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Faces of Interface Featuring Dave Reardon

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In today’s Faces of Interface series, we are talking to one of the newest members of our distinguished sales team, Dave Reardon, regional sales director. Dave grew up around the force measurement industry and has made his way to Interface after a distinguished career in the aerospace industry.

Dave Reardon has known the world of strain gages since he was young. His father was a long-time strain gage expert in the aerospace industry and Dave followed in his footsteps. He also took a liking to the industry at an early age, participating in CAD classes in high school followed by attending Cal State Long Beach in pursuit of an electrical engineering degree. He ended up finishing his bachelor’s degree, switching to information technologies at University of Phoenix, followed by a master’s degree in business administration from Kaplan.

His first role came as an assistant engineer for aerospace industry giant McDonnell Douglas. His role involved flight test engineering team as needed, until they learned about his CAD skills, at which time they had him primarily doing strain gage drawings.

Over the next 18 years, Dave took his talents across a wide variety of aerospace leaders including Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Bombardier, The Boeing Company, and more. His roles varied from instrumentation engineering in flight test, to test directing in avionics development labs, and eventually sales. On the sales side, he was working with systems very akin to Interface’s portfolio including data acquisition, telemetry products, and sensors. He even owned his own rep firm for a time that included a few sensor lines in addition to other testing equipment.

A few months ago, Dave was looking for a new opportunity. He was well acquainted with Interface’s products and when he saw an opportunity to work here, he jumped on it with the help of a referral from a friend. Dave came to Interface as our regional sales director in charge of the East Coast. His long-time work in aerospace industry, and specifically his knowledge of strain gages and sensors, made him a great fit in this role.

His responsibilities include managing sales across the region, working with customers daily to find a solution that is right for their specific needs, working with applications engineers, and managing rep firms across the large territory. Dave works across all industries; however, with his background in aerospace, in addition to automotive, he certainly knows what fits bests for those industries.

Dave has made an incredibly positive impact on our team at Interface. Dave mentioned what he enjoys the most is that he has never worked for a company with better communication internally and throughout our community. He specifically highlighted the marketing team’s ability to continue driving leads as critical benefit of working sales at Interface. He also loves collaborating with customers and seeing the incredible potential of the innovation landscape.

When he is not solving customer challenges with force systems, Dave is usually off traveling. He has visited 46 of the 50 states, as well as multiple countries. He lives in Daytona Beach, Florida, but still loves to vacation in other beach destinations. Italy is his favorite international get away so far, having spent two weeks there back in 2014. Dave also has five grown children, a grandchild, with another on the way.

We appreciate Dave taking the time to speak with us and look forward to watching him flourish here at Interface . To learn more about our incredible team members, check in each month for a new Face of Interface’s feature. You can see all our ForceLeaders here.

Faces of Interface Featuring Karla Salaz

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When you possess the worldly knowledge and the wide range of career experience as our Custom Solutions Procurement Specialist Karla Salaz, you can be successful anywhere. In today’s Faces of Interface, we spoke to Karla about her career experience as well as her travels abroad and throughout the United States.

Karla grew up in Arizona and is a rare third generation Arizonian. Her father worked for the U.S. Forest Service, while her mother was in administrative work. Karla always enjoyed her home state and although her life took her all around to California, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Germany, she always knew she would make it back

Karla’s career is defined by her outstanding ability to pick up new skills and roles very quickly. When she moved to Southern California, she started a job in construction as a laborer before moving into an administrative assistant role. Her next stop was in retail where she worked at Walmart. She began as a cashier and rose through the ranks. Seven years later, Karla left Walmart as an assistant manager.

Then, after a few years working in the retail industry, Karla’s former husband, who was in the air force, received Permanent Change of Station orders to Germany, and she went along. In her new home, she began working for a broker for military exchanges.

After a little while and a move back to the states to Texas, she would take on her first role in manufacturing at a sausage manufacturing plant.  She moved into procurement at the plant and realized that she really enjoyed the various aspects of the position that allowed her to nurture and grow supplier relationships, as well as internal relationships. She also really enjoyed the responsibility of forecasting supply because it could make a huge difference in the success of the company.

Then, Karla returned to Arizona and began at Interface. Her experience in overseas brokering and procurement made her a perfect fit for the role as custom solutions procurement specialist. And while she only started in October 2020, her positive impact has certainly been felt by our team and customers. Her day-to-day responsibilities include processing orders, maintaining the correct level of inventory, coordinating logistics with partners locally and abroad, assisting in customs clearance and finding parts and bringing them in at the best price.

