5 innovative made-in-Singapore IoT solutions to improve labour productivity

Photo credit: Chris Isherwood.

With limited manpower resources to build on its economic growth, Singapore has been obsessed with improving labour productivity. In an article dated Sept 18, 2015, Singapore has faced a drop in productivity numbers. And the call to improve labour productivity has become even more urgent to ensure the economy does not stall.

A broad based answer would be to have automation and robots to replace physical manpower. And that is clear in Singapore’s RIE2020 S$19b agenda, part of which is to focus on advanced manufacturing and robotics solutions.

And how is that panning out? Does Singapore already have real-life practical solutions to address the drop in labour productivity? I asked four entrepreneurs of specialised engineering companies, who have created their very own made-in-Singapore solutions and products, for their insights.

Speeding up inventory management with drones

Inventory management is a manual and tedious chore which may lead often to human error in counting. Unfortunately, inventory counting in the automotive industry is part of monthly audit compliance and an unavoidable exercise.

“Imagine counting thousands of cars every single month. The labour cost for this operation can be tremendous,” cites Dan Boon, CEO and Founder of the Symphony Group. This computing solutions company provides business clients innovative solutions that revolves around wearables, augmented reality (AR), drones, iOT automation and digitalisation platforms.

“In a joint collaboration with our engineering partner HOPE Technik, we have developed a drone technology to fly drones autonomously, in a pre-set flight path receiving RFID signal from the tagged automobiles, seamlessly integrating the data to the warehouse management system to generate the inventory count report required by the regulations.

Drone technology being deployed to count vehicle stocks for a luxury automotive distributor. (A joint collaboration between Symphony and drones manufacturer HopeTechnik)

Sensors, anti-crash and collision technology are built into the drones for this highly precise operation. What used to take the company 50 man-hours to complete, we aim to complete it within the hour, by a single technician.”

Real-time stock replenishment with smart shelves

Stock replenishment is a tedious and costly process, especially if you have 126 outlets to manage in Singapore and approximately 2,000 outlets internationally. In another project with a listed F&B company in Singapore, the company optimizes their supply chain by enabling outlet managers to manage order forecasts, automatically place inventory replenishment, track fulfillment via tablets, optimize inventory to reduce overall procurement and inventory costs.

“Our F&B clients utilize the Symphony platform to manage and track products throughout the entire supply chain, starting from supplier, distribution center to last mile fulfillment,” explains Dan Boon. “The supply chain platform is an omni channel software-as-a-service platform which is multi-lingual, and can be managed in multi-entities and geographies. Our goal is to help them focus on their core business and not to worry about their supply chain.”

“Food quality is always at its best when it is freshly made. At the same time, it is important for our customer’s products to be readily available when they wish to buy it,” continues Dan Boon.

In another project for bakeries, the store associates take a significant amount of time to regularly note down which bread products have run out and to inform the kitchen to make more of those products.

Handling heavy load labour intensive tasks with AGVs

Disrupting manual observations and surveys with big data accuracy and analytics

Modernising the ancient art of TCM massage with sensors

Raising productivity with many opportunities