CleanSlate UV of Buffalo, New York makes a hospital-grade disinfection system that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to sanitize mobile devices by inactivating pathogens at the cellular level. The University of Buffalo helped advance the company’s technology under a 2017 FuzeHub Manufacturing Grant and recently joined CleanSlate UV in an episode of New York State Manufacturing Now. Find out how their partnership worked, how CleanSlate UV is continuing to grow, and how UB helps other innovative companies.

In a podcast with New York State Manufacturing Now, FuzeHub’s Steve Melito talks to Heidi Quinlivan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at New Scale Technologies, about what the company does better than anyone else – and what manufacturers need to know about automation.

FuzeHub, the statewide New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NY MEP Center), is making it easier to check out cobots and evaluate potential applications. FuzeHub owns a UR5e collaborative robot arm and recently collaborated with the Center for Economic Growth (CEG), Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC), and Buffalo Manufacturing Works (BMW) to host a cobot training session for NY MEP and HVCC personnel. FuzeHub and CEG sponsored the event and BMW, which is part of the Edison Welding Institute (EWI), provided the instruction at HVCC on August 18th and 19th. 

In addition to highlighting ideal robot applications, this two-day seminar provided participants with information about how to quantify the economic value of robotic upgrades. That’s an important consideration for contract manufacturers and job shops who are hesitant to invest in automation because of concerns about return on investment (ROI). For FuzeHub’s UR5e cobot, the next stop is a stint in HVCC’s mechatronics department, where it will be available for demonstration purposes and used by second-year students to automate a difficult materials test.   

Are you looking for ways to improve manufacturing efficiency? Are you interested in automating operations? FuzeHub can help. To get started, ask to speak to an expert.   

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Cross-site scripting uses a third-party website to inject malicious JavaScript code into the target’s web browser. The victim’s cookie is transferred to a server, and the attacker uses this file to launch an attack. XSS lets hackers gain remote access and control, collect network information, and even take screen shots.

Denial of Service (DoS)

Denial of service (DoS) attacks make a network resource unavailable to users. With websites, cyber attackers overload the site with illegitimate traffic so that users cannot perform legitimate tasks such as placing orders or finding product specifications.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks use networked devices that are infected with malware to flood the bandwidth of a target system. These attacks can be global in nature since compromised devices are located around the world.

Drive-By Attacks

Drive-by attacks target insecure websites. Once hackers find a potential victim, they inject a malicious script into either the HTTP or PHP code of site pages. Becoming a victim may begin with visiting a compromised website or reading a malicious email and then clicking on a popup window.

Malware Attacks

Malware, or malicious software, refers to any harmful program or file. It’s an umbrella term that includes spyware, viruses, Trojan horses, logic bombs, and worms. Ransomware, a type of malware, lets an attacker hijack a network and encrypt files until a ransom is paid.

Man in the Middle (MitM)

Man in the Middle (MitM) attacks happen when a hacker gets between your network connection and a server. Cyber attackers can then observe, manipulate, or redirect your website traffic. They can also use their network access to decrypt and steal data.

Phishing and Spearphishing

Phishing and spearphishing both send fraudulent emails with clickable links that download malware or take you to a dangerous website. The difference is that phishing sends emails to a large number of recipients while spearphishing targets a single recipient.

Social Engineering Attacks

Social engineering uses psychological manipulation to trick users into performing actions or divulging information. It includes spearphishing and may involve email spoofing, which is the falsification of the “From” section of an email so that it appears to come from a trusted source. Social media is also an attack vector.

SQL Injection Attacks

SQL injection attacks insert malicious code into a structured query language (SQL) server, sometimes by submitting malicious script into a website search box. Typically, these attacks provide access to a secure database so that information can be added, changed, deleted, or encrypted.

Password Attacks

There are three main types of password attacks: brute force, dictionary, and keyloggers

• Brute force attacks involve guessing your password.
• Dictionary attacks involve guessing at commonly used passwords.
• Keylogger attackers use programs to capture keystrokes to gain passwords.

For manufacturers, all of these cyberattacks are all-to-common. For defense manufacturers, the stakes are especially high when there’s the theft of controlled unclassified information (CUI).

Improve Your Cybersecurity with Help from NY MEP

The New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NY MEP) is helping New York State manufacturers to strengthen their cybersecurity. If your business is part of the supply chain for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), you can apply to join a free cohort that provides expert instruction valued at over $10,000.

Take the first step toward strengthening your cyber defense against the types of attacks you’ve read about in this article. Join the Cybersecurity Cohort.

• Facility: Leasing or purchasing a physical space can be a major expense, depending on your needs. A space dedicated purely for assembly may be fairly straightforward, whereas a facility with special processes and/or requirements (like a clean room, paint booth, chemical storage, cutting fluids, etc.), will most likely incur additional scrutiny and costs.
• Equipment: Large purchases like CNC machines and injection molding equipment can be crucial to achieving the lowest cost per part but tend to have long payback periods. Also, complex equipment often has more stringent maintenance and service requirements.
• Expertise: Finding skilled employees with the right backgrounds is sometimes the hardest challenge a new company faces. The more complicated or specialized your product or a specific component is, the more difficult it can be to find and/or train the right people to manufacture it.
• Quality: Assuring a new product launch is up to your quality standards requires significant effort, from establishing and implementing a quality plan, to determining test criteria, to figuring out how to deal with defects. If taking this on internally seems like too much, you might be better off letting a more established company, with quality protocols already in place, make critical components for you.
• Intellectual Property: In this digital age, having a patent and/or an NDA with a supplier is no longer enough. Cyber-security attacks continue to be on the rise, and if you or your suppliers do not take necessary precautions, your IP could be at risk. So, for proprietary parts, it may be best to keep them in-house. Note: For available resources on cybersecurity, be sure to check out this link: https://newyorkmep.org/cyber-security-assessment-program/
• Supply Chain Risk: Components that are critical to your product deserve extra scrutiny, beyond ensuring you have adequate inventory and safety stock. If you are getting these critical parts from a supplier, it’s a good practice to have a backup vendor already vetted and ready to go at a moment’s notice. If you are making these parts yourself, consider having redundancy in the production line in case a failure occurs.
• Cost: When comparing the per-unit cost of purchasing a component versus manufacturing it yourself, don’t forget about “hidden” costs like the added expense of protecting and transporting the goods to your facility (typically, these types of costs are never recovered unless, for example, you find a creative way to re-use or re-purpose the packaging). On the other hand, manufacturing more components yourself could require additional warehousing space and higher inventory carrying costs.