She says that what she enjoys most about working at Interface is that the company has such incredible potential, and in her role in custom solutions, she feels she has a big hand in influencing that growth. In addition, her proclivity for relationship building in concert with all of the different suppliers and Interface team member she interacts with, allows her meet knew people and engage all the time. Something she stills really enjoys after all this time after her first procurement job.

In her free time, Karla loves to spend time with family, her daughter is studying medicine at NAU in her junior year, and she gets up to see her as often as possible. She also has two sons and a granddaughter in Texas whom she also gets out to visit as often as she’s able. Finally, she’s a huge sports fan, basketball, baseball, football, and her favorite, hockey. She’s still waiting for the days that the Arizona Coyotes are competitive again.

Karla has a bright future ahead of her at Interface and we are thrilled to have her on board. If you enjoyed Karla’s story and want to meet more of our outstanding staff, check out her fellow ForceLeaders here.

Faces of Interface Featuring Garland Hawkins

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Faces of Interface is an important series because it highlights the talented team members that keep Interface going strong. In this new ForceLeaders feature, we interviewed Garland Hawkins, our production planner for Interface’s most popular LowProfile load cells.  A key member of our operations and Navigators teams at Interface, this feature highlights Garland’s professional history and a few of the things he’s working on today.

Growing up in the home of a mechanical engineer, you are bound to develop a kinship with the engineering and manufacturing world. For Garland Hawkins, he remembers fondly the time spent with his father building and tinkering with different mechanical objects. While a career in the manufacturing industry wasn’t necessarily planned, he’s thrilled that it’s where his career has taken him.

Garland’s path to the manufacturing industry is a little different than his father’s trek. After high school, Garland’s career began in the logistics industry as an order filler for Lineage Logistics. He enjoyed the work and quickly showed off his talents rising through the ranks over six years from order filler to trainer and eventually the supervisor. After leaving Lineage, Garland continued his career in logistics as the shipping and receiving manager for S&G.

After two years at S&G, Garland was ready for a change of scenery. He had spent his whole life in California and wanted something new. In 2016, Garland moved to Arizona because he preferred the desert landscape and knew that growth opportunities in Arizona were on the rise. Garland began working at the airport for a consolidation company, but he knew it was just a temporary gig before getting back into the field he knew and loved of logistics.

Then an opportunity came about with Interface. Garland began with Interface in the shipping and receiving department. As he became acclimated and comfortable in this new role in the engineering and manufacturing industry, he caught his stride. Shortly after, Garland was recognized for his hard work with a promotion into the planning department and eventually into his current role as Production Planner for Interface’s LowProfile Load Cell line.

In this role, Garland is tasked with managing the supply chain and planning. Basically, everything related to shipping and logistics for LowProfile Load Cell products. This includes, monitoring parts, maintaining inventory, addressing works orders with the production floor, scheduling machine shop and production orders and aligning capacity with customer demands and requirements.

Garland notes what he loves about Interface is the opportunity for success within the company. Most importantly, Interface is hyper-focused on growing into new markets and new regions and Garland knows that this will translate to career growth and opportunities to contribute to the company’s growth.

In addition to taking advantage of opportunities to grow at Interface, Garland is also working on his own to grow his skillset and knowledge during his time at Interface. Garland recently completed his degree in Operation Management and Analysis at Ashford University.

Garland’s drive and hunger are certainly not lost on Interface either. The company recognized this ambition and nominated Garland into its prestigious cross-functional Navigators program, which is designed to take rising stars and put them through development activities that expose them to every department of the company. This working team is essential in providing ideas and plans to drive positive change with critical thinking and problem-solving throughout the company. Garland is thankful for this opportunity because it provides the ability to see the company from every angle. It is helping him better understand the impact and importance of his own role while giving him insight on growth opportunities within the company.

While he’s not working at Interface, Garland likes to relax by enjoying his relatively new hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. He’s recently taken interests in hiking and exploring the outdoors in the desert. He’s also a big sports fan, especially basketball. He enjoys playing and watching NBA games while checking out the local food scene. However, he has not adopted the Suns as his home team yet, he’s a loyal Lakers fan through and through.

We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to shed some light on one of our committed team members. Garland Hawkins is star in the making with plenty to offer and a drive to take action.

 

Faces of Interface Featuring Elliot Speidell

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In today’s Faces of Interface post, we are featuring Interface National Sales Director Elliot Speidell. Amongst all the wonderful stories and backgrounds, we hear about from our amazing team, Elliot’s may be one of the most unique and interesting.  You see, Elliot didn’t start his career in or go to school for engineering like many of the Faces of Interface subjects we’ve highlighted in the past.

