We are delivering engaging digital transformation solutions to customers: Sasken

Thomas George

Today, digital technologies are helping businesses create new business models with new performance thresholds and outcomes and to help them through their digital transformation journey, Sasken has been strengthening competencies and capabilities in Digital Platforms, Mobility, UX/UI, IoT, AR/VR, Analytics, and Blockchain. Raman Sapra, Executive Vice President and General Manager-Digital at Sasken Technologies Limited tells more on how the company is leveraging its phygital capabilities to build solutions for customers in Industrial, Transportation, and Automotive sector.

Excerpt:

Could you elaborate on the current digital landscape, and what do you feel are the key opportune segments that companies like yours should focus on in the coming years?

Digital landscape, as we see, rests on 3 pillars, Platforms (siloed to connected), Analytics (hindsight to foresight), and IoT (sense to action). We implement design thinking, automation as much as possible and agile development methodology in all our digital transformation projects. We would like to state that various segments are at different maturity levels when it comes to digital transformation. To quote a few examples below in key segments:

Industrial: Suitable Industry 4.0, Smart manufacturing use cases are identified and are currently in the pilot/prototype stage. The use cases are getting evolved on a regular basis.

Transportation: Trip planning, interoperability across different modes of transportation, smarty city yeah transportation planning.

Automotive: There have been numerous successful pilots with respect to Connected Car solutions. Hence it has passed the stage of pilot/prototype and is built and deployed into production.

Which markets (Americas, Europe or Asia-Pac) according to you are on the higher adoption curve for Digital Services?

While all the above-mentioned markets are adopting Digital Services, we are seeing broad geographical trends as outlined below. Pertaining to the segments Sasken focuses on, we are observing the below-mentioned trends:

-Significant adoption of Machine vision, Digital IVI, etc. related technologies towards the connected Car initiative, which have been undertaken by OEMs and Tier-1s across North America, Europe and now are slowly being picked up in Japan.

-Germany is at the forefront of adopting Industrial IoT and adjacent digital solutions towards Smart Manufacturing initiatives with North America following closely.

-Again, Europe as a whole is also leading in building smart cities.

In today’s competitive industry landscape, how is Sasken enhancing its comprehensive capabilities in digital IoT platforms, and accelerating digital transformation for its customers?

Let me start off by providing a high-level perspective of our overarching strategy for Sasken Digital. At Sasken we are focused on Industrial Digital through our practices of Platforms, IoT, AR/VR, Analytics, and Blockchain. We enable Sasken to deliver ‘Chip to Cognitive’ to our customers.

A digital platform enables rapid delivery of services aiding business outcomes allowing for synergies of standardized tech and re-usability. Sasken believes that a platform can enable extensive automation of business processes and quicker release cycles, predictability of sticky engagement via synergized user context, increased addressability of common functional concerns, etc.

Prominent example of a digital platform is an IoT platform. It is playing a very important role for customers with the implementation of their digital transformation roadmap. An IoT platform enables extraction of data from the secondary sensors/devices, protocol translation, data processing on cloud to derive actionable insights. It ensures internal optimization and connectivity, data monetization, process efficiency.

Sasken is constantly strengthening competencies and capabilities in digital platform. To ensure completeness in terms of competency we work with leading IoT platforms such as PTC ThingWorx, Microsoft Azure, AWS IoT, and GE Predix.

We are engaged in discussions with a large European automotive supplier in development and implementation of Industry 4.0 use cases aimed at increased process efficiency, industrial automation, and reduced time-to-market. We are helping a leading UK-based manufacturer and supplier of aftermarket automotive accessories in making their products smart by using AWS IoT with secondary sensors on their products, BLE connectivity, and mobile and web apps for visualization.

With growing technologies in the domain of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, AR, and VR – how do you as a company leveraging these technologies to its advantage across industries?

Sasken is leveraging AI, ML and AR/VR to build solutions for customers in Industrial, Transportation and Automotive sector. As a case in point, we are using AI and ML for driver drowsiness and fatigue detection towards safety, fleet management, and ADAS solutions. We are investing significantly in solutions that can run on the Edge devices.

We are helping our customers to build connected factories and deliver smart manufacturing. AI/ML and AR/VR are enablers in this endeavour. While AR/VR have a multitude of use cases towards field/workforce productivity we are focusing on solutions such as expediting the product design and improving first-time fix ratio for our customers.

We are leveraging data from connected vehicles and connected assets to derive insights using AI/ML. As a case in point, we are leveraging data from connected vehicles to improve journey planning and customer experience.

How are you building physical and digital competencies for enterprise growth at Sasken?

Sasken, as a company, constantly strives towards delivering customer success. Towards this, we invest in competencies which contribute to reducing time-to-market, increasing automation, and delivering engaging digital transformation solutions for our customers.

We are enriching our competencies in platforms, IoT, AI/ML, Blockchain and mobile apps and platforms. We are investing in areas such as cloud-native apps, microservices, containerization, design-led thinking, DevOps, low code application development platforms, and blockchain.

We are also actively engaging with Microsoft, PTC, Tableau, Predix, and AWS among others to keep ourselves abreast with market trends and technology evolution. This helps guide our competency building initiative across the corresponding platforms.

Could you elaborate few examples or use cases, where Sasken has built ‘Phygital’ competencies and helped its customers?

Sasken has leveraged ‘Phygital’ competencies to build solutions for multiple verticals and we have observed maximum adoption in industrial and retail verticals. To state a few:

-We are helping a leading RFID tag manufacturer to build ‘Phygital’ solutions enabled by UHF/NFC technologies to help them on their journey to build smart connected products and improve customer engagement. We developed an NFC based digital solution to enable authenticity check before purchase. The solution is used by factory operators to embed NFC tag within a product, associate product details with Tag ID, and perform quality checks. Before purchase, shopper taps the smartphone on the product. Smartphone reads NFC tags and confirms product authenticity.

-Helped a leader in Process Efficiency and Energy Conservation to initiate digital transformation journey centred on Digital Twin. The client wanted to increase the efficiency of its boilers and reduce AMC spends. We modeled a Digital Twin to establish interdependency between the various parameters impacting boiler efficiency. This exercise saved field trips for the service exec. and avoided manual trial and  error methods.