semantha Makes Knowledge Available – and Us One of 100 Locations for Industry 4.0 in Baden-Württemberg
Since August 2020, thingsTHINKING has been living in one of the 100 locations for Industry 4.0 in Baden-Württemberg[1]. semantha was selected as one of the 13 flagship projects recently awarded in the state and we would like to thank Allianz Industrie 4.0 Baden-Württemberg for the award[2]! It is intended to motivate companies to actively address the real opportunities offered by Industry 4.0, says Katrin Schütz, State Secretary in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics, Labor and Housing.
But what exactly does natural language processing have to do with Industry 4.0? In this blog post we will get to the bottom of this very question.
semantha’s Contribution to Industry 4.0
The Allianz Industrie 4.0 Baden-Württemberg [3] is regularly looking for outstanding ideas from industry and science that fully exploit the potential of Industry 4.0. Typically, Industry 4.0 refers to keywords such as Internet of Things, Digital Shop Floor or Smart Factory – in other words, the measurement, automation and optimization of production process steps in industrial companies. semantha, on the other hand, reads documents – so how does she fit in here? Quite simply: semantha digitizes thinking processes. She supports highly qualified and often expensive staff in time-consuming and recurring work steps, so that at the end of the day more time can be invested in creative thinking processes. This in turn also benefits the production processes.
semantha for Manufacturing Companies
semantha can add value to any process that includes the necessity of reading a lot in order to make an (actually simple) decision or a simple assessment. In the industrial environment there are many such processes beyond actual production – mostly upstream in planning or downstream in continuous improvement or in classic after sales. Until now, these processes have not been the center of optimization, only the production itself. With semantha we meet the increasing desire to also improve these “non-production” processes.
A special application for semantha is the processing of tenders and specification sheets, e.g. for automotive suppliers. Normally, technical experts process tenders according to their specialist area and create an offer based on their wealth of experience.
semantha can support two essential process steps here: First, she can compare the new requirements with requirements that have already been assessed in completed projects in the past. Thus, critical or recurring requirements, for example, can be identified quickly and easily. The evaluation of the separate requirements in an individual tender is thereby greatly accelerated, as it is possible to fall back on thinking work that has already been done.
Second, with semantha’s help, new incoming requirements can be compared with internal documents such as quality manuals or process descriptions. The results of this comparison provide the engineers with valuable information as a basis for decision-making, e.g. if semantha discovers deviations between internal specifications and the requirements in a tender.
The big advantage here is that the responsible specialists do not have to compare all possible reference documents themselves (if they even know all of them), but can make well-founded decisions based on semantha’s preliminary work. In addition, semantha’s comparison is traceable and auditable.
We think – just like the jury – that digitization and Industry 4.0 are about much more than the production or the collection of sensor data. It is rather about all areas of industrial value creation. It is precisely the countless unstructured text documents in many company processes that hold a great treasure semantha can help to unlock. With semantha we have a solution ready that takes Industry 4.0 to a new level.
1. https://www.i40-bw.de/de/100orte/thingsthinking-gmbh/
2. https://www.i40-bw.de/de/13-leuchtturmprojekte-ausgezeich/
3. https://www.i40-bw.de/de/100-orte-fuer-industrie-4-0-in-baden-wuerttemberg/
