How Smart Skin Technologies Found The Right Fit To Help Scale Rapid Growth
FREDERICTON–Smart Skin Technologies (SST) is growing fast–almost too fast.
The Fredericton-based “industrial internet of things” productivity solutions company raised $10.7-million last June to help accelerate its growth in the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries.
It was Smart Skin’s largest-ever funding round and an investment intended to hire up to 50 new employees over a one year period.
Finding the right talent to grow SST has also been a major challenge, according to founder and CTO, Kumaran Thillainadarajah.
“The team has grown quite a bit, we’re at about 55 full-time employees in Canada,” said Thillainadarajah.
The company supports several of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and nearly every major bottling company, with its trademark Quantifeel solutions.
The patented technology is added to containers on a production line and combines sensors, analytics, and artificial intelligence to give manufacturers data on the forces their containers experience during production.
This helps workers better control the filling process and reduces the number of broken bottles and damaged cans.
Just how much money the technology can save a large-scale beverage operation depends on how big the operation is, and for some that answer is in the millions. It’s also helped develop Smart Skin’s client list to include some of the largest beverage producers in the world.
Keeping Lines Moving
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic saw Smart Skin set the stage for further growth. Thillainadarajah said it was also a proving point for scaling the business.
“People weren’t buying their beverages at restaurants, they were consuming them at home,” he said. He added that beverage makers saw more pressure put on their production as a result.
“They needed more of our service, more of our help, to keep their lines running optimally and it actually helped us kickstart our remote services business.”
Thillainadarajah believes the global pharmaceutical industry faced a similar challenge, and with more at stake.
“Our solution was used on lines that were producing Covid vaccines in Europe and the U.S.,” he said. He noted Smart Skin helped to reduce breakage and waste on the same lines that produced lifesaving drugs and vaccines.
The company has operated under a relatively low profile and Thillainadarajah guessed not too many people know that a New Brunswick business has had such a big impact in the world.
“It’s probably the most rewarding part about our jobs: we are creating unique solutions and it’s having a huge practical impact.”
Help around the corner
In March, Smart Skin was able to hire Chris Xuan as its new Operations Director.
Originally from China, Xuan came to Smart Skin with 25 years of experience working around the world with electronics manufacturing companies, helping to scale and operationalize growth.
After holding senior operations roles with manufacturers in China, Xuan came to Canada in 2015 to work for Toronto-based SMTC.
The role was fulfilling but came with a lot of travel, leading Xuan and his family to look for a more local opportunity where they actually were — in Fredericton.
Xuan says what attracted him to Smart Skin was seeing a fast-growing company making a great product with very high marketing potential.
“That layout — moving from start up to scale up — means they need to improve a lot and they need to hire lots of talent to have the company grow very fast,” said Xuan.
Thillainadarajah couldn’t agree more. Prior to hiring Xuan he had discussions with other companies in the region about their challenges in manufacturing scale.
“Manufacturing is a big headache honestly, for me,” admitted Thillainadarajah. “There’s not a lot of it in New Brunswick and when we posted this job I did not think that we would find Chris in New Brunswick.”
Thillainadarajah assumed the hiring process would involve headhunters, with an inevitable relocation for someone from a tech stronghold like San Francisco or Waterloo.
“We just got to a stage where we realized that we’re growing so quickly that this is going to get out of control pretty soon. We’re doubling revenue, we’re doubling our output every year,” shared Thillainadarajah.
“We needed someone like Chris, who’s actually run large factories with hundreds of employees and who knows the processes that we need to put in place.”
Smart Skin moved into its current office space in downtown Fredericton in 2020, though continued growth has put some added weight on looking beyond the company’s King Street walls to a larger space that can match its scaling.
Xuan says his first job is to better align with the company’s long-term strategy by implementing an operational plan to move its processes to more of a manufacturing environment.
Navigating the skills challenge
Thillainadarajah says despite its rapid growth, SST has kept a low profile, a vibe that’s always been his modus operandi in business.
“That’s the way we’ve operated but it has also, to an extent, kind of hurt us because not many people know how successful we’ve become, or that we even exist frankly, and that’s starting to impact us.”
For Smart Skin Technologies to reach its targets, Thillainadarajah says it means more rapid growth.
“We need more people to join us. We’ve got several positions posted right now. We’ve got twice as many that we’re working on right now,” he added.
“Chris has decades of experience in manufacturing. Most of the team that we have making our products are young, they’re eager to learn,” says Thillainadarajah. He says he believes finding Xuan was essential in providing a unique opportunity to learn how to scale manufacturing.
“That’s a skill set that’s not easily found in New Brunswick,” said Thillainadarajah. “I think that’s going to be good for the whole province.”
Tyler Mclean is a Huddle reporter based in Fredericton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].