engineering hat and maybe I'll go audit suppliers.



02:40 - 03:17
There are days where, you know, in the old days I'd literally was building robots in back. I was the technician. So I think that, you know, tying it back to regulation and I guess to Unifize is that the system that we have with Unifize reflects the scale and size of our company and the fact that it's so adaptive and we've changed it several times over already as we've learned more how to use the system and as we grow as the company is, that's really, you know, what we need as a company

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Transcript

But what we've known from what I experience was, is we were able to get there with the system. We still there with the system. The system has what is needed to provide us what we're looking for, because every company, admittedly, is trying to get compliant. If we educate people, if we get people the education that they need and to get over the fear factor, I think 90% of those things can be resolved because most people will go to what they're most familiar with.What I worked with from a different company, but they're not willing to sit down and look at what the demographics are saying. People are into social media now. People are moving fast into fast paced world. But technologies are still antiquated. So there's a disconnect here, right? So while we're moving at a fast pace at home with dragging at work, so why can't we continue that speed while we at work?If your supplier has issues and you're not informed on time, you want to have an alternate supplier in place. If your suppliers are not qualified, you may not know that that needs to happen. And so when you have an integrated system that speaks to itself and is giving you all this data, you literally have the pulse of the organization in your hands as an executive at a money bound access.

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