Scotland Manufacturing & Supply Chain Expo 2026

At the end of September we spent a day at the Scotland Manufacturing & Supply Chain Expo at the SEC in Glasgow. It was Fostrom's first outing as a company, and as good an excuse as any to start this blog.

We build software for teams building on hardware, so this was our crowd: people who ship devices, push updates to them over the air, and live with whatever breaks afterwards. With over a hundred exhibitors under one roof, so we just walked the hall and talked to anyone working on something interesting.

People were generous with their time, and were happy to get into the weeds of how their stuff works and what goes wrong, such as machines that have outlived the software around them, and a lot of unglamorous engineering quietly holding production lines together.

We kept hearing versions of the same problems at different stands. Many teams seem to be solving these problems in-house, more or less alone. This insight was worth the trip by itself.

See you at the next one.