Nestle, Dow, Grundfos, Amongst Top Industrial Giants Seeking Israeli Industrial Innovation
Eighteen months into its digital transformation journey, Nestle Cereal Partners Worldwide (CPW), the Swiss food giant’s breakfast cereal producer, still didn’t know how much time and money it was losing across its 14 factories around the world. The global breakfast cereal company, behind some of the world’s most iconic breakfast cereals brands, like Nesquik, Cheerios, Fitness, and some 50 other brands—is active in 130 markets and has billions of dollars of revenues. Any downtime caused to malfunctioning machinery can be very, very costly.
Boxes of cereal manufactured by Nestle SA.
Company execs were looking for a way to gain visibility into the production floor, root out inefficiencies, preempt machine failure with predictive maintenance, and optimize every moving part across the entire production chain. “We realized that to go further and faster we needed to look at startups,” said Thierry Friant, CPW’s Continuous Improvement & Digital Manager. After exploring the market for optimization solutions, the company settled on Seebo, an Israeli startup that makes “digital twinning” software, essentially creating a virtual replica of a factory through sensors and imaging and finding out why and when losses happen. The main goal of the Seebo technology partnership, Friant said, is to “know what we don’t know, especially about losses around our processes.” CPW now has two factories implementing Seebo’s software. Nestle itself, the world’s largest food and beverage manufacturer with over 300,000 employees and active in 190 markets, is interested in what Seebo is doing, Friant added. “Startups can make the difference, they are agile, as opposed to a bigger company. Seebo helped us fine-tune our business case. They are experts in AI and machine learning. We are not. They came and proved that their technology works.”
Seebo Digital Twin software includes code-free graphical modeling, simulation, and deployment tools.
For Seebo, Nestle is just the beginning. “Manufacturers who don’t adopt AI on time are likely to lose their relevancy in their markets. Alternately, early adopters are likely to gain strategic advantage over the competition,” said Lior Akavia, co-founder and CEO. “Nestle is thinking several steps ahead,” he added.
Nestle isn’t alone in tapping Israeli industrial innovation startups. This week, dozens of industrial giants —including Dow Chemicals, Honda, Ford, Schneider Electric, AB InBev, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, ABB, and PepsiCo—descended on the Tel Aviv Trade Grounds to attend Israel Industry 4.0 Week, an annual multi-day event series and conference that connects multinationals with Israeli startups looking for digital manufacturing solutions, process optimization, connected factories, and industrial cyber security. Organized by tech NGO Start-Up Nation Central, Grove Ventures and Deloitte, the meeting of large industrial companies with Israel’s growing I4 startup scene has drawn attention from governments, states, and cities too, with the State of Bavaria signing an MOU with SNC to commercialize Israeli I4 technologies in the industry-heavy German state.
CEOs of multinational corporations meet with Israeli I4 tech startup CEOs, at Start-Up Nation … [+]
The global demand for industrial innovation is spurring the local Israeli I4 industry, which, according to SNC, has grown 70 % in 4 years, both in terms of number of startups and funding into the sector. There are 260 currently active industry 4.0 startups in Israel today, attracting $650M by the end of 2019, a new SNC report shows.
Prof. Eugene Kandel, CEO, Start-Up Nation Central, opening the Israel Industry 4.0 Week, in Tel … [+]
For several of these startups, the route into large corporate projects has been broadly the same: start with one pilot implementation, gain trust and visibility within the larger organization, catch the attention of Corporate HQ, and then get rolled out across global operations.
Dow Chemicals, among the three largest chemical producers in the world, has for the past 4 years been working with Israel’s Mobideo, a startup that provides a factory worker monitoring and management solution, starting at one facility in Texas, then growing to other plants and facilities across the Gulf of Mexico within 2 years. “Our product went completely viral across Dow,” said Yaron Eppel, Mobideo Technologies’ CEO. That rollout caught the attention of corporate, after which corporate IT made Mobideo an official Dow solution connected to other IT systems within Dow’s plants. Dow is now broadly interested in Israel’s tech ecosystem, including things like drones, AI, and logistics. “Now we are looking at other Israeli companies,” said Yochai Gafni, Managing Director at Dow Chemicals Israel, adding that Dow Chemicals are opening up an innovation center in Europe, of which Israel will be a key part.
The Dow Chemical Co. headquarters in Midland, Michigan, U.S.
Another very recent example is Grundfos, a Danish pump manufacturer with more than 19,000 employees globally producing more than 16 million pump units annually, which has been working with Augury, a startup that connects sensors to production line machines, creating a digital twin and enabling predictive maintenance and other optimizations.
Components for pump units sit in a wooden storage box inside the Grundfos AS factory in Tatabanya, … [+]
“The idea is to explore what happens when you combine super exciting new technologies —artificial intelligence and machine learning—with mankind’s oldest challenge, which is moving, managing, and treating water,” said Michael Langerskov Bak, Head of Global Service at Grundfos. Augury were able to provide very accurate analytics over Grundfos’ pumps, allowing the 75-year old manufacturing company to move towards its vision of becoming a water-as-a-service company, said Gal Shaul, Augury’s founder and CEO. When your organization knows earlier when something’s wrong, you are able to provide additional services over your equipment,” Shaul added.