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It sometimes seems that everyone is talking about AI and how it is going to change the world. In a hands-on business, like glass manufacturing, the shift won’t be as profound as in some sectors, but it is already starting to happen.
At Jotika we’ve been researching and developing with AI and machine learning for some years, and this is already yielding practical benefits for customers in the glass industry.
New software sooner, with more proactive support
You may have seen the increased rate of new Gtrak modules being released and in the pipeline. From our ground-breaking, automated factory control system through to integrated customer portals, our developers are achieving more in less time using AI tools to help with planning, writing and documenting the product code.
Because Gtrak has been designed to be open and flexible, our customers get the best of both worlds with AI. That is, a reliable, proven system with an unrivalled breadth and depth of functionality, plus the ability to integrate innovative new capabilities faster than ever before.
Our technical team is also using AI to make support more proactive. For example we analyse Gtrak logs in the Cloud for advanced preventative maintenance, spotting trends and identifying issues in time to avoid problems.
Embedded AI to enhance your working
One of the best examples of AI working hard in the glass industry is in order processing. We are helping several customers to make the order entry process easier and more responsive to their customers’ needs:
You may already receive orders from some customers directly into your systems through EDI (electronic data interchange) or the Gtrak API. This structured data exchange is the fastest and most reliable way of automating the ordering process, but it’s not available for everyone. For the foreseeable future, many customers will continue sending orders as PDF files or even plain emails, which can be time-consuming to process and need to be checked carefully. What’s more, unless your staff are particularly attentive, urgent orders can end up sitting in an inbox.
One solution to this is to give an AI program access to your sales mailbox. This will allow it to read through each incoming email and alert you to urgent orders. It can also be trained to do the laborious work of going through each customer order line by line, drawing out the specific details and creating orders in your system, ready for review.
But like a fresh new employee joining your business, an AI can’t just get on with the job on day one. You need to give it a process to follow and guidance, so it understands concepts like dimensions, glass treatments and special instructions. In practice you will need to train the AI to get specific skills for interpreting orders from each of your different customers. For regular, well-structured orders this is likely to provide good time savings, but for less frequent, or harder to understand customer orders, human staff will still be needed.
Your bespoke AI projects
We have also been working on bespoke AI projects for customers, solving specific challenges in their businesses. We have collaborated with their chosen third parties who are creating new AI functionality, complementing their specific skills with our decades of experience creating flexible and dependable software for the glass industry.
Using Gtrak it is easy to integrate new AI programs, whether they are bringing unique approaches to analysis, automating specific tasks or providing other capabilities that give your business a competitive edge.
Next steps
If you are one of the innovators who is starting to experiment with AI in your glass business, please get in touch. We would be happy to share ideas and practical considerations to help you realise your ambitions.