In today’s industrial landscape, the notion of “Data Analytics” is rapidly gaining popularity in every aspect of company processes. Data analytics helps industries increase productivity and thus ultimately profits by enabling better decisions and improved production processes.
Yazzoom, a European company, leverages its expertise in advanced data analytics and industrial process control to deliver immediate value to its customers by improving company processes. The software, data science and engineering firm is specialized in advanced control and artificial intelligence solutions for industrial applications.
Besides custom advanced data analytics software, Yazzoom has developed two standard products, a predictive modeling Software Suite and an AI-Powered Solution for anomaly detection on data of machines and production lines.
A Mentor with Engineering background
Jan Verhasselt is the Founder and Managing Director at Yazzoom. Jan holds Engineering diplomas in Automation, and Physics and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences with specialty in Automatic Speech Recognition. When Jan founded Yazzoom, he had sustainable growth in mind rather than the quick “sell and cash out” of many start-ups in this field. Jan believes in the use of revenues from projects to grow and invest it in the development of a standard product with the vision to transition later from a purely project-based company to a product-based one.
“There’s always an exchange of ideas and discussions between all team members around each of their projects. This leads to innovative solutions and faster development. For the data scientists and engineers of Yazzoom it also keeps things interesting with a lot of variation in the type of problems to be solved.” adds Jan about the company culture.
Positioning Yazzoom in the Automation & Control Systems Market
Yazzoom uses its expertise in advanced process control and machine learning to allow its customers to create more value out of process and machine data. The rare combination of skills enables a wide range of applications, for example auditing and improving industrial production processes or AI-powered anomaly detection for monitoring assets and production lines in order to enable predictive maintenance or assist remote service teams of machine manufacturers.
Shaping Journey through Experiences
“When you hear about companies in our field in the press, it’s usually focused about how much money has been raised rather than the product, service or customers but that’s not the way we want to grow at Yazzoom. Yazzoom is seven years old now, and we did this without external funding,” states Jan.
The company now offers standard products and has expanded its international customer-base. “At the time [when Yazzoom only did custom projects – ED.], we invested time and resources to expand in the Middle-East without result. It was a lesson for us: in our custom project business, it’s really hard to find customers without a strong local presence. There are enough opportunities close to us to do the project, and new products are now creating a better opportunity to expand to more distant markets.” he continues.
Offering Unique Industrial Analytics
In the field of industrial analytics, there are two aspects that make Yazzoom unique. The early start seven years ago gives it more maturity and the capacity to evaluate if new developments in the field of AI and machine learning are reliable. The other unique thing about Yazzoom is its expert team. They are highly skilled in software development, data science and engineering, with diverse backgrounds ranging from industrial process control and physics to civil engineering and chemistry. Yazzoom is one of the few companies with top-level expertise in both AI and advanced control: the predictive models and real-time optimization software they develop changes the way the machines and production lines are running in real-time.
Battling with Competition
Based on knowledge of the market and its customers Yazzoom acquired over the years, the firm has thought its products around their customers. While many companies are coming up with IoT and data monitoring platforms that include everything from data acquisition and storage to some analytics capabilities, visualization and dashboards, Yazzoom chooses to focus on AI-powered anomaly detection. The system easily integrates with new and existing platforms but also more traditional SCADA systems and process historians.
In Yazzoom’s fields of advanced control, AI and machine learning, the challenge is keeping up to date in a quickly evolving domain. The firm places a strong emphasis on continuous learning and regularly sends its data-scientists and engineers for training, follow courses or attend academic conferences.
Realizing the Digitalization of Automation Systems
“Digitalization is changing automation, but this didn’t start with the internet of things and cloud platforms, it’s an evolution of industrial networks and process historians. It’s not an end in itself, but an enabling technology that opens the door to more advanced process control and monitoring of industrial assets.” asserts Jan further.
Jan has also mentioned that “What you can do today with artificial intelligence is make software that assists humans in repetitive and boring tasks or have smart systems that detector event predict anomalies in how the equipment works.”
Source :-The 10 Most Disruptive Automation Companies to Watch 2018