EPISODE 22 - KEVIN ACKERET

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we meet with a New Product Development Engineer at Pro-Form Custom Packaging who has an extensive history in product design and manufacturing. Our guest has had the opportunity to work in several industries including consumer products, medical, architectural, automotive and even exercise equipment. In his free time he likes to spend time outdoors with his wife of 37 years, 2 adult children and 3 grandchildren. 

Kevin Ackeret grew up in a small town in Southern Indiana where he began his career cutting steel as a tool and die maker in the early 80's and instantly found his passion for design and machining. After a decade working as an engineer and CNC programmer Kevin moved into a role as a design engineer and has almost 35 years of experience working closely with both design and manufacturing teams

Kevin's most recent venture has brought him into the world of product packaging, introducing a whole new realm of challenges to his ever expanding portfolio. In today's episode we begin by discussing the Centurion Rack Repair System, a robust pallet rack product that is modular by design to allow for a plethora of configurations based on the repair requirements. Kevin designed  this system from the bottom up for SpaceGuard Products and provides insight into the design, testing, and manufacturing processes involved in bringing that product to market. 

For the second half of the show we learn more about packaging design. Kevin outlines the design practices used to design packaging, the consideration package designers have for the customer experience, and emerging trends with industrial design to allow for smooth and fast online collaboration between engineers. Kevin provides a very unique perspective and stands as a shining example for anyone looking to get into the industry.

Show Notes:

To learn more about Space Guard Products, please visit https://www.spaceguardproducts.com/products/pallet-rack-repair/

To learn more about Pro-Form Custom Packaging, please visit https://www.proformcp.com/

Podcast Transcript:

Hey Kevin, Welcome to the show

Good to be here thanks for having me

Yeah i am glad you are here so i always start out by telling everybody that i started impulse almost 26 years ago i worked for a company before that they had all kinds of product development services under 1 roof kind of got my master's degree in product development if you will working there and then went off and started impulse how did you get started in product development.

So i you know my road is a little bit different than yours i was working in the grocery store back in the early 80 s and was dating a girl and her dad's best friend on a 2 and die shop so we are having a dinner 1 evening he is like hey what are you going to do with your wife and i think i do not know and he said i just built a new tool and die shop why do not you come to work for me so i get really excited about it i thought man a tool and die maker this is going to be awesome i so i went in and i was making a decent amount of money at the grocery store so walked in he is like hey you know what i am going to have to invest a lot of time in you so i can pay you 4 bucks an hour but he said the sky is the limit if you can grasp this so i said i am man so i went in and start squaring up steel and infer moved in to cnc machining and thought man this is what i was made to do and you know in school i did not really understand trigonometry and geometry did not make a whole lot of sense to me i did not have a need for it when i got in the tool shop and i started having to trigger out angles and i was writing c NC programs by hand all of a sudden it is like man i wish they would have taught me this in school and so that is kind of how i got into it you know building cutting steel and and being intrigued by you know how plastic parts were made.

Yeah so we are going to get into a product that you want to talk about today but fill in the a little bit of the gap there between tool and die to you actually have developed a product what filling your history there.

Okay so after we are not involved in tool and die you know my job was to to take a take a2d par print or a a blueprint back then and then reverse engineered to create electrodes and you know so on to burn it to burn apart well then the c NC technology came on so then i started doing a lot of cnc programming i started drawing 3 dimensional parts and then from there that was before cad was as strong as it is now so everything you know we are in a machine that 3 dimensionally we needed to have good threed databases so that moved me into creo you probably remember those days back when it was when it was pro engineer and i started on the purple barney box and you could you could rotate you could rotate apart and you could shade it but you could not rotate the shade at the same time you and so we started doing 3D modeling and got it i started doing a lot of automotive headlights and then from there i was offered a job at valley osylvania so i went there and i am a senior engineer doing doing composite headlamp layups i did the 99 ford mustang mark lincoln several of those those vehicles and after a few years i had an opportunity to to start my own business and i believe that you and i were competitors there for a few years saw so you might you did mine as well but anyway so i got into that i had i had a good team of designers industrial engineers industrial designers we did infant car seats consumer products all different types of products so did that for a long time and then you know when the economy slowed down a lot of the tool shops fled up a lot of stuff went to china. i sold off my equipment and i went to work for h n i corporation which is han furniture basically for their pay furniture division and got into furniture design senior engineer there moved into product business development i managed the case good lines for them conference tables from there i moved off into cutlery designing scissors and cutlery and was on a team that designed and built and manufactured a 7 axis knife sharpening system. Sso that that was that is interesting and from there i got off into metal fabrication which involves a product that we are going to talk about later and then after i left that i am currently in packaging so the cool thing about it i have been blessed to be able to see how our part goes into a piece of steel how to get that part out of there you know what what what does it look like to to develop furniture what does it look like to manufacture and then what i would call the end of my career and getting into packaging and i am wondering now why i did not understand packaging on the front end because that seems to be such a crucial crucial part of the of the whole process you know if you if you develop a product and you put it in a box and it does not the right amount does not fit across the back of a semi across the length or kind of a mess so that is kind of a just a quick rundown of start to finish and

