Dell has sponsored this post.
Saying the past year was a challenge is like saying the Atlantic Ocean is damp. But engineers thrive on challenges, and across that damp ocean in West Sussex, UK, the engineers at product development company Maddison met that challenge and then some.
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Maddison has vacated its former office and built a new hybrid workflow that has not only seen them through the pandemic, but has also seen them thrive.
“It all seemed to go too smoothly,” described Rob Butterfield, Maddison’s managing director, about the company’s forced shift.
So how did Maddison do it?
Maddison and Medical Product Invention
Maddison specializes in developing innovative medical devices, working with start-ups, universities, hospitals and research groups to bring novel medical products to market. Designing within a strict regulatory framework including IEC 62366, IEC 60601, ISO 13485 and more, Maddison’s team of engineers takes the seed of a product idea and brings it to harvest.
“There’s usually a fair bit of invention required between the raw technology and the market,” Butterfield explained.
Take the M-MARK limb rehabilitation system, for example. Maddison collaborated with the Department of Health Sciences at Southampton University to design the sensor-equipped garment that, in conjunction with a graphical user interface, monitors and informs a patient’s rehabilitation exercises. The M-MARK system, which stands for Mechanical Muscle Activity with Real-time Kinematics, is designed to help stroke victims recover the proper function of their arms and hands.
Maddison’s core team includes just 10 people, “but we punch above our weight,” Butterfield says. Maddison fills its gaps with a large network of external specialists and suppliers that combine into a multi-disciplinary development team.
In early 2020, before we were all compelled to be hermits, Maddison’s office was a typical office. Employees came in to work and sat down at their desks, shared some air and morning greetings with unmasked colleagues, and booted up their desktop workstation. At Maddison, the desktop of choice was the Dell Precision 5810 or 5820 tower workstation, equipped with an NVIDIA Quadro P4000 or P6000 graphics card for GPU-based rendering in KeyShot. For computer aided design, Maddison uses SOLIDWORKS.
“We try to keep the workstations reasonably up to date, and we make sure that if you're doing serious CAD work, you've got a half-decent machine,” commented Nick Smart, senior designer at Maddison.
One of the few exceptions to the Precision 5810 and 5820 tower workstations was Butterfield’s computer, a Dell Precision mobile workstation. This came in handy for visiting clients and showing off designs, back when a client visit meant a train ride into the city and not a link to a Teams meeting.
Though they had a typical office setup, Maddison was a step ahead of the game with a limited remote work setup. Employees who needed to work from home for personal reasons could remote into their Dell Precision towers via Microsoft RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). This capability would smooth the transition once the pandemic was in full swing, but as Maddison quickly discovered, they would need a better solution.
How Maddison Responded to the Pandemic
“We had a feeling it was coming,” Smart recalled. It was March 2020, just a week before the UK went into lockdown, and Maddison was running some tests to see how it would fare with everybody working from home. The Dell Precision towers were turned on in the office and Maddison’s engineers each remoted into their own desktop via Microsoft RDP.
This scheme worked well enough to get Maddison through the early days of the pandemic, but it was necessarily a temporary solution. When using SOLIDWORKS, KeyShot or other graphically-intensive applications, there was a noticeable slowdown in performance.
“It was quite clear once we started working from home during COVID that there was a bottleneck,” Smart said.
With no end to lockdown in sight, the next move was simple: bring the desktops home. Gradually, Maddison engineers migrated their Precision towers from the old office to the home office, connecting to Maddison’s servers via VPN. With the office now empty of both people and computers, Maddison made the choice to get rid of it entirely. In July 2020, the company put its former headquarters up for sale.
This was only the beginning of the new Maddison. The medical product development company used the pandemic as an opportunity to invigorate its workflow.
PDM and the Cloud
One of Maddison’s biggest changes during the pandemic was turning to the cloud. The company partnered with their IT contractor Wessex IT to host their servers in a managed datacenter. This move also opened the door to Maddison adopting a new approach to managing its product data. With help from its SOLIDWORKS reseller, Solid Solutions, Maddison began using SOLIDWORKS PDM for product data management.
“We've put a PDM system in place to help us manage all of our documentation. We're in the process of getting our [ISO] 13485 accreditation, and our documentation for 13485 is critical,” Butterfield explained. On top of SOLIDWORKS PDM, Maddison has also begun using SOLIDWORKS Simulation to make up for its diminished physical prototyping capabilities.
The move to the datacenter has given Maddison unprecedented scalability, according to Smart.
“The cloud runs all our licenses for SOLIDWORKS, KeyShot, etc.,” he said. “It's got a PDM server on it. It's also got a directory structure for admin. And the other beauty of it is that it gives us the ability to upscale at any point. So if we need more bandwidth or storage or processing power, they can switch that on for us, as and when required.”
