Expertise

Computer vision, telemetry and field tools

Digital that walks out of the office: into the shop floor, onto the vehicles, and into the hands of people wearing gloves.

In most companies digitization stops at the office door. The management system knows everything about invoices and orders, and nothing about what is happening right now on the plant, on the truck, in the yard. That part of the work keeps travelling on paper, phone calls and people's memory, and every time a number is needed somebody has to be asked to remember.

Three fronts

Computer vision on the plant. A camera plus a model that watches instead of a person: quality control, counting, recognising what goes past, alarms on conditions the naked eye misses. The point is not to replace who is there, it is to relieve them of staring at something for eight hours.

Sensors and telemetry on vehicles and equipment. Position, status, consumption, running hours, alarms. The value is not in the raw data, which on its own only produces dashboards nobody looks at: it is in joining it with operational data. A vehicle that says where it is is worth little; a vehicle that says where it is while the system knows which round it is running and which service falls due in two weeks changes how you plan.

Apps for people working away from the office. Offline-first as the normal condition, not as a degraded mode. Main operation in two or three taps, large targets, readable in sunlight and with gloves on. The camera instead of the keyboard. And technical errors handled by the app, never passed to the person doing the work.

The rule that holds across all three

You design by watching the real work. Half a day in the yard or next to the line, with the people who do that work, is worth more than ten requirements-gathering meetings: that is where you discover the glove, the sun on the screen, the spot where there is never any signal, the gesture repeated fifty times a day.

And the sign that something did not work is always the same: paper comes back. The notepad, the sheet folded in four, the photo sent to a colleague. People are not sabotaging anything, they are defending themselves against a tool that slows them down.

Related reading: A yard app is not an office app · When your assets live in the field

How it starts

From one gesture or one plant. A pilot on one crew or one line, in a few weeks, with the measure agreed up front: how much paper stops circulating, how many hours are freed, how many stoppages are avoided. If the pilot does not convince the people using it, it does not get widened: it gets changed.