I recently heard about a new company, ThinkIQ talking with Niels Andersen, someone I’ve known in the industrial software business for (ahem) many years. We conferenced in Brian Anderson, also with ThinkIQ to introduce me to a different take on industrial software–Track material flow, not assets.
Industrial companies are facing disruptions. The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing how things are made, bought, used, and shared. The always-on, always-connected world is changing how consumers expect to conduct business. The combination of Big-Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Cloud computing is changing how applications are built and what they can do.
They told me about embracing digital transformation to run a supply chain more efficiently and collaboratively, make its products safer, and increase the quality of the output, all whilst driving down costs.
ThinkIQ developed what it dubs Digital Manufacturing Transformation SaaS. It delivers material traceability and insight into ways to improve yield, quality, safety, compliance, and brand confidence. “Our fact-based granular and data-centric contextualized view of material flows and related provenance attribute data integrates into existing IoT infrastructures and crosses supply chains to manufacturing processes and beyond. Our customers have saved $10’s of millions by identifying waste and underperforming assets, as well as reducing warranty reserves for quality and safety issues.”
The occasion for the conversation was a recent release of new functionalities.
New functionalities improve yield, quality, safety, compliance, and brand confidence while reducing waste and environmental impact.
ThinkIQ, a pioneer of digital manufacturing transformation SaaS driving continuous intelligence on the shop floor and throughout the global supply chain, today announced added functionality to its SaaS Manufacturing platform. This new release adds significant product enhancements, which include UI components that allows customers to build custom dashboards, simplified analysis of time series data, and reusable type systems that help to accelerate deployment.
In this release, ThinkIQ addresses core issues that have hindered broad adoption of manufacturing analytics with features that power continuous intelligence driven by sensor data and control systems rather than transactional capabilities.
The new added functionality adds to ThinkIQ’s platform which delivers fact-based granular and a data-centric view of material flows and related providence attribute data. The platform integrates into existing IoT infrastructure to help manage everything from supply chains to manufacturing processes and beyond. These added capabilities will continue to build upon ThinkIQ’s unprecedented material traceability and insight which helps manufacturers improve yield, quality, safety, compliance and brand confidence while reducing waste and environmental impact.
“Most manufacturing systems are transactional in nature, which creates a disconnect between the transactional information systems and the real-life continuous nature of the processes,” said Niels Andersen, CPO of ThinkIQ. “This has limited manufacturers’ ability to analyze operations and find opportunities for improvements. Traditional data lakes do not structure manufacturing data in a reusable schema that is easy to analyze, which results in a vast amount of custom code being written for every analytics scenario where every dashboard has to be created from scratch.”
The following new features break down these barriers:
- Consistently Analyze Sensor Data – ThinkIQ features a richer type and instance system model that provides additional meaning to sensor data, making it easier to build systems in a repeatable manner and consistently analyze the data across many production units.
- Dynamic Data Calculations for Continuous Intelligence – The upgraded product features a simplified approach to performing calculations on time series data while fully embracing the complexities of how sensor data must be processed. These ValueStream Expressions include manufacturing specific functionality such as material flow alignment of the data, rich interpolation algorithms and unit of measure conversion. ValueStream Functions are able to process time series data at its full resolution with no need to downsample or resample the data prior to performing calculations. This process can be compared to the power of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) for live data streams with the simplicity of 5th grade arithmetic.
- User Interface (UI) – ThinkIQ features updated UI Components that allow people with simple web site development skills to build rich dashboards and user interfaces. The UI Components are an integral part of ThinkIQ’s Content management system and embraces ThinkIQ’s type and instance system model so that users don’t have to worry about how to map the UI Components to the underlying data.
“The newest functionalities to our platform will allow our customers to achieve a more precise understanding of their manufacturing data which can be utilized to better fine tune their production execution,” said Mr. Andersen, CPO of ThinkIQ. “Our customers are continuing to push the boundaries of material traceability and we are committed to giving a holistic view of the supply chain process from farm to fork.”
ThinkIQ’s SaaS Manufacturing cloud-based platform simplifies the creation of web-based applications and leverages the strengths of the Internet of Things, Big Data, Data Science, Semantic Modeling and Machine Learning. The platform is able to collect data inputs across supply chain (existing & IIoT sensors) and analyze with AI, ML to identify correlations and root causes. It creates a new set of value-added traceability data which is delivered with actionable insights and decisions to guide systems across the supply chain.
“We are continuously looking at ways we can improve our platform in order to help our customers obtain the most information possible to manage their supply chains,” said Doug Lawson, CEO of ThinkIQ. “The latest functionalities we have added to our platform will give our customers more ease of use which in turn will allow them to operate their supply chains and material flow with even greater efficiency.”
