Drishti Technologies, Inc. (Drishti), a transformative technology company that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to produce continuous, system-wide data on manual factory tasks, was named a “Cool Vendor” in the May 2019 Cool Vendors in Manufacturing Operations report by Gartner, Inc.
Drishti’s impact on lean assembly lines is two-fold: first, the data Drishti gathers is used by operators to make faster and better decisions on the factory floor; second, the data allows supervisors and engineers to understand the system at scale and drive far-reaching improvements in productivity and quality.
Drishti was one of four vendors included in the report as “interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.” Gartner finds that manufacturing operations leaders should “enable better decisions, not just better processes”, which is what we believe Drishti is able to do by automatically creating data from manual activities that have historically required time-intensive manual data collection.
The report states, “Manufacturers are faced with multiple pressures from the changing labor force and customer demands. The labor force is aging and significant expertise is leaving with the retiring workers…This shift in the manufacturing workforce, which has gone unattended for over a decade, has left organizations scrambling for new tools that create better ways to empower and support the manufacturing workforce. While the allure of artificial intelligence and machine learning is strong, these technologies are not going to solve production problems today, nor are they likely to ever replace the need for a skilled workforce.” This is why we think that manufacturers turn to technology like Drishti to augment and extend the value of human beings on the factory floor. We feel that Drishti’s “man and machine” approach allows operational decisions to happen more quickly and confidently by combining the strengths of both.
We believe that Drishti technology complements and enhances lean manufacturing, a philosophy that empowers and engages employees in an effort to drive faster decision-making – and, ultimately, business growth – from the bottom up. We also believe this approach to augmenting lean is gaining popularity with leading manufacturers around the globe. According to the report, “The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has shown early promise in asset and energy management, but artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are nascent. Success for AI and ML in decision-making will be as worker assistants not as replacements for the foreseeable future.” In fact, the Cool Vendor report cites a Gartner survey and states: “In the 2018 Gartner/MESA [Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association] International Business Value of MES [Manufacturing Execution System] Survey, 59% of respondents rated ‘Improving employee decision making/competence’ as the second most important business criterion in their justification of manufacturing applications.”
“Despite all of the industry hype around robotics and automation, humans still do the vast majority of factory tasks,” said Prasad Akella, founder and CEO of Drishti. “In fact, humans are responsible for 72% of tasks on the factory floor, and create three times the value of machines. Drishti makes humans visible to analytics for the first time by augmenting existing lean-based improvement processes with massive datasets on actions performed by humans. With Drishti, manufacturers can optimize manual operations throughout the factory and ensure that digital transformation extends to people, allowing better decisions to be made across the organization, from the line associate up to the executive level.”
For more information about Drishti, visit Drishti.com.
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