Michael Williams, Sovda COO, talks about Sovda's new custom engineering initiative and how Sovda is making way for custom projects.
Sovda Podcast Transcript
Episode 11
Nicholas Flatoff
00:00
Welcome to the Sovda coffee podcast this is Nicholas Flatoff technical brand ambassador joining you from as usual our Portland Belmont showroom where we’re almost wrapped up completely on our move and we’re happy to have ya stop by look at the equipment. We’ve got most of the Sovda equipment running and we’re good to go to show that off to the public. So pop on in if you’re in the Portland area. We’d love to see you. That's not what we’re talking about today though. Today we have a really cool project, actually, a new department that we’re adding to the Sovda lineup of services, and I’m stoked about it.
00:37
I’m here with Michael Williams he’s our COO and lead engineer and it’s his pet project so I’m actually just gonna hand it over to him and let him do the introduction, It’s pretty cool.
Michael Williams
00:47
Thanks Nick, so this month we are announcing a new branch of Sovda. It’s called Sovda Custom House and it’s a branch which will hold all of the custom engineerings that we do for clients. And so over the last three years of Sovda we’ve come out with a line of great machines that handle coffee from green bean all the way to roasted final product. However, over that journey, we’ve also gotten requests from different customers to build some custom machines or make some custom modifications. And we’ve always taken that on an as-requested basis but this summer we started talking about what would it look like if we spun off a new branch of the company to just really focus on custom work and so that’s what Sovda Custom House is. If you have an idea for a piece of equipment or you have a problem that’s unique and no other piece of equipment on the market solves it, than Sovda Custom House is for you.
Nicholas Flatoff
01:56
Yea, that’s amazing. I think we’ve all dealt with.. you know me on the roaster maintenance doing a lot of installs at factories and such and then you guys out there on the roaster side of things trying to fit something that’s a little bit of a comprise into either a space or a configuration that it really wasn’t designed for and some of the challenges and obviously having a custom engineering firm work on stuff like that would be really nice to have. It’s a little bit inaccessible and even then, you know, you’re starting out trying to basically explain a really unique situation to someone who is outside of the coffee world. And of course this is still Sovda right. This is still Sovda as a company and all of our brand goals and all of our brand promises so Michael what are some of the unique situations or the unique differences I’ll say in working with Sovda for a custom engineering solution rather than going to a custom engineering firm or an architect for layout.
Michael Williams
02:57
Yea, that’s a great question, Nick. I mean I would say that the biggest thing is that we’re just steeped in coffee and so our engineers, our manufacturing, our technical support installers, training staff, everyone we are very experienced with coffee. We’re in the industry every day and that can manifest itself in several different ways so I’ll just bring up a couple of examples on the engineering side but with engineering coffee systems there’s a bunch of different factors that I wouldn’t say are necessarily unique to coffee but they are specific to coffee and if you’re working with a general application custom engineering house or engineering staff or a contractor, they're really gonna have a lot to learn and frankly it’s gonna be a very steep learning curve to pick up all of these little tricks that we’ve developed over the last couple of years in handling coffee. And that’s everything from minimum angles to make sure that every single coffee bean gets drained out of a hopper to different best practices on making sure that surfaces are easily cleanable, serviceable, maintainable, making sure that systems fit together in a modular way so that they can be expanded over time if applicable. There’s really a lot of different factors at play that make a roastery’s job easier to commission and maintain a piece of equipment and we just have that experience.
Nicholas Flatoff
04:51
Yea and a side note you say commissioning and maintaining again as Sovda products you’re still getting the Sovda support team. Myself and Maxime to be able to do technical support on these custom jobs so it’s not a one off situation where its like oh! Boom! We made the thing now you’re on your own with it. You still have access to our customer support team and our sales staff to be able to make sure that your equipment is running long into the future. Rather than just handing it over to you and saying you’re on your own with you know. I’m not gonna go out and say that it’s gonna be exactly the same level of service you get for a precision fill because obviously, we have those parts in stock. But the majority of the parts, it’s still stuff that we should be able to turn around and get to you pretty quick even if its not next day or over the weekend. You know I think that’s a pretty cool perk. Michael what’s been your experience with, in general, an overview, of the some of the problems that people have approached you with in the past for custom engineering solutions.