For a company that relies so heavily on external specialists, the centralization and scalability of Maddison’s new cloud solution has proven invaluable. “It’s gold dust to us,” Smart summarized.
If Maddison’s new system is gold dust, it’s the kind of gold dust that shows up in your pan on the first dip.
“We were thinking it was going to be a hell of a lot more painful,” Butterfield said. Though it was a forced transition, it ended up being a silver (or should that be gold?) lining to a terrible situation. “We can now run individual teams on any project and integrate people when and where necessary, so each project becomes its own entity,” Butterfield praised.
Building a Hybrid Approach to Product Design
As it stands, Maddison has succeeded in transitioning to a remote workflow. The company has not suffered any lost productivity from this transition. On the contrary, there have been many benefits: happier and more productive employees who no longer need to commute to an office; reduced overhead due to the evacuation of said office; and the jumpstarting of a new system that provides greater scalability and flexibility.
But there’s one piece still missing for Maddison.
“We're geographically quite spread as a team, but we've stolen the MIT mantra of ‘demo or die.’ We do like to build proof of principle prototypes where we can,” Butterfield said.
Ultimately, Maddison hopes to establish a new lab where they can physically test their designs and occasionally gather as a team (when it’s safe, of course). The company has no plans to bring its employees back into the office on a permanent basis. Instead, Maddison is working towards a hybrid model of remote work supported by a small physical workspace. Not only would this enable Maddison to build physical prototypes, but it would also provide some much-missed social interaction among colleagues. Butterfield also expects a lab would make it easier to ease new employees into the company.
This hybrid approach is giving Maddison a lot to consider when it comes to their hardware. To keep their current Precision towers up to date (towers which still reside in home offices), Maddison is gradually upgrading its graphics cards to the more modern NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000, which significantly reduces KeyShot rendering times, according to Butterfield. But when it comes time to upgrade the towers entirely, the hybrid approach seems particularly well-suited to mobile workstations, which are becoming increasingly capable and provide the flexibility so integral to the hybrid model.
“I think probably we'll slowly migrate back to face-to-faces with clients, so that will be a mobile system for sure,” said Butterfield.
Hybrid Working with Dell Precision Mobile Workstations
The pandemic fueled sales of mobile workstations, which grew by 25 percent from 2019 to account for 79 percent of all PC shipments in 2020. It’s not hard to understand why—mobile workstations have achieved a balance between portability and processing power that makes them a perfect fit for working from home. If you sell your office, as Maddison did, you can get away with giving each employee a desktop to take home; but if you hope to shift to a hybrid workflow, as Maddison does, a mobile workstation makes a lot of sense.
Dell, which provides Maddison’s workstations, has taken note of the changing tide. Their latest Precision mobile workstations are a “significant launch,” according to Matthew Allard of the Dell Precision product team.
“Normally these refresh cycles are increases in processor and GPU capability within the existing chassis,” Allard explained. “These [new Precision mobile workstations] are much more significant this time. While the chassis remain the same, the entire innards are different. It's not simply new processors and a new GPU, it's actually new motherboards and new designs internally.”
Each tier of Precision mobile workstations, from the entry-level 3000 series, to the thin-and-light 5000 series and finally the heavy-duty 7000 series, has received numerous performance enhancements. An upgrade to PCIe Gen 4 across the board offers higher bandwidth, which means faster performance for data-intensive workflows such as loading large CAD models. A better thermal design allows the GPUs to tap into more power for graphics performance. The Precision mobile workstations now support ThunderBolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6, with some models including support for 5G LTE WWAN.
Of course, the Precision processors have been upgraded as well, with the top-of-the line Precision 7760 offering up to an Intel Xeon CPU with eight cores and an NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU with 16 GB of VRAM, plus up to 128 GB of 3466 MHz SuperSpeed RAM. As Allard noted, these are powerful mobile workstations that are more than capable of replacing Maddison’s current fleet of towers should they so choose.
For users who don’t quite need that level of performance and want a sleeker option, the Precision 5560 and 5760 are Dell’s thinnest and lightest 15-inch and 17-inch mobile workstations, respectively. The 5000-series mobile workstations are practically made for showing off designs to clients and, as Maddison’s Rob Butterfield would appreciate, are small enough to use comfortably during a cramped train ride.
Finding Flexibility
Back on this side of the damp Atlantic, it’s hard to say what the working world will look like over the next few years. Some companies, like Maddison, responded quickly and with great success to the challenges of the pandemic. Other companies are still trying to find their footing in the new normal.
Wherever you are in the spectrum, it seems that flexibility is the key to resilience. Whether that means adopting new software, pursuing cloud solutions, transitioning to a new workspace, switching to mobile hardware, or all of the above, keep in mind that the transition doesn’t have to be a burden. As Maddison proves, it can be as good as gold dust.
To learn more, visit delltechnologies.com/precision.