Community Spotlight: Richard Shaw

Community Spotlights are special features to introduce you to the amazing folks transforming manufacturing as part of the Tulip Community.

Richard is Staff Digital Transformation Engineer at Smith & Nephew, where he enjoys digging into complex, technical problems and is passionate about exploring and implementing new technologies in manufacturing. As you’ll read in this spotlight, he is also active in both his local and online communities and is passionate about mentoring and teaching others.

Richard Shaw has spent his life rooted in the South, where he enjoys spending time with his family, playing disc golf, and working on his ham radio. "I've always lived around the Memphis area. I’ve been in Mississippi for the last 20 or so years, but I can almost throw a rock across the (Tennessee) state line, so I’m still right there."

Richard enjoys serving his Memphis community and volunteers with his local Emergency Management Agency, where he helps coordinate responses to severe weather events and disasters. His role includes everything from training to actively participating during emergencies, ensuring everyone remains safe and informed. “I got into ham radio originally because I was thinking about emergencies," Richard explains. "I always wanted to lend a hand in my community and working in emergency management allows me to do just that.”

His interest in hobbies like ham radio, combined with the inspiration from his father, who was working on computers before computer science was a field of study, made his journey into engineering a calling he sensed early in life. “I've always been mechanically inclined, and I knew I was gonna be an engineer, but I didn't know what kind.” He went on to attend the University of Memphis where he earned a Bachelor's and Master's in Mechanical Engineering.

Richard originally had aspirations of working for NASA, but found a great opportunity with Smith & Nephew, a global medical technology company specializing in advanced wound care, orthopedics, and sports medicine products, and has been with the company for the past 22 years. In that time, Richard has held various positions that have helped him have a career filled with continuous learning.

He started as an intern in the computer-assisted surgery group, moved into manufacturing where he enjoyed leaning into the technical side of machining, and then went into gauge design where he honed his GD&T skills. After that, he jumped back into manufacturing, but this time on the new product development side of things. After a couple years and product launches later, Richard reflected, “as I'm prone to do, I get bored.” and he moved into a 3 year project and role in sustaining engineering management. After that project finished up, he landed in his current role on the Automations team working with Tulip and other digital technologies.

Across his many roles and projects, he has a couple of favorites that stick out in his memory. Working on the development of the Anthem femoral knee system, Richard recalls, “I got to see that project from start to finish, from design all the way through launch. On the manufacturing side, I was responsible for launching all three implants out of Memphis.”

His early work as an intern helped set the tone for the rest of his career as well. “I worked on computer-assisted surgery tools when the concept was still new, so that was really cool. Getting to play with state of the art tools and technology is always something I enjoy doing.”

It is fitting then, that in Richard’s current role, he spends some of his time evaluating and implementing new technologies, like Tulip, to improve connectivity and data visibility across Smith & Nephew’s manufacturing processes.

His day to day involves collaborating with the central OT (Operational Technology) team on architectural decisions, working on large projects to digitize S&N operations, driving technology adoption within the organization, and mentoring newer engineers and team members. With all these responsibilities and an exciting variety of work, he happily notes, “Being bored has not been an issue lately, I can say, so that's good.”

Richard has been working with Tulip for around 4 years and is now a true power user of the platform. While he enjoys the overall experience of making apps to solve problems in production, his favorite parts are working on the logic and backend data architecture that enables Tulip to talk across the hardware and software at S&N.

A couple other examples of Richard’s projects with Tulip include: a custom order ingestion system that integrates with SAP and provides visibility into the material review board (MRB) process, creating an attribute to track shift changes and using Telnet to interlock machines without edge devices, and a really innovative hack for monitoring old equipment. “I came up with a completely custom tank monitoring solution for some old equipment we have where we didn’t want to touch the PLC or modify the tanks. So I used an IO-Link solution and just layered those sensors over the existing system. Then, using Node-RED, I pulled that data into Tulip, so there's literally a TV screen outside the room, with a Tulip App that shows the tank levels, warning levels, and status, all in real time.”

He also has been supporting a global eDHR (Electronic Device History Record) project, which will digitize S&N’s paper DHRs and improve the efficiency and traceability of their manufacturing processes.

Richard is an active participant, not only in his local Memphis community, but also in the Tulip Community and the Industry 4.0 Discord. Richard sees the value in peer learning and sharing ideas in these online communities. "Being a member of these communities has accelerated my own learning because, yes, it's great to learn from your own mistakes, but it's even better to learn from others. So, I can go get on the Discord and say, ‘Hey, has anybody ever tried this?’ And they can tell you ‘oh yeah, we ran into this problem or recommend that approach.’ It's good to know. That has been invaluable just to stop us from making the same mistakes.” A big part of what Richard enjoys in his work is not just the technical challenges, but getting to share ideas and his learning with others.

Richard is always happy to share his own learnings and knowledge as well, and you can check out some of Richard’s most recent Show & Tell posts on Tulip Community:

Richard plans to stay on the technical path in his career, using his knowledge and experience to mentor others and provide strategic vision. And of course, he plans to stay up to date on the newest technologies so that he can add these to his toolbelt to solve big problems in manufacturing.

While some in the manufacturing world may resist change and technology, Richard embodies the qualities of an innovator, mentor, and community leader and is passionate about tackling big problems with new approaches and tools, all the while bringing along others for the ride.

Join us on Tulip Community to ask Richard a question about his career or hobbies or to just say hello!