Development - Automation

Automation is the art of transforming manual processes into automated, which utilise systems of computers or machines, to perform them instead of your valuable human resources.

Reducing, or completely removing, the human error factor is a major benefit of automation. Another major benefit is that it saves significant amounts of time — time that your human resources can invest in focusing on more important things, such as understanding the results instead of obtaining them. This increases the efficiency of your workflow, and allows for innovation and further development of your project.

We would like to believe that you would prefer to have your human resources spend their working time on improving your business, rather than spending it on repetitive and monotonous tasks — tasks that a computer excels at.

Replacing Manual Platforms

Most of us are guilty of firing up a spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft® Excel®a, and opening up a new spreadsheet when we want to do some quick calculations. In many cases, this ends up being a rather bad decision in hindsight. Your data is likely to grow, and as it does, you are one step closer to getting swamped. Managing large and complex spreadsheets is a nightmare.

Spreadsheets entail manual editing and importing of data, which unfortunately most of the time means “copy-pasting” — something that can over time lead to inconsistencies and also to incorrectly calculated results. Tracking down the origins of errors can be a daunting task if your process is elaborate. Worst case, you would not even realise the results are wrong.

While a spreadsheet might seem like a quick and easy way out — more often than not, it will sooner or later prove itself an adversary.

We believe that there are significantly better tools for these tasks.

Liberation from Proprietary Platforms

One of many proprietary platforms for computational sciences and engineering is MATLAB®b. It is widely used for computations in many fields of science and engineering. Due to a long-standing tradition, many, if not most, engineering students never get to experience anything other than this platform for their computational needs.

Despite its large market share, MATLAB is a closed and proprietary system. While it is a great interactive tool, it can be limiting when you need to develop complex customised solutions that do not necessarily have to, or can be interactive. MATLAB lends itself well to a manual working method, but where automation is desired, it is not a prime candidate. For instance, while it may calculate the results for you, the task of compiling reports is usually left for human post-processing. This is something that we think can be improved.

Automated data processing, analysis, and reporting

Manual data acquirement and processing is time consuming, repetitive, and prone to human error. We are able to provide you with custom solutions for automated data processing and analysis, tailored to your requirements and needs. By eliminating the manual processing, the reproducibility of the results becomes far more reliable — and reproducible results are very important in science and engineering.

Our solutions can create customized compiled reports containing the relevant information and results from the processing and analysis of your data. Depending on your needs, this can include raw input data, the processed results, derived information from the analysis, visualisations in form of high-fidelity graphical plots, diagrams, tables, and more.

Autonomous Systems

Some applications and systems require human interaction, or are specifically designed for it. Some systems, on the other hand, do not. Depending on your challenge and requirements, we may be able to fully automate the solution, to a point where it requires no human interaction, or intervention, in its day-to-day operation. We call these autonomous systems.

It can be surprising at first how many tasks can be fully automated. This allows you to refocus on important matters rather than the repetitive and monotonous ones to an even greater degree.

As an example, an autonomous system could automatically fetch data output from laboratory machines, perform predefined analyses on it, and then compile a report. If the input data or the results of the analyses are unexpected, as defined by configuration parameters, the system can react accordingly. Depending on the requirements, the system could then save the results to a database, and for instance email the report to the project manager.

Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you.

  1. ^Microsoft® and Excel® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
  2. ^MATLAB® is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.
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