POV: Ryan Thomas, Chief Operating Officer

You release a product, you have all your prints. Maybe we've designed it, maybe we've done a DFM, maybe we're just the contract manufacturer of that product.

Through the lifecycle, I guarantee you, you're gonna have new revisions because a part will go obsolete. You have to validate a new component. You have to update all your prints, for that change.

I also guarantee that there's gonna be firmware revisions that come out that really match the technology and the connectivity that changes year over year. You're always innovating your software stack.

By having engineering in the same building as the contract manufacturing side of it, we become a one-stop shop for our customers where we can manage their prints for them. We can manage the lifecycle, the bill of material. We can manage their software, which allows us to, again, use our flexibility and our agility to really accelerate that timeline.

So instead of having a theoretical change, you run it on a bench, you run it through a simulation, I can actually build the product as it changes, run it through tests, get it out in the market, get quick feedback on it if it works or not, and then release those prints, rev the product, and then quickly hit the market with the new changes and the new software. It's something that we've been doing for a very long time.

Our biggest telematics customer, they're always giving us what's called an engineering change request, saying like, "Hey, here's the new thing I want done. Roll it out." If you don't have that, you're just adding so many lanes of communication, and the process map goes from a very two-layer swim lane to just multiple lanes, multiple companies, multiple labs, and that becomes such a massive challenge for accelerating, really getting innovation to your customer, and we shorten that window down massively.