Nominated for OUT OF THE BOX.NRW

mia

Cologne

Nominated by:
Matthias Huxhagen

Internet address:

Your business model in three sentences

mia, our smart factory SaaS solution, makes manufacturing processes more efficient, more sustainable, and more profitable. How? mia monitors the factory and informs when necessary. Whenever defects become critical, mia tells the workers how to react.

What problem do you solve?

Throughout our careers in crisis and quality management we worked with numerous manufacturing companies like BMW and Bugatti suppliers. All of them had high monthly scrap rates. Sometimes up to 80 or even 90%. But scrap rates this high are unsustainable with growing supply chain issues, tougher economic conditions, and CSRD-goals that will force companies to reduce scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. The root-causes of scrap we observed were always the same three: long reaction times to problems, poor communication of problems, and lack of understanding of root-causes. Most factories spend more than two hours a day collecting and evaluating data with paper based tally sheets and Excel rather than actually solving problems. On the shop-floor, issues are only communicated between the worker and the person that should solve it. But no one else is being informed unless they ask proactively. The collected data is then transferred to different departments with their own tools, resulting in conflicting information with faulty numbers, and no single point of truth. The consequences are poor on-time delivery, low customer satisfaction, and diminishing followup orders by existing customers.

What's your digital solution?

mia is a platform to transform factories into smart factories. We use factory data to facilitate the problem-solving process. Thanks to mia, our first customer reduced annual scrap cost by over € 6 million. Here’s how we did it: mia matches the manually collected quality and downtime data from our tablet app, with measured process data from machines and ambience data from IoT-sensors to inform when a problem becomes critical and provides quick measures from our knowledge management system. This resulted in minimized reaction time from +24 hours to <1 hour, improved information flow through push notifications and a personalized news feed, and increased factory transparency from real-time dashboards that provide information for meetings and root-cause analysis. And the best news: no more tally sheets and excel. Because we combine lean manufacturing principles and modern UX/UI design, mia is easy to use and needs no training. That way we ensure higher data quality than any other solution.

Why should we award you for your digital business model?

At the moment, most companies are measuring their greenhouse gas emissions by energy consumption and sometimes by raw material consumption. To reduce emissions factories have to know why they are wasting energy and material. With mia we provide the tool that makes it easy to measure, understand and eliminate waste in factories. Our overall goal is to use AI and user-friendly software to make manufacturing more efficient and more sustainable.