No that is awesome that is that is some great experience so yeah before we will get into the packaging a little bit but let us talk about the product that you want to talk about today

So the product that i am going to talk about today is a product that is called centurion rack repair and i believe i believe i shared an image with if you want to share that you can or if not that is fine too so the reason i picked that product was because you know we started out with just a basic concept and the owner the owner of space guard products laid out a vision and he says hey i want to get into the rack repair market he was currently producing caging securing areas and stuff like that so he laid out a few sketches on on the board and said hey i want a product that basically when you go into a warehouse and you have a pallet rack he wants to go in and if you got to damage his leg he wants to take that leg out replace it with something that is equally as strong as what you took out so you know it sounds pretty simple pallet racks are all pretty standard until you get into them and this is what i like about the whole design and engineering process and i am sure you can attest to this as well you never know where you are going to end up at you know you have a start and you have an end goal but the journey in which you take it and all that you learn about that industry is just is what excites me because you uncover all these little interesting facts about the product line so in the pallet rack industry you know there is there is there is a row farm rack there are a structural rack everybody has their own way they do things their whole spreads how their cuff mounts up and then you have to look at how is a customer getting into this rack system do they have it do they have a pallet rack cross member at the bottom how far up should they go so basically at the end of the day we created a product that would allow you to you know to cut a leg off at any height from 16 " on up and basically we go in there cut that lag off put in a repair kit and sometimes this can be done in as little as 30 min so in that particular product line i laid out the basic concept which was on a 3 " column and and then the solid work which you are familiar with i did a configuration file on that so i managed about 144 different variations of that at 1 time of that product all through a configuration so of course the end i you know i worked with with with my maintenance team a reporter to me at that time to go to plasma table cut these components bend them fabricate them and then the team would go out install 1 come back to the feedback what we do right what we do wrong and then over a period of about 8 months that product was fully developed and loss and it is it is a it is being well received in the marketplace it is a lot a lot of fun of course you know me being the the only person there driving threed solid modeling and and this is why it is kind of a kind of 1 of my favorites you know i laid down every line on.

Is there anything else like it on the market like is there any any competitive

There are there are some there are some other competitors nobody does it quite like we do or space guard does their their product is so modular that no matter what you come up against you are able to solve your problem and you know the other cool thing about it was you know you have got to be able to support whatever that rack was originally supporting so at the end of the day we sent this off to size and make to make sure that we you know were seismic approved had all the structural engineering test on it so it was probably the first product that i that i actually worked on that you know i laid that initial line all the way through you know working with the mains team jim cook jay thompson those guys got to give them a shout out they are the guys that built it and installed it and then my industrial engineer madison nelson she you know had to put it all into e r p system because at the end of the day how are you how are you going to get this item from a customer request into your system out the back door get it shipped on site so that you know that that was the interesting part of it as well

Did the the end customer do the replacement or was that something you guys did as well you fabricated this and it was

