As part of my Hannover Messe interviews a couple of weeks ago, John Gonsalves, a VP at Cyient, introduced me to “our answer to Industry 4.0” for connected workers and supply chain. The new product is INTELLICYIENT, a suite of Industry 4.0 solutions that will enable digital transformation for industries that draw significant value from their assets such as manufacturing, industrial, aerospace, automotive and off-highway, utilities, and mining and natural resources.
Gonsalves, “The most successful Industry 4.0 solutions will be the ones that bring domain knowledge, depth of technological expertise, and engineering excellence and understanding of business operations. These have been the unique strengths of Cyient, which makes it a partner of choice across its Fortune 500 customers globally.”
Commenting on the launch, Anand Parameswaran, SVP and Global Business Head, Cyient Digital, said, “Cyient has leveraged its investments in the latest digital technology capabilities, and its three decades of experience in engineering and geospatial offerings for asset-intensive industries to design its INTELLICYIENT solution portfolio. With six digital solutions, powered by the interplay of nine technology studios, and our strong partner ecosystem, INTELLICYIENT will help enterprises globally achieve the full potential of digital transformation with IT-OT convergence. We aim to focus on the four key themes of smart automation, intelligent supply chain, end-to-end visibility of workflows and assets, and next-gen workforce solutions that are driving Industry 4.0 adoption.”
Akshat Vaid, Vice President, Everest Group, added, “Digital engineering has become all-pervasive, contributing over 23% to global ER&D spending. Within manufacturing, it manifests as Industry 4.0—the transformation of cyber and physical systems on the back of digital themes for enhanced visibility, control, and autonomy. Industry 4.0 investments have been rising steadily, and the COVID-19 crisis has provided an additional impetus as enterprises look to enhance manufacturing resilience. In effect, enterprises are no longer viewing this spend as discretionary but rather as an avenue for driving business resilience and competitiveness. They, however, struggle with a shortage of capabilities, organizational complexity, data integration, and speed of implementation when it comes to transformation-at-scale. This has led to a rise in outsourcing with third-party vendors offering services across consulting, development, integration, and management of existing deployments.”
Cyient is a global engineering and digital technology solutions company. As a Design, Build, and Maintain partner for leading organizations worldwide, Cyient takes solution ownership across the value chain to help customers focus on their core, innovate, and stay ahead of the curve. The company leverages digital technologies, advanced analytics capabilities, domain knowledge, and technical expertise to solve complex business problems. Cyient partners with customers to operate as part of their extended team in ways that best suit their organization’s culture and requirements. Cyient’s industry focus includes aerospace and defense, medical technology and healthcare, telecommunications, rail transportation, semiconductor, geospatial, industrial products, and energy and utilities.
Here is a look at where leadership can take you. This features Pat Gelsinger, new CEO of Intel. He recently left VMware to return to Intel to lead the company. Intel definitely needed new leadership. It has been dropped by Apple in favor of ARM system-on-a-chip. It has been unable to get its 10 nM manufacturing process ironed out, let alone 7 nM. It has fallen behind in the chip race.
Obviously, many things Gelsinger talks about in this message started before he got there. But a good leader brings things and people together, focuses on the essential, and can articulate the company, its mission, and its vision. The meat of the talk is about 25 minutes.
Yesterday, I sat in on a Webinar from Honeywell about a plant optimization project with Woodside. Here are a few takeaways.
Supplier/Customer Collaboration–from the earliest phase of the project, the customer brought in experts from the supplier to assist planning, specifying, scheduling, and the like.
Planning–not a surprise to any of us who have done any project in manufacturing (or around the house) that success was correlated with good planning.
Access to remote experts–we now have good tools for bringing in experts from wherever they are to consult with the project. Video tools mean they can see and be seen. This saves time, money, headaches.
Jason Fried, co-founder/CEO of Basecamp a projects software company, released a blog post (the hyperlink on his name) that dumped a number of new policies on employees. He and co-founder CTO David Heinemeier Hansen (@DHH) have decided that employees at Basecamp are too worried about things other than work.
Following the lead of Bitcoin, they have banned all political and social communication on company communication tools. Employees are free to do that on their own time on their own social media platforms. But not employee-to-employee.
I have to back up a second to some of my past experience. I served eight years on a public school board. I learned that school administrators hate any public discussion and questioning of their decisions. They hate any feedback from teachers. Since principals are “part of the club”, it becomes career-limiting for a principal to question anything. I mentioned one time to the superintendent that I was advising a bunch of students on how to protest (thanks to my civil rights/hippie days). He blanched.
Similarly, Fried wrote that decisions wouldn’t be discussed. Live with it and go back to work.
They also did away with “paternalistic” policies. They had over time instituted policies and payments for wellness programs and the like. They will give employees a payment this year in lieu of the benefit, then it’s cut out. Maybe in future years a profit sharing plan will make up the difference. The rationale is that they don’t think the company should tell people what’s good for them–even if it is.
And, no more advisory committees. The person in charge makes the decision. Period. If they want feedback and information from anyone, they will ask for it.
Basecamp has been an employee-friendly company. These new policies require trust. They blew the trust by the way they rolled it out. Bitcoin lost a number of employees with its new policies. We’ll see how many Basecamp loses. And what the culture will evolve to. And whether Fried and DHH will write any more books about the right way to work.
I have witnessed the evolution of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) over the past 35 years. This is an automated system of taking a picture in a digital vision system of some text, doing some magic processing, and outputting machine understandable text that can be used directly in your software application.
Neurala discovered this website’s reach and has been sending me a stream of updates. This is a company moving forward rapidly. Today’s announcement pushes the state-of-the-art.
Today, Neurala announced a partnership with IHI Logistics & Machinery. Neurala’s vision AI software will be deployed to increase the effectiveness of optical character recognition (OCR) reading of package information by automatically identifying expiration dates, to ultimately reduce waste and relieve workers from mundane, repetitive tasks.
IHI Logistics & Machinery is a leading global provider of material handling and factory automation solutions, with a focus on the management of food packaging information and logistics process improvement specifically. Traditionally, food and perishable items come into the warehouse with a production and an expiration date, with these important dates scanned by human workers with handheld OCR terminals upon arrival. It is a tedious job, and when an OCR terminal misreads an expiration date, it results in the need for inspection by humans. This also increases manufacturers’ costs and reduces profits.
Neurala’s vision AI will improve OCR by automatically identifying a product’s expiration date, including validating where on the packaging the expiration date is located. It will also be able to verify that text on a box is the expiration date, as opposed to other numerical data such as the SKU or production date, if a series of dates is present. This reduces the need for manual intervention when errors or misreads occur and ensures that only accurate data is passed back to the ERP system.
“Introducing AI and automation into our workflow will be a game changer for our business,” said Takayuki Sado, general manager at IHI Logistics & Machinery. “By partnering with Neurala, we are able to bolster our value to our customers, by dramatically increasing the speed and efficiency of material handling. This level of automation is also extremely valuable, as it helps us do more with less – which is especially critical in a time when there are restrictions limiting the number of workers present on the warehouse floor.”
“Neurala is on a mission to help manufacturers realize the benefits of vision AI by partnering with companies around the world who are leaders in their industry,” said Max Versace, co-founder and CEO of Neurala. “We are excited to partner with IHI Logistics & Machinery to provide them with the technology needed to further their position as an innovator and leader in material handling.”
