‘Nobody has a good day in space if the team has a bad day’

Pound for pound, Neptec Design Group Ltd. of Ottawa punches way above its weight in the aerospace industry:­ a 100-person firm that in its 20 years has loaded its technology onto six space flights for NASA. The key to its success as a mid-size company is in being a team player, which means solving problems the way its customers want them solved, says Iain Christie, Neptec’s chief executive. “Nobody has a good day in space if the team has a bad day,” he says.

Neptec designs and builds advanced sensors and robotics for space, defence and industry, specializing in the development and operation of 3D vision systems for equipment inspection and positioning. This year, it became the first company outside the United States to win NASA’s George M. Low Award for quality and performance.

Beyond Canada and the United States, Neptec has contracts with the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency, and is in talks to do work in Russia. It is also seeking partners abroad for Neptec Technologies Corp., a start-up that hopes to put the company’s technological expertise to work for industries such as defence and energy.

Single-fault tolerance is written into the NASA documentation; it’s also very much a part of their culture. They don’t consider doing anything any other way, says Iain Christie.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA

Christie, 46, received his PhD in physics from the University of Ottawa. Most of the company’s staff have been trained at Canadian universities, including the University of Waterloo, Carleton University and Laval University.

Why did you win NASA’s George M. Low Award?

We do things the NASA way. We understand not just explicitly what they want, but implicitly the way they need to see this thing done. They understand that when we’re on the team, we’re on the team. Nobody has a good day in space if the team has a bad day.

Can you explain what you mean by doing things the way NASA needs to see them done?

When I first went down to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston very early in my career, I spent time working on the space vision system, which we eventually used to put together the space station. It used a camera to look at targets. We thought it would be better to use two cameras. I had worked for a year figuring out how to generate, as we call it, the two-camera algorithm. So I went down to NASA to work as our liaison down there, and the very first day we had a meeting and I said, “We have this two-camera algorithm and it will make things a lot better; it’s a lot more accurate and it’ll solve your problems.” The first guy to speak up said, “That’s very interesting, but we have to be single-fault tolerant, meaning if we lose one camera, we can still do it. So in order to do what you’re asking, we’d need at least three, maybe four cameras. So we can’t do it. I’m sorry, you can’t use your two-camera algorithm. What else do you have?” So that was my first lesson. Solving the problem the way you want to might be great, but if you can’t really understand what the customer wants and do it their way, you haven’t really solved the problem.

What did you learn from that?

The most important feature in solving problems is not only understanding the constraints the customer is willing to write down for you, but to understand their implicit constraints as well. The ones that come from their culture–the single-fault tolerance is written into the NASA documentation, but it’s also very much a part of their culture. They don’t consider doing anything any other way. When you can get to the point where they say, “but did you do this, did you do that, does it do this,” and you have the right answer, they begin to relax and believe that “when these guys bring us the solution, it’s going to be the NASA solution. It’s not going to be the Neptec solution.”

Is that the key to your company’s success?

Our ability to make ourselves part of our customers’ teams and adopt their constraints, attitudes and goals is what keeps our customers coming back, and staying very loyal to us. A lot of large companies like the innovation they get from the small companies, but they distrust it because they don’t know how to control it. They don’t know if they can trust the product they get. They don’t know if it’s going to be reliable or consistent.

What’s the biggest limitation of being small?

Any business that is focused on cash flow instead of balance sheets is a small business. And we’re a small business. The biggest constraint of being small is you can make long-term plans and long-term strategies, but you’re always at the mercy of short-term issues, and one way or other those issues always end up coming back to cash. The wolf is never far enough from the door to let you truly put aside short-term considerations for the long-term one.

It’s great to know you can find talented staff in Canada.

We really do have a first-rate post-secondary education system. And we have a society that allows people to focus on their employment. Because we live in a very stable society with very little social unrest or problems, people are able to put their energies and their creativity into their employment, which is a great benefit to the people that employ them.

To learn more about Neptec, see our video and feature.