In fact, Elliot studied music education at Northern Arizona University. Music was Elliot’s first passion and he thought that he would go on to pursue a career in it. Although, as he explains it, he was a kid just trying to figure it out and wasn’t sure what to do. But he loved music, so he went for it.

His first job out of school was teaching music in elementary school, followed by teaching both middle and high school students. And while he did enjoy it for a time, he and his wife were expecting a daughter and he thought that it was time for a change.

Now, music isn’t Elliot’s only passion. He also loves to work with cars. He can often be found tinkering and improving cars that he eventually races in Sports Car Club of America Solo (SCCA) events. SCCA Solo is different from what you see on TV with NASCAR and Indy Car Racing. It involves precision driving through a designated course marked with cones. If you’ve kept up with the Faces of Interface series, you would know that SCCA Autocross is also a major hobby for our Global Sales Vice President, Brian Peters.

Going back to Elliot and his desire to move into a new field, both Brian and Elliot became friends during SCCA competition, and Elliot had mentioned to Brian that he was looking for something new. Knowing Elliot well, Brian thought that he would make a great application engineer. Thus, the unique story of how Elliot moved from music to a career in technology and engineering by joining the team at Interface.

As an Application Engineer at Interface, Elliot provided frontline support to customers across the east coast, later moving to serve the west coast. He worked across industries providing force measurement solutions to customers for a wide variety of applications. After a few years, he moved on to the newly introduced technical services department where he served as the technical services manager. In this role, Elliot and his team helped manage the recalibration of customer’s products as well provided technical support to customers for load cells, torque transducers, and related instrumentation. He was also instrumental in selling these services to customers and growing the technical services business.

Elliot was promoted to regional sales director starting on the west coast and eventually taking over support for the region that is along the US east coast, as well as a few regions in the south including Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The  role is more strategic in nature in that he’s out working directly with customers providing Interface force solutions, while also working directly with Interface’s teams of outside sales reps in those regions.

Today, he is the national sales director for Interface. He is responsible for all the regional sales directors and application engineers covering the United States.  He works directly with our sales network and supports key accounts. His promotion is based on years of experience and dedication to helping customers find the right solutions for all their test and measurement needs.

The thing that Elliot loves most about working at Interface is the diversity of applications he gets to work on. One day he could be helping provide a solution for measuring the tension on a guitar string and another day he’s helping a customer that’s working on a test stand for a rocket engine. Every day is unique and the technology he gets to see, and help solve challenges for, is always getting cooler!

When he’s not solving customer challenges, Elliot can be found with his wife of 14 years and their daughter, riding his mountain bike, or in the garage slowly working on LS swapping his car’s engine for SCCA autocross. Pre-pandemic, he also still indulged his love of music by playing trumpet in a Soul and Funk band at various Phoenix area venues.

We hope you enjoyed learning about Elliot as much as we enjoyed sharing this feature. Stay tuned for more Faces of Interface in 2021, and from everyone here at Interface, we wish you a very happy New Year!

Setting the Standards in Innovation

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Interface continues to advance our business to meet the growing demands and requirements of our expansive line of products. As it pertains to product development, the focus is heavily placed on innovating to enable our customers to depend on Interface solutions for evolving technology trends to design and test next-generation products. This fundamental prioritization at Interface over the past decade is centered on the way we serve our customers and by enhancing our product development process.

How does Interface take a customer challenge or key technology trend from an idea to a scalable product? 

Interface does not follow a standard product development process with a team dedicated to coming up with new ideas. New product development is a culmination of input from every facet of our company, from sales to engineers. We leverage the outstanding talent we have built at Interface across the board to identify what is next in terms of solving force measurement challenges.

New product ideas are mainly identified from three different areas:

  1. Trend Research: We are continually looking at technology trends to determine how we solve problems in an evolving technology world.
  2. Customer Requirements: Many product ideas are born from working face-to-face with customers to discover their precise needs. Occasionally, a custom product built for a specific customer will present a wider market appeal and turn into a larger product line.
  3. Product Gaps: We are always reviewing our core products to try and identify gaps in our ability to solve customer needs.

Once we have identified specific challenges that Interface can solve with a new solution, we begin to look internally to ensure that we have the right talent and expertise to deliver an industry-leading force measurement product.  If not, we may search externally for the right talent or partners to collaborate on the project.  We utilize tools like the SWOT analysis to evaluate our technical, business, and competitive position in the market.

Upon determining that the product is in high demand with our customers or in new markets, we then further define our product concept, as well as the business case for development and going to market. We perform thorough research to determine potential applications and conduct a risk analysis on the product. This is followed by a timeline for development and assigning resources to the development project.