So so the end customer can so they have they have they have a the way they are set up now is you can be certified so his team will come out certify you and then you are certified to install the other cool thing about that as well as we you know at the volume that we were going to sell these where we are not going to be able to manually well them so we brought in brought in robotic welders you know which which kind of goes back like we were talking earlier about when you design products how are you going to produce them how do you need to hold these things how are you going to nest them so you know i am sure you know you are the same way you look at parts and you think well what is this feature on here what does it do or whatever a lot of times as designers and engineers we put a little nicks and holes and features to allow these parts to be nested so currently these parts are all well done on robotic tables that way you know you get the same product every day day in and day out because the robot is the same thing all the time

Sure sure when you were designing this were there any like novel technologies or methodologies or anything like that that you kind of discovered as you guys were developing it

I would not not really i think what really what really stopped me was the amount of variation across the across the industry there is it seemed like a pretty standard industry right and until you get into it and it is like well this guy's a 32nd here and the other guy he is a 30 second up and over and then trying to make something that is going to be rigid and solid with a target that you can not tie down so and i think that is where as designers and engineers that is part of the discovery process that we run into into is how do i capture this animal and how do i make it to where i can produce this day in and day out so at the end of the day the customer get a product that goes in fairly easily

Sure sure so in impulse we have helped design literally thousands of parts or products i guess some of them just parts but in every 1 of those journeys is a little bit different can you kind of walk us through the journey of designing and developing this i guess system

Yeah so you know you know you know first off we start out with you know we walk out the south we say here is a pale rack right what are the dimensions and and then of course you you know after you to get those dimensions you start looking at how do i need to support it what is the bracing did it look like and then like i say we we had a the table so it is like well how do we how are we going to be able to produce this thing to the qualities that we need and just you know just every every little avenue in corner you turn around you you continuously open up new discoveries but you know at the end of the day you look back at the product and you think it looks pretty simple right but as you can probably you know attest to as well there that whole discovery process is just exciting to me

Sure yeah yeah what was the timeline like like start to finish

So start to finish and i was trying to nail that down looking back to the old and just because i am not with with space card anymore but it have a great amount of respect for the for the the team there from start to finish from initial concept all the way through to shipping out the door and a quality product and i believe was inside of about 7-8 months now we were kicking parts early i mean we literally took a we took we took a sketch and i drew up apart we went out and hard well it apart in a matter of 30 min over there right and as a designer and an engineer i was always get a i get i almost get tickled when i when i look back through a project and you look at your first concepts when you thought you nailed it i think you look at it at the end of the day boy was i naive and i remember 1 time this is off of the off the subject here on another product i flew with my team to dallas texas 1 time that we were going to go to design this revolutionary cat litter box it had skylights in an automatic break and everything so i was young and naive and i signed up for the deal and i jumped back on the plane with my team and they said how are we going to do it and i said i do not know we will figure it out and i am sure you do that as well you know that the you know that the the interesting components are going to repeal yourself you do not understand right now how it is going to happen but you know that over time. That given enough time enough money and the opportunity that you can solve the problem

Yeah yeah it is funny you mentioned you know when you are young you just kind of like yeah we are going to knock this out you know first first concept is going to be it i have gotten into the habit whenever i hire anybody new of course they are usually young and you know full of energy and you know and they are like well why do not we just do this i am like model it up model it the model it up model it up and 15 min later like that is not going to work i am like i know but no you know.

Do not you love it when you do not i do not know if you spend much time in manufacturing but but i was at heart i you know i create stuff and i draw stuff digitally but i have always been involved in the manufacturing side of it so even now i drive 5acnc machines i am driving routers i am driving driving CNC equipment but it always amazes me you get a plastic party and it is ready to go right and they need this thing in 6 weeks i can produce it so you ask the engineer the designer you say hey what is your die pull on this mold and he is like i never really thought about that it is like that is the first thing you think about is how is this thing going to come out of a tool right right so you know you know when i was a value you know you are designing on a vehicle maybe on a the turn signal a tail light side marker and you are working out here on the car but you know at the end of the day this thing has to open up in a mold like this right and i think i have been really blessed to be able to cover all these different genres and then at the end of the day you realize hey i got to be a producer thing and i think that is the key

Sure sure a minute ago you talked about like you had a bunch of configurations do you remember a number that you had

