KonnectAi Helps Give Even the Newest Employees the Confidence of Seasoned Veterans
The company has collaborated with Google Cloud to launch its AI-powered quality inspection platform that is scalable and secure, without changing or adding time to manufacturing processes.
June 12, 2024
One of the many benefits of its AI-powered quality inspection technology, said Jarred Knecht, KonnectAi’s president, in an interview with Design News, is that it can help give even newer employees the confidence of seasoned veterans.
“What we saw is that quality inspectors or even operators who have many years of experience and are able to say whether something is good or bad—that's getting increasingly difficult, just with the evolution of the world,” he explained. “And, so for us, we have a lot of younger people coming into manufacturing and [this technology] really empowered them to be able to feel like that 20-year veteran operator or inspector who just knew when something was good, or not good, or kind of in between.”
The software is completely cloud-based, using Google Cloud to host the AI, Knecht said. “Basically, you have a camera, and you show the camera whatever you'd like it to inspect,” he said. “And the camera, the AI models, are trained to look at that particular process, know what it is, recognize it, and say whether that's a good or bad visual of that particular process.”
The model building is done inside the tool, Knecht said, in a process called the Wizard. The customer can click on the Wizard and take pictures of a good and also a bad inspection point. “That gets uploaded to our system and our team trains the model and deploys back to the customer’s system,” Knecht explained. “So, there’s no work that the customer has to do—we’re doing that service for them.”
The image is then saved into the cloud linked to a specific work order or serial number of a particular product. “You have the traceability, as well as the quality aspect at the same time,” Knecht said, noting that all of that is done very quickly, without adding time or making manufacturers change the way that they produce or manufacture products. “It's really meant to be seamless as an add-on to their existing processes,” he said.
The software can be used to recall images of past products, something that is especially useful for engineers, Knecht said. “If they want to do a final inspection at the end of a production line, they can recall images of multiple steps in the production process on a particular part to see how things are being done and even drill down into specific work cells or specific operators and really measure those quality metrics,” he said.
Additionally, there is a dashboard in the system that gives information about how many inspections have been done and how many were good and how many were bad, as well. “It does give you that analytic perspective that engineers I think will really enjoy,” he said.
KONNECTAI
Knecht noted that instead of AI replacing people, he has seen an improvement in the workers in his company’s plants. “It's making them more confident and more efficient,” he said. “Of course, it’s a great tool for quality inspection using AI and not increasing the cost of products by adding these new features, but it does have wider benefits in terms of retention and turnover and motivation and all these things for our workforces,” he concluded. “That's a byproduct that we started to see happening in our own plants, which was a great surprise.”
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