Building a robust enterprise robotics automation program comes with myriad challenges.
Juggling decisions between vendors, pinpointing the right data to discover ROI, and ultimately achieving buy-in from executives can be overwhelming, especially for Innovation teams working on multiple projects. It often leaves the team asking,
“It has to be easier than this, right?”
And it can be. Unfortunately, “How to Build an Enterprise Robotics Program for Dummies” doesn’t exist yet (but we have developed a roadmap for you). The truth is, to build a strong robotics program at the enterprise level, you need solid data that guides you in the right direction. Without the necessary data, you’ll quickly find yourself needing to make uninformed decisions that can lead to the possible failure of your program altogether.
Let’s dive into how a cloud robotics platform that ingests, and manages all of your data can the critical tool that increases your likelihood for success.
Vendor selection: A maze of options and limited data
So many choices, such little insight. The sheer number of robotics vendors, each specializing in a specific type of robot or automation, can be overwhelming. When multiple vendors are vying to be the chosen one, how can you know for sure which is the right option for your organization?
Keeping vendors honest
Initial deployments of a robot fleet involves a series of crucial steps: selecting vendors, acquiring robots, and onboarding them efficiently to ensure you’ll have the visibility need to make informed decisions. This stage can be a significant hurdle if not managed effectively, and as vendors vye to make the sale, they may not necessarily be providing you with an accurate picture.
One of the biggest challenges during the early stages of implementing enterprise robotics initiatives is determining how many robots you’ll truly need. Your program may only require 50 robots, yet the vendor may not specifically disclose this information in the name of closing a larger deal. You’ll also want to compare workflow data they’ve provided to ensure you’ll receive the ROI promised.
Formant’s cloud robotics platform can help streamline the process for you. As a vendor-agnostic platform, we can ingest data from any robotic device, in any location. This state-of-the-art ingestion ensures effortless integration and streamlines data collection from your entire robot fleet, eliminating compatibility headaches further down the line and help you have an accurate and unbiased ROI analysis of POC deployments.
Here’s where advanced data analytics come to bat for you during the decision-making process.
We recently launched Formant Analytics, a user-friendly interface for data exploration that enables any user to build a variety of valuable visualizations (line charts, bar charts, etc.). Formant Analytics helps you understand data trends at a glance, and, in this case, easily compare the performance of different vendors. These insights are invaluable for understanding how certain robots perform, enabling you to make data-driven vendor selection decisions. Instead of relying on marketing materials, you’ll be able to base your choices on real-world performance.
Streamlining onboarding & eliminating vendor lock-in
Once you’ve decided on vendors and signed a contract, it’s time to officially deploy your fleet.
Traditionally, onboarding and deploying your first fleet can be a tedious process, especially if you’ll be utilizing multiple vendors, each with its own platform. Managing multiple vendor platforms can quickly force your team to unnecessarily synchronize data and information between platforms – unnecessarily increasing labor costs to manage the workload.
Formant provides a single, unifying platform for onboarding robots and optimizing deployments through a single pane of glass. Our platform eliminates the need to integrate, learn, and manage multiple disparate systems, saving you valuable time and money. Imagine a world where you don’t need to be an expert on every vendor’s platform – Formant streamlines the entire process.
Eliminating Data Silos
Another huge challenge in managing an enterprise robotics program is building a data management solution that accesses, aggregates, and transforms your automation data into a format you can use day-to-day. Done manually, this can require countless hours of costly labor to implement and manage … and frankly, it’s just plain tedious.
Using Formant, this problem is solved.
Formant is a central hub for all your robot data. It eliminates the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines, offering pre-built dashboards and visualizations that enable you to gain quick insights, lower costs, and accelate robot deployment to ensure that your organization can realize your automation goals.
In enterprise robotics, this mindset has slowed down many processes from POC to full-scale implementation. Don’t settle for old habits that slow down automation and, ultimately, innovation as a whole for the organization; unified cloud robotics platforms are the “new way” to ensure POCs and ultimately, large-scale fleets, succeed.
If you’d like to learn more about how Formant can support your enterprise robotics endeavor, please request a demo with our team.