I am thinking at 1 time i had about i do not know so you know this thing travels several different inches based on the main tube so and we have got different types of you know like tier drop cutouts we have got structural hole cutouts and then we have got for every different style of palette rack out there there is a different set of hardware depending on if you are using a34 or 5 " column and if it is structural or if it is tear drop and then that changes your cuff size which is a part that actually hooks onto the column so you have got just a plethora of of hardware configurations sheet metal configurations tube configurations so e.g. if you are doing in the in the roll form repair you might be using an athens wall section but in the structural you might be using the 316 so right there there is a whole plethora of configurations right there and then we change the whole pattern we change you know where the maybe the whole spacing but i think there is probably a 100 and i am guessing 144 different configurations and so i drove that all out of 1 file and then you know in solid works i named all my drawing tabs and based on what the part number was so then i created a macro in solid works that i could basically drag up to my command bar and it would kick out all these drawings based on their drawing tab name and then we would feed those into the e r p system so it was a pretty seamless integration you know it is 1 thing to just draw a part up and make it and but it is another thing to get that thing to where you can actually put it on a former to make an order and be sure what they got you know for me the most exciting part of the whole design process i love that initial phase when you are laying out the concept you throw a little paint on it a rendering package i love that marketing side of it and i could totally live there but at the end of the day what good is a you know a part with some pain on it if you can not produce it right

Yeah now that is interesting about the configuration that was kind of why i was digging at it i i did not know if it was you were just doing different i guess lengths depending on where the the damage was or but it sounds like you have to accommodate all of the different rack designs which again me walking into a warehouse i assume there is 1 but i am sure there are dozens of different shapes and sizes and

That that is kind of what i thought to originally and and then so you know to make it efficient you want to be able to have this this line card if you will that has a complete portfolio anything you should need it it is like going in and buying a socket set you know you can buy an industrial ranch but you want some of the more custom so you buy a boxing ranch right they can of all sizes and i would encourage any of the listeners if you are using solid work you do not understand configurations configurations are your best friend and you know a lot of times i use configurations as as a way to change apart so maybe i am doing a coaster for a coffee cup and i got 5 different size coffee cup so i can configure the diameter of that maybe that can configure the thickness of it but i also use configurations as a sketch board so i have got AI have got a design that is developed and then i want to run off on a different tangent to see hey but this fly so i just started configuration start putting holes in it changing the changing the shape changing the dimensions so with the configuration you can change anything within that cad model whether it be the color which is kind of trivial all the way down to turn holes on and off change the dimensions of something and and and i every design that i had that i do will have at least 3 or 4 different configurations on

Sure sure so excuse me before we kind of shift gears and get into packaging you know with with all the products we have helped design there is always some kind of challenge that comes up what was the biggest challenge you had in developing this product

I think the biggest challenge i had there was probably just digesting all of the potential variations across the system because when i first walked into it laid out i think this is pretty simple you know a para para right and then the other challenge was making sure that once this thing was developed that when it went to the structural engineer to pass seismic testing that it would meet or exceed the approval and when we submitted there were no changes so we so we know of course you know within solid works there are some tools to kind of test but at the end of the day you need a pe to look at it and in depth because you know in that particular market you could have a nice part it could look good you could have it all configured right in your e r p system but if this thing goes out to the field and you can not you you can not meet seismic approval because a lot of the places where these go into are seismic approved these these racking systems have to have a seismic stamp on you know the little the little things about you know how far do you put your your holes in the concrete you know they 3 " a 4 and a half they have 5 " where they need to be so they made the seismic approval so there were there was just like around every corner there was something you had to overcome.