As you think about these and other factors, consider each sub-assembly, critical part, and possibly even the minor components (depending on the complexity of your product) to weigh the pros and cons of manufacturing each in-house. On one extreme, you could bring in all the raw materials, purchase or lease the necessary equipment, and make and assemble everything yourself, in your own facility, where you can control quality, order accuracy and shipping. The other extreme would be to have everything made, assembled and distributed by a single contract manufacturer, who may be able to do it more efficiently than you could on your own. But the optimal solution will most likely be a hybrid approach where you order certain components, make others yourself, and do at least some of the assembly in-house. If you’re able to find that right balance in your manufacturing strategy, you’ll be able to produce your highest quality product in the most efficient manner possible.

For more insights about engaging with a contract manufacturer, be sure to check out the previous post at https://fuzehub.com/fuzehub-blog/how-do-i-engage-with-a-contract-manufacturer/. And if you need assistance with potential suppliers, new facilities, cyber-security, or anything else mentioned in this article, reach out to FuzeHub’s Solutions Team at https://fuzehub.com/expert-consultation/.

Survey Participation Benefits

• Eligibility to schedule a 60-minute Industry 4.0 consultation with experts at RIT’s COE-ASM, at no-cost.
• Access to survey summary results.
• Priority access to tools and case studies developed within the project.

Risks and Other Potential Benefits: We don’t anticipate any risks. Other benefits may include engagement with COE-ASM to provide assistance with your Industry 4.0 implementation – with some funding support available for NY State companies. Visit the COE-ASM website to learn more about the available resources and support.
Need more information?
Call Ajay Khaladkar, RIT Industry 4.0 Program Manager at (585) 475-5145 or email him at apkgis@rit.edu if you have questions about the study.
Contact Heather Foti, Associate Director of the HSRO at hmfsrs@rit.edu if you have any questions or concerns about your rights as a research participant.

1. Document your product and all its parts.

Often, the first step in preparing your prototype for the transformation into a manufacturable product is to create a detailed bill of materials (BOM) – a list of all the components that go into making your product. The biggest benefit of a well-documented BOM is that it helps identify how you can simplify your product, whether by removing parts that don’t provide any tangible benefit, consolidating parts for manufacturing simplification, or using common components like one style and size screw, instead of multiple varieties. A good BOM will also identify the cost of each component as a percentage of the total cost, so you can focus efforts on parts that will have the biggest impact on maximizing your profit.
When it comes to creating a BOM, there is no single “best” template. Since each product (and company) is unique, the criteria you chose to include in your BOM will reflect that. At a minimum, you’ll want to include unique part numbers, descriptions, costs, and vendor/source. For more advanced companies, a bill of process (BOP), which documents how all the parts are assembled into the final product, is another useful exercise to complete.

2. Optimize your product design for manufacturing at scale.

As convenient as it would be to take your final prototype (or specific components) to a contract manufacturer and ask them to reproduce it in higher volumes, that is simply not realistic because the designs of prototype parts are generally not suited to large scale manufacturing methods. As an example, additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) is great for creating “one-off” prototype parts but those designs usually don’t translate to the injection molding process, which requires draft angles, consistent wall thicknesses and less complex geometries.
These types of considerations will impact the “design for manufacturability” of your product. That is, designing each part so that it can easily be manufactured using the most efficient method for the intended material. You will also want to ensure that your parts are designed for things like final product assembly, overall durability, ease of maintenance, and packaging, to name a few. Importantly, it can be exponentially more efficient to change a part design early in the process, rather than rushing into production and realizing a change needs to be made after tooling and other investments have already been made.

3. Find the right manufacturing partners to work with.

Once your product design is optimized and documented (via an updated BOM and part drawings), you may be ready to approach a contract manufacturer (CM) to get the parts or assemblies quoted. The best approach here is to find CMs who have the capabilities to meet your requirements and are eager to work with companies at your stage (i.e. start-up companies).
And remember, you are trying to establish a relationship with this CM, not trying to beat them down on price, so over-communicate and be forthcoming about your company goals, target costs, and anticipated part volumes. A true partner knows that if you succeed, it helps them succeed, and vice versa.
In the effort to commercialize a new product, developing a prototype that accomplishes your goals and is accepted by potential customers is a huge hurdle. However, getting that prototype into a “production-ready” form, is a whole other challenge.
For additional help with navigating the design optimization process and creating a bill of materials, check out the Build4Scale™ website https://build4scale.llnl.gov/modules.php (Modules 2 and 3 are dedicated to these, and other related topics) or reach out to FuzeHub directly here.