2023. Digital start-ups are big business with new names emerging constantly, a trend fueled by among other things, consumer expectation and changes in corporate behaviour. On a wider European scale, the likes of Seeq, Nuron and Brightseed are already making and impact and every week brings a new player to the fore in all sectors, along with the bigger names such as the increasingly established Seedrs, Mondo and Mimecast.
Experts point out that broadly, they fall into four key areas of digital transformation. There are those emerging in the Foundational Technology space; emerging and fast- evolving areas such as AI and IoT. Then there is Innovation Transformation such as the switch from Natural Language Processing through to informatics and digital tools and personalised products and services, using the likes of AI and IoT to unlock new areas of value.
Then what we broadly term Industry 4.0 – the emerging technologies built on the quest for improved efficiency, cost reduction, and flexibility for improved ROI.
A key challenge for any startup, alongside the initial
product development and marketing, is the need to raise a substantial amount of money to move it on. Though a vast majority of them fail in the long-term, some of history’s most successful entrepreneurs began in this way. Just look at what Bill Gates did with Microsoft and Ray Kroc did with McDonald’s.
BRIEF | TOWERS OF INNOVATION
Covid has been very instrumental in driving digital transformation and there are few better examples than Unilever’s Intelligent Powder Towers in Brazil and Ecuador. They are critical for processing their laundry detergent powders, such as OMO, Comfort and Surf. Ingredients are sprayed into them to be blasted with hot air to dry into powder form. The moisture content is pivotal to product consistency and crucial to maintaining brand standards. Manual operators have historically controlled this balance, but this can now be done algorithmically and overseen by staff from home. The algorithms use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict optimal operating conditions and simulate different scenarios. “Now the technicians in the control room can focus on more strategic decisions regarding production and use data intelligence to improve the process, instead of having to constantly monitor each process parameter,” said Daniel Correia, the company’s digital manufacturing manager, LATAM. “The insights are all in one place, accessible through a Power BI dashboard and the Unilever Digital Factory app, which enables faster decision making based on real-time data to optimise the performance of the tower.”
“worldwide, we take care of everything which has to be transported from a to b. our customers are, for example, large Parcel providers. if a customer orders a package or an online retailer sends it, back its often done through our systems”
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