Case Study: How Traction Technology helped a major industrial manufacturer capture and scale organizational knowledge

Neal Silverman

Traction Technology

The manufacturing space has been dealing with a workforce crisis that’s been costing millions due to downtime, missed deadlines, and repairs. It used to be that seasoned supervisors were key to keeping factories running smoothly. They knew their machines like the back of their hands. Often, these experienced individuals could tell by sound or feel when a machine needed maintenance.

Unfortunately, people age and retire, and new employees cannot be reliably trained to “feel” for when something’s wrong. Our client, when faced with these same issues, turned to their usual vendors for a modern solution that could replace an employee's “sixth sense” with sensors and analytics. They came up empty-handed.

Discovering the right partners for Industry 4.0

That’s when they came to us. Using the Traction platform and our research services, we opened a pipeline from Silicon Valley and other innovation centers to their doorstep, connecting them with new startups as well as more established players in the IoT space.

As with every client, our first step was to thoroughly understand their needs. In this case, our client needed to find partners to deliver:

Advanced sensor technology and AI-driven analytics to create digital twins of their machinery
AI to test hardware fixes on Digital Twins before applying them physically
Scalable solutions across multiple sites while reporting to a single source
Cybersecurity to protect against ransomware and operational technology (OT) attacks

Using our proprietary platform and research process, we helped this multi-billion-dollar manufacturing company quickly shortlist vendors who could meet their criteria, including enterprise-ready startups with the latest technology.

Cutting time to value in half

Our client had planned for the digital transformation and modernization of their manufacturing process to take twelve months. Using Traction Technology, they did it in six months, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and preventing the incursion of competitive threats. Thanks to our software and knowledge of relevant startups, the entire selection process was completed and new systems began testing in half the time they would have otherwise. In fact, our client was so convinced by the new technology that a venture investment was made in one of the earlier stage companies.