Intemic helps manufacturers optimize processes with AI and digital twins. Their no-code platform creates virtual replicas of production lines to uncover insights from data. This allows predicting failures, improