DENSO and Drishti bring innovation to production floor with AI-based action recognition technology

DENSO, the world’s second largest mobility supplier, is working with Drishti Technologies to help optimize manufacturing production at multiple of its North American facilities. Drishti’s action recognition technology, which is enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision, allows DENSO to generate real-time, continuous analytics on manual tasks performed by its production employees.

This dataset grants production management the ability to quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks, improve processes, boost efficiency and prioritize tasks.

These capabilities increase production outputs, improve product quality and consistency, and assist production employees in their day-to-day assignments, helping them identify how they and their teams can better streamline processes. The move is part of DENSO’s Long-Term Policy 2030 to create and inspire new value for advanced mobility using disruptive technology. It also marks one of the first times DENSO has integrated AI into its production processes.

“As DENSO continues to transform into a true digital operation, having data on manual tasks fills a major gap in our analytics,” said Dave Grimmer, a senior vice president at DENSO and head of its North American Production Innovation Center. “Drishti’s continuous data creation offers productivity insights and quality metrics that help us make better decisions, faster.”

Drishti’s technology can produce datasets that are several orders of magnitude larger than those produced by traditional time and motion studies. Drishti-produced datasets are also more diverse and enriched by video. The benefits of these massive datasets extend beyond the production floor to DENSO’s leadership and engineers, who, like production teams, use Drishti’s technology to gather production feedback and make data-driven decisions on design and organizational management.

“I’m pleased to see the impact Drishti has had on our people and processes,” said Raja Shembekar, vice president of DENSO North American Production Innovation Center. “The potential we now see to achieve significant process gains while simultaneously helping our workforce add greater value is precisely why DENSO is so committed to exploring and implementing innovation with leading-edge startups like Drishti.”

“Digitizing highly variable human motion continuously and in real time provides analytics insight that can significantly improve productivity, efficiency, and quality, as well as how we approach employee training,” said Jon Ruge, a director of DENSO Industrial Engineering.

As Drishti discovered in joint research with A.T. Kearney, human line employees perform 72% of factory tasks. This data, from a survey of more than 100 manufacturing leaders, suggests that even as the industry increasingly focuses on robotics and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), people and their ingenuity remain central to manufacturing.

“True digital transformation efforts have to extend to the human operator, because the bulk of manufacturing tasks are still done manually,” said Prasad Akella, founder and chief executive officer of Drishti. “DENSO recognized that fact well ahead of the rest of the market, and our technology is helping the company secure its position as an innovation leader in the advanced automotive manufacturing industry.”

For more information on how DENSO is reimagining transportation and manufacturing, visit https://www.denso.com/us-ca/en/.