Is Clip A ‘Slack’ For Factories?

The magic of the digital industrial revolution lies in gifting the spark of intelligence to every piece of industrial equipment. But the true full value of the digital-industrial revolution can only be unlocked by turning every intelligent machine into a fully integrated member of the team.

 Every corporate leader knows that the rapid and efficient flow of information plays an essential role in making a team effective: it allows all team members to have a complete view of the process, to learn from new incoming information and to react in a coordinated way to unexpected developments. Over time, technology has developed new ways for human colleagues to collaborate more effectively, exchanging documents, videos and ideas – Slack is perhaps the most well-known example.

 With the industrial internet of things, the challenge becomes how to extend the same kind of collaboration to intelligent machines; to make it possible for machines to “talk” to each other and their human colleagues, and to exchange information in different forms and in real time.

This is the challenge that Rajeev Bhalla and Sriny Sundararajan set out to solve when they founded Clip Automation.

Clip aims to bring data gathering and analytics, information sharing, and collaboration onto a single platform. The system connects all intelligent industrial equipment in a production facility, together with workers who can access all information and adjust operations through computers and portable devices.

 Clip’s system includes the deployment of cameras that capture high-definition videos of the key elements of the production process. This allows to not only generate an instant alert in case of malfunctions, but also to rapidly analyze the cause of the problem, fix it, and determine what changes might need to be made to the process to prevent the same incident from reoccurring.

 Clip also allows human operators to easily generate reports including charts, data tables, videoclips and any relevant attachments, and to share them within the organization. Chats, feeds and discussion boards make it easy for all team members to stay up to date, exchange views, discuss problems and possible solutions, and collaborate on projects – much as on traditional collaboration applications. The difference here is that the same system is connected to – and accessed by – the “silicon colleagues”, that is the intelligent machines on the factory floor, and the data generated by the machines can be accessed in real time. In other words, Clip extends the collaboration to all elements of the production process, both human and mechanical.

 It’s an ambitious undertaking, one that requires guaranteeing a very high degree of interoperability to ensure that people, machines and processes can communicate with each other seamlessly, and that all key systems such as Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and others can directly access up-to-date information from machines and processes. This higher level of automation, if implemented right, can unlock a new level of efficiency for manufacturing companies.

 One of the obstacles that has so far slowed the adoption of digital-industrial innovations is a sort of “communication gap” between software developers and manufacturing clients; in other words, sometimes the development of digital solutions is driven by the priorities and expertise of software experts without sufficient understanding of what it takes to effectively implement them on an actual factory floor.

 Co-founders Bhalla and Sundararajan, however, have seen the pain points and implementation hurdles up close: they both have extensive experience working in automation with companies such as Apple AAPL -0.5% and Juul. They set out to create the ecosystem collaboration tool that their own experience told them was missing and needed.

 Clip is a young startup, founded just before the Covid-19 pandemic brought heightened uncertainty and a whole new set of disruptions and challenges. But the pandemic also brought an opportunity, because the disruptions have made manufacturing companies much more determined to invest in digital-industrial solutions that can increase the efficiency and resilience of their operations – exactly what Clip promises. The startup has already attracted interest from companies in a range of industries, it is a company to watch closely.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcoannunziata/2021/10/21/is-clip-a-slack-for-factories/?sh=610ea00346dd