Yeah that is interesting so let us switch gears a little bit what are you up to these days

So my day my days now are the type of modeling that i do now is i would say in some senses it is a little simpler so i am cutting cort i have been taught that you do not call it cardboard it is corrugated and we we do plastic dunnage so you know an automotive customer needs to transport 15 parts from point a to point b to be painted or assembled or whatever so i am you know i am taking a taking a plastic part or a metal part basically shrink wrapping that offsetting it sucking that down into a piece of plastic creating an offset of it cutting a wooden mould sucking a sheet of plastic down over over it once that is approved then we will send it off to a foundry to have a cast pattern bow off of that so that is a duty side of it the other side is you know you we have all received a package in the mail we open it up open up the top of the box and boom there is a layer of foam in there so somebody like myself looks at that part and says hey here is here is what this thing needs to be able to get from point a to point b you know what are the impact point is going to be on this box and the interesting thing about packaging is everybody wants their their part to arrive to you in a good manner and all intact but typically by the time you get the packaging the budget the budget is blown all the money has been spent on r d and marketing and nobody wants to pay anything for packaging so so it is a commodity but you know if you look if you look at the markets and the overall economy you can base the health of the economy on what the packaging companies are doing because everything travels in some type of a box so that is that is kind of my game now and i believe that all businesses show business no matter what you are what you are designing or developing at the end of the day you need a good customer good customer feeling and and it is a little frustrating when that product comes to your home you pop it open and it looks like it just snowed in your office or your or your home so you are thinking about you know what is that package look like how how do we minimize the phone scatter and i always preach that if your if your product goes to your customer and the box looks bad it is painful digging into that box trying to find the components by the time he gets to the bottom and starts assembling it his frustration level is almost through the roof and and if something does not turn him around there is a good chance he is got to take that box back up ship it back to amazon and just forget the whole experience so as a package designer what i will do now is i am going to i just finished up a product that you open up the box but there it is the pamphlets in top tells who i am as a customer business card down here tells who your contact is if you have a problem and then you unveil the next next layer you get to see the meat of the product here it is this is what i bought this is what i spent my hard earned money on and so i want that experience to be very pleasant all the way down to the bottom and that is probably when i am going to dump the nitty gritty hardware and stuff like that on you because at this point i have got my i have set hook line and sync right so this point you bought into the system i think that if you open up a box and foam scattered all over your room and you got all your complex stuff in there you have got directions that you have mirrored apart and even married your text so everything's backwards you know the customer he is having a bad experience so and i always talk to my guys about like the apple box you know i get an apple phone i still have my boxes why because that box is nice it feels good so i think it is all the customer experience has to be has to be sweet.

You guys get into that level of package design like an apple type you know clean you know white box or is it all cork that is not coded

No no we we do the whole thing we did we have done some really cool things we have done some things that are actually packed in like a nano case so we have taken like you have you have a product let let us say it is maybe maybe it is a microscope maybe it is a consumer product it is somebody maybe it is maybe it is a handgun if somebody is selling you a case for so we will actually we actually have a have a partnership with nanox so we can take their case put f in it color layer it so we do we do some really high end cosmetic stuff and then we also just do the standard 1.7 pound black pe foam to stand in a box with cardboard around it or cort around it yeah

Interesting what what what should somebody that is designing a product think about i know you are going to tell them then you think about packaging first but what what hould they think about in with regards to that like ed educate them a little bit.

Well i think if you are if you are designing a product you need to be thinking about at the end of the day how is my customer going to receive this product is is it going to be bulk packed is it going to have a package that you know i am looking at my b speaker that i am talking to you through it came in a real nice bowls b box labeled pulled out nicely nice instructions but but it goes a little further beyond that because when you are thinking about packaging that am i going to be in a facility that has robotic integration does it does this part that i am making does it need a feature so that a robot can grab this how am i going to nest this part so maybe maybe the part maybe you could put a quarter maybe you could put a 1 " fill up on all 4 corners of your part but maybe this component needs to be positioned in a certain way for the user to interact with it so maybe i change the geometry a little bit and you know as an industrial designer you have a lot of freedom on the front end and you can make you can style that in however you want and then the next big thing comes in you know back on it let us say that we are doing the bow speaker and it is a 4 by 6 well how many can get in the box well i get 12 of them in a box well how how what is that stack look like and i throw these in a semi wait a minute i have got i have got a 8 " void all the way down the side of this truck the stuff is going to slide around so i think it is i was thinking about you know we did some dog house is 1 time a ig blue shaped dog house that you know we worked on the the cor gate we worked on the plastic part design and that dog house is the exact dimension so they stack up to the exact number across a semi truck width and the depth so there is there is not a there is not a quarter of an inch of space inside the semi trailer which you know that just maximizes the whole process all the way around.