Michael Williams
05:55
Yea the big, broad categories that we get for custom engineering requests fall into two buckets and the first bucket is form. Sometimes you have a roasting space that has a low ceiling or has an odd footprint that an off-the-shelf piece of equipment just won’t fit into or won’t fit into very well. Perhaps the ergonomics don’t work and we get requests for building hoppers all sorts of other coffee handling equipment that fit into those unique spaces. So that’s the first bucket, is form. The second bucket is function. So specifically, I need a piece of a coffee equipment to do specifically this. So an example of that would be our custom engineering project for Caravan coffee. Which is featured actually on our website on the Custom House engineering page. What we did for them was kind of twofold. We enabled a workflow that they had perfected over a number of years prior to working with us. They were looking to modernize it and so what we did for them was we created a custom vacuum conveyor system that conveys coffee substantially faster than most of our clients have a need for and we also engineered a custom solution to store coffee directly above their precision fill. Which was a workflow that they had been accustomed to and they had developed as something that they really wanted to maintain while they were modernizing their equipment. And so we were able to help them keep that workflow through our custom engineering, manufacturing, commissioning program. So those are the two broad categories, the first one is form, the second one is function or another way of putting that would be workflow.
Nicholas Flatoff
08:06
Yea man that’s awesome and the Caravan buildout was pretty fun. I guess I use that a jumping point to mention, we’ve already talked about tech support but also installation we do optional uncrate and assembly and commissioning and training on all of the equipment that we do and that won’t be any different for Sovda Custom House. If you wanna set it up yourself and save some money, go for it, boom, done. Otherwise, I’ll fly out there put it up, Maxine will fly out there, put it up for ya and train you so you have a nice turnkey up and running solution. But with all that said, lets say I have an idea and I wanna present it to Sovda and get going on a Custom House project, what’s an overview of what that looks like, you know what should I expect when I reach out?
Michael Williams
08:57
Yea absolutely so the first thing you’ll do is go to sovdacoffee.com/custom-house and you’ll scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and you’ll fill out this form where you’ll tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the problem that you’re trying to solve or the machine that you’re trying to build and then we will reach to you for an introductory call where we learn about what you’re thinking about and if it makes sense and we wanna move forward we’ll move through the next five phases of the six-phase program. And that goes through anything from a feasibility study, concept development, engineering, manufacturing and at the end training, commissioning, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a ten-thousand-foot overview of what the whole process looks like.
Nicholas Flatoff
09:52
Yea and it feels like its gonna be very hands-on there’s gonna be a weekly design review where you’re able to see what’s going on and have input throughout the process. You know it should be a more unique, client-oriented experience than what you normally get out of a smaller engineering works like this so yea I think this gonna be not only super productive in getting exactly what you dream but also a lot of fun you know you’re getting something out that you were there for every step of the process and now you’ve got it in your roastery. You know there’s more of a personal connection, I don’t know maybe. I get personally connected to equipment right its like I see a coffee roaster that I installed like three years ago and I’m like yea I installed that coffee roaster. There’s just a little part of me that’s just like oh I love it, even more than other coffee roasters but yea you get that every day you get to look at it and be like yea, I fricken made that you know, that’s a sick feeling.
Michael Williams
10:52
Absolutely, I mean I love the feeling of taking a piece of equipment that I design on a computer screen and seeing it in the flesh with coffee flowing through it. Its always a cool feeling, its always a really cool feeling and I guess just a little more on that. One of the things that I’m excited about, is sharing a little bit of the internal process of how Sovda makes our own machines with other clients so at Sovda we do weekly design reviews for all new products that are coming out and we’re doing the same thing for Sovda Custom House. So it really is like you’re a part of the Sovda team for the designing, engineering, building, manufacturing, commissioning, training of this unique equipment.
