GetScale’s (YC S15) QC System Protects Factory Workers and Hardware Companies

Hi HN. I'm Jonathan, one of the founders. I'll monitor this thread all day to answer questions. Thanks for taking the time to read about us! It means a lot to everyone here at GetScale.

The article notes that:

> All information is permanently archived on GetScale’s servers, which saves workers from being held responsible for mix-ups that aren’t their fault.

This is presumably meant as a way to try and fix the issue referenced in the article's title and hook:

> He realized that many line workers have very few legal protections, and if something goes wrong while an order is being produced, they often end up absorbing their employer’s losses by taking wage cuts or deductions even if they aren’t at fault.

Is there any actual evidence that in legal regimes with inadequate worker protections, increasing transparency of the workers' labor efforts improves fairness or pay for the workers?

Do you think your camera system could (eventually) support some combination of Computer Vision and Machine Learning to identify (some) assembly mistakes in real-time and provide feedback/warnings to the assembler?

My thought is improving yields by reducing defect rates caused by those hopelessly imperfect humans (like me) might be a great selling point for some types of manufacturing.

That's a very thoughtful comment!

You're right in that if the factory wants to misbehave and the owner/GM is a tyrant, you aren't likely to directly impact worker treatment (we have in-house auditors in China that can check on the factory for you if you have that specific concern). Fortunately, the overwhelming number of factory owners/GM's are fundamentally decent people caught up in difficult circumstances.

Typical contracts are structured 30% deposit and 70% when it ships. Margins to the factory aren't 70% so they wind up quite leveraged. Most of the scenarios I saw came out of the factory not understanding or executing on the customer requirements correctly. If they build units and the customer rejects them, they have to cover those material costs so they can repair or otherwise try again. This tremendous financial pressure causes otherwise good GM's to cut corners every possible way they can to try to keep the lights on.

GetScale impacts worker treatment in several ways:

(1) it eliminates waste and errors that result from misunderstandings in customer acceptance procedures. After deploying us in a factory you just don't encounter thousands of bad units because the factory is confirming against the exact acceptance procedure as you go (instead of build a lot, ship, customer receives and rejects).

(2) it is possible to audit your suppliers and if you do that, GetScale provides the ground truth of which workers were working at which stations when and for how long (down to the millisecond!). Since you have to login-logout to do any work our records are very accurate.

(3) it enables you to vote with your dollars. Without invasive monitoring (like GetScale) it is very difficult to determine which factories are "good" because reputation is easy to coopt and places like Alibaba can be bought. GetScale data collection is automatic and the data is held off-shore (in the US). We already see factories in China using GetScale as a selling point to foreign clients since it provides quantitative proof of their compliance and performance. A factory that is willing to be open about its performance and let you document workers on the line is the factory proud of its worker treatment, not the one trying to hide it.

As to studies, I have seen some in both the psychology of management literature and the manufacturing management literature, but as to specific citations I will need some time to dig them out of my research notes.

In any case, I hope I've answered your concerns. If I missed anything, please follow-up!

All of the photos in the article show consumer electronic devices. Could I use it with, say, furniture manufacturing / aftermarket car parts / leather goods manufacturing?