OAKLAND – Silicon Valley Elite Manufacturing, a precision machining company based in Santa Clara County, was facing problems. Located in the cradle of the U.S. technology industry, where speed and automation are the hallmarks of success, SVEM found itself bogged down with operational inefficiencies.
Communication on the factory floor was being done through handwritten pieces of paper and whiteboards, and status reports were often delivered inaccurately due to language barriers among the company’s highly diverse workforce, said Kate Karniouchina, associate professor of marketing and director of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business in Oakland.
“It was pretty old school for a manufacturing facility,” said Arnav Mukherjee, a finance and entrepreneurship student who spent his first year on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus. “They had displays on the machines just to control them, but if any technology was integrated, that was pretty much it.”
Seeking solutions, the company met with a team of Mukherjee and three other first-year Northeastern students as part of their professional practicum course, a 10-week intensive project that fulfills the university’s experiential learning requirement.
Kate Karniouchina’s students used AI-based development tools to implement intelligent automation into their final product. Photo by Ruby Wallau for Northeastern University
The students created a digital alternative to SVEM’s papers and whiteboards using a number of different AI coding tools, centralizing all relevant schedules, machine status updates and analytics into one streamlined platform, Mukherjee said. The app also included an automatic audit trail, eliminating the headaches that come from lost or damaged papers.
The students estimated SVEM would save $180,000 annually upon implementation of the app, and reduce processes that once took three hours to complete to just seconds, according to their final presentation.
Christine Ngo, vice president of operations and business development at SVEM, said the students’ future-focused work gave her optimism about the manufacturing industry and the prospect of finding new ways to increase efficiency.
“When I see students like this come up with such a successful project with just such a limited amount of time on our factory floor, I could only imagine what they would do actually working within manufacturing,” Ngo said.
The experiential practicum course enables business students to collaborate with corporate partners such as SVEM under close supervision from business faculty, all with the goal of providing real industry experience early in students’ academic careers.
Using AI tools and real-time translation, Mukherjee and his team chased an even greater goal of elevating the company’s outdated workflow into the 21st century, said Karniouchina, who co-taught the practicum with marketing professor and Oakland co-op faculty lead Magda Cooney.
A Northeastern partnership with enterprise workflow platform ServiceNow gave students access to AI-based development tools, which they used to implement intelligent automation into their final product, Karniouchina said. The application hosts pages that provide real-time status updates on the factory machines, as well as task-related pages where managers and employees can easily communicate in their preferred languages.
It was difficult for SVEM to estimate its cost of production because workers and managers had little knowledge of the amount of time the machines were being used on each item, Karniouchina said. Students also noticed that there were many disconnected parts of the company’s production monitoring system.
“Sometimes their managers would need to actually step onto the floor to check on the machine, or talk to the workers to see how long this is going to take,” Karniouchina said. “There is a lot of this informal back and forth, and things are not very well tracked.”
But the biggest barrier was the wide variety of languages used by the SVEM employees, Mukherjee said. Even if his team could develop technological solutions to some of the company’s efficiency problems, they would be impossible to implement if the workforce could not easily and quickly communicate, he said.
The students addressed the issue by adding “on the fly” AI translation across the app’s many pages, Mukherjee said, which would allow workers to instantaneously toggle all text between English, Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Tagalog.
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“With the click of a button, when you change to the next language, it translates the front end and the back end together,” Mukherjee explained. “You can type it in your language and then essentially use AI to convert that into different languages.”
At the conclusion of the 10-week practicum, the students presented their developed app to SVEM and ServiceNow.
“They were floored,” Karniouchina said, referencing the group’s effort to go above and beyond the expectations of the practicum. “This is not a concept, this is not an idea, this doesn’t look like a school presentation. It’s an actual working solution, like a really sophisticated prototype.”
Even having served for six years as the founder and CEO of Nexacore Solutions 一 a Bay Area software development firm that assists startups in implementing company-wide automation 一 Mukherjee said some of the skills picked up during the practicum have proven useful in his new role as a wealth management intern at Morgan Stanley, which he said experiences some of the same technology gaps SVEM hoped to address.
“If there are opportunities to pursue this further, I would definitely want to do something like this again,” Mukherjee said.
Peter Rubinstein is a Northeastern Global News reporter based in Oakland. He can be reached at p.rubinstein@northeastern.edu.