Nicholas Flatoff
11:47
Yea that’s so super cool, you know to add on there we’ve got the tech support side of it, we’ve got the install side of it but then we’ve got the whole logistics and manufacturing side of it all dialed to we own, we’re partner owners with our factory in China, we’re able to do on the ground QC before it ever gets loaded, we’ve got employees on the ground in China. And you’re leveraging the great build quality and affordable price that we have in our integrated, you know, all the way from sales to construction and shipping plus logistics. We’ve got a good logistics team and we get crates places you know. I think its gonna be a pretty efficient, pretty streamlined solution once the final product is designed. Bang it out, do QC on it and get it out to you and install if needed. So yea! That's super cool.
Michael Williams
12:54
Yea, I was gonna say that yea, I think that something not to gloss over, one of the things not to gloss over is the importance of doing QC and testing in a coffee specific way, at manufacturing. So said another way basically, one of the other things that differentiate Sovda Custom House from any other engineering, manufacturing provider is that we can do coffee-specific testing at our manufacturing facility and they are experienced with doing such things. And they have ancillary equipment so that they can hook together different components, different Sovda components and validate that the machine works with not only the machine itself but with other Sovda equipment.
Nicholas Flatoff
13:51
That’s amazing
Michael Williams
13:52
Right, it’s very common for us to commission a, when you have a piece of equipment for a coffee roastery it does not live in isolation, it lives alongside other equipment, the inputs, and outputs of that machine. And so it's really important to be able to test the machine and those conditions and just by virtue of manufacturing that equipment in a shop, in a facility, that does all of our other stuff. We have the setup to be able to test things like no one else can.
Nicholas Flatoff
14:34
Well as we kind of transition to the closeout of the podcast, I know a few months ago we had a newsletter that went out that was just kind of talking about that child-like fascination or that, you know, super geekin’ out that a lot of us experienced when we first got into coffee and maybe still are experiencing. And how frikken awesome that is and it’s something that you know, if you’ve never felt that way and you just like coffee, that’s fine, that’s a hundred percent okay. But at the same time when you get that, like, oh man I just gotta try this like I’m super stoked about it, I’ve got an idea, I wanna see what happens. You know whether its a different brewing method or a new coffee that you haven’t had or now so more than ever we’re getting new varietals of coffees, aromas and stuff. Shoutout to Cole at Forward and Rosso that was so delicious. But this is one of those things that you can at the end of the day shut the roastery off and before locking up the door just turn around and look at the place be like man if there were no limits right. Like any equipment that I ever wanted could be implemented in this facility, just look at tit for a few seconds and just imagine. You might come up with something that’s absolutely brilliant that completely overhauls your workflow. Saves the backs and or brains of your employees, who knows what the possibility is and the long term implications of having a piece of equipment that changes a workflow step every single hour of every single day for the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. So yea just be thinking about that because you are the person that we’re trying to take that idea and be like yea, that’s frikken awesome, I think that’s frikken awesome too, lets build it and get that idea into something that’s sitting in your factory. So if you’re that, if you’re feeling that Michael how people get in contact with you and a get a project going.
Michael Williams
16:39
Yea the best way is to go to sovdacoffe.com/custom-house we have a bunch of information about Custom House on that page. If you scroll all the way to the bottom you can apply to be in the custom house and if you have any questions or wanna reach out directly my email address is innovation@sovdacoffee.com and I’d love to hear from you.
Nicholas Flatoff
17:05
Yea and we do of course have a banner page on our landing page if you’re too lazy to type in custom dash house because I am. Well, hey guys thanks so muchfor joining us were really excited about this new operation for Sovda we’re really excited to see what you guys come up with and were really stoked to see how the industry changes hopefully for the better as a result of it. Thanks so much for joining in and we’ll talk to you next week.