Interface uses either an agile or phase-gate approach depending on the type of project. This allows Interface to make better decisions throughout the development process and quickly adjust when we determine there is a better or more efficient way of doing something.

If the technology we will be working with to develop the new product is something we have never worked with before, we assess the technology readiness level (TRL). This process helps to determine if we are equipped to handle the new technology or if we need to invest in additional R&D and, in some cases, expertise to carry out the project.

Following the detailed development plan, risk analysis, establishing a timeline and allocating resources to the development of the new idea, we begin the concept phase. This involves some discovery and often includes designing and manufacturing a prototype of the product, to begin testing with customers and gaining feedback for additional iterations.

These steps lead us to deciding if a minimum viable product (MVP) or minimum valuable product is the best way to proceed to market. Utilizing this approach, we can quickly develop a fully functioning product with minimal bells and whistles and get it into a customer’s hands. This also freezes the design and allows production to prepare for the product launch.

Concluding the process is a new product introduction (NPI) and lifecycle management. During NPI we are focused on two key aspects – internal planning and external communication. Our internal planning involves setting up manufacturing and educating the sales staff on the final product. External communication is the process of creating a marketing plan, developing content and data sheets, as well as planning events and demonstrations for exhibits.

During the lifecycle management phase, we are taking orders, managing service on the product, and evaluating both the product and the launch. All these initiatives help drive future product development and launch strategies for innovative solutions.

This part of the process is where our technical sales team is critical. These individuals, with strong relationships with our customers, are constantly collecting feedback and reporting back to our design and engineering teams. This helps us determine the best way to proceed in adding additional features and technology to the product.  This in turn, leads to post launch releases and enhancements to the product, which help fuel the product’s growth.

Our product development process is constantly evolving as we continue to add new capabilities and work towards providing our customers with an all-encompassing suite of force measurement solutions to handle the challenges of today and into the future. Interface has thousands of products, standard, modified, and custom.  It is critical in our approach to stay ahead of trends, predict needs, and most importantly listen to our customers to make sure our products are exactly what they need from a leader in force measurement.

To learn more about Interface and our industry-leading lineup of force measurement products providing premium accuracy and reliability contact our Application Engineer experts. Be sure to watch for new product updates by subscribing to our InterfaceIQ blog here: /blog/.

Contributor: Ted Larson, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing

Recent Articles: The Future of Force Measurement, Metrology News

Faces of Interface Featuring Ted Larson

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When Ted Larson, VP Product & Project Management at Interface, has a passion for something he devotes his time and energy to mastering it, whether it is innovating industry game-changing products or discovering new tequila.

This pursuit of excellence has served Larson well during his 30-plus year career in product design and engineering. His expertise has helped Interface establish itself as one of the premier innovators in the force measurement industry. Larson credits his success to being mindful of customer needs.

“I believe the most important aspect of product development is listening to the customer and discovering the most difficult issues they face every day.” Ted Larson

Larson started his journey at the University of San Francisco in 1979 where he would go on to earn a B.S. in Business and Organizational Behavior. Shortly after graduating, he quickly realized that he had a desire to become an engineer and wanted to bolster his skills as a maker. In 1987, Larson earned a B.S. in Electronics from Chapman University in Orange, California.

His education and skillset boosted Larson’s career in the aerospace and defense industry where he held positions with Boeing and SYMVIONICS. Over the next 20 years, Larson would hold various management and executive level positions in manufacturing and engineering, initially starting in mechanical and eventually moving into electronics. He worked in a diverse range of industries including software, automotive, chemical and lighting.

In 2015, Larson joined Interface to head up new product development. This position was unique to Interface because in the company’s 50-year history its focus centered around improving its industry-leading load cells, as opposed to creating new products. Larson was tasked with creating products that take the company into its next 50-years, what Interface coins as the 2nd 50, as a leading innovator of force measurement technology solutions for the automotive, aerospace and defense, medical, industrial industries and metrology.

In the four years that Larson has been with Interface, the company has released some of the industry’s most innovative products including ConvexBT and AxialTQ. Larson’s propensity for fresh ideas and new ways of thinking have propelled Interface’s capability to solve complex customer problems.

“Engineers thrive when they are attacking a specific problem, and without customer input, new ideas wouldn’t change a thing.”

When Larson isn’t developing new ideas for Interface, he enjoys traveling to Mexico to be with family. In Mexico, he can spend time discovering and collecting new and delicious tequilas. Each year, Larson will bring back a few unique bottles of añjeo tequila to taste with family and friends.

For more information Interface’s new products and innovations, visit www.interfaceforce.com.