Sure sure so shifting gears 1 more time as we kind of start to wrap up what are some of the trends like in your corner of the product development world what are some of the trends you are seeing emerge?

So i think the biggest trend that i am excited about is the the the availability of online collaboration i know that solid work katia and i am out kind of out of the kato world right now but in the ug world but i am really excited about the ability to once something is designed or in conceptual phase i can post this out on a3d board so like with you with a with a with a as a contract designer you can share your design with your team worldwide so then i am sitting here working on something somebody is just looking through a design they mark it up i get feedback immediately on my on my screen that says hey you know joe he is got to suggest a change i can pull that up link into him and i am thinking you know back when and you know i i got out of business in 2015 and i look at how the how the online community and how the internet has grown up just in 2015 i mean you look back 20 1011 and 12 trying to have a video conference trying to share models back and forth i mean it was basically it was lethargic where now you can.

It was easier to get into a plane back then just fly on the car

It was i was doing work with a company up in in wisconsin and i hired a guy that would pick me up at the seor airport and he would fly me to wisconsin with with 2 other guys would spend the day out there and fly back home because trying to convey that but you know nowadays with the threed modeling tools the ability with with 3D printing you know 3D printers are affordable enough that you can have 1 in your office it is pretty simple so i think i think the technology you can see it reflected in parts the detail that goes into the parts that we buy now the accuracy that goes into them the ability to 3D scan you know if you need you know if you want to make a change you can play something up 3D scan it and then right back into the modeling so i think the the time to market is got a lot shorter and i think the accuracy is a lot better than what it used to be obviously.

Sure sure so you have been got quite a bit of experience so reflecting on all the challenges and successes that that you have you have encountered developing products what kind of words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development world

I think the other day i think first of all for me i am a man of faith you know and i thank god for the for the challenges you have given me so i look at product development and the product the product design cycle as i am really into building people and product design is just the way that i do it so i i would say that if you can get on the design team learn how to work together there is never need there is never any dumb questions be be open to your peers so when when i when i had accurate engineering just to kind of give you a snippet of my team i had 1 guy that was a purdue graduate that was a mechanical engineer and i had a guy that was an aeronautical engineer out of texas a and m so those are those are quite a bit different right so we were sitting and then you got me you know i am not college educated i took a lot of classes but never never declared declared a degree so we all get into a room and we start banging stuff out which i would call the adrenaline room in the adrenaline room we can beat each other up we can we can ask questions but nobody gets offended and then we come out of that and i think the key is realizing that you can learn from anybody you can learn from the janitor all the way up to the CEO so everybody has something to offer because we we have all taken a different path and we have we have a different set of paradigms that have that have shaped us into who we are

Yeah yeah that is really good awesome this has been great is there anything else in regards to the product that we talked about or packaging or product development in general that you want to mention.

I do not think so yeah i am sure i am sure if i will watch this later i will think about you.

Know it is just you know it kind of go back to the start 101 thing i missed on is you know i grew up in a small town crossville indiana you know i kind of joke sometimes about where i ranked out my class when people are bragging about where they ranked that and of course i ranked you know at a certain percentage but the class was real small right and but so i kind of give you an idea of the size of school i went to it was small not a not a lot of opportunities. We did not have computer did not have a design class and i had no idea that the kind of work that you and i do ever existed until i got into the tool and i trade and i think man it is it is just really really a blessing that i was able to somehow find this trade and flourish in.

Yeah yeah that is awesome before we wrap up is there that product still exists right they are still making that and selling it yeah

Oh yeah it is it is it is fairly new actually. So the this interion is built right here in sem indiana if you head down highway 50 right across the walmart distribution you will see you will see space card products and then i currently work for pro for custom packaging and we are just south of columbus and we do everything like say from plastic dunnage we do wood creating basically when you think of a pro for anything that you need to get from point a to point b no matter what the container looks like we wrap stuff around it so we do a lot of different types of products custom package

Cool cool i will make sure i put links to both of those in the in the notes so people can go take a look i appreciate you doing this kevin

All right uh have a good day troy we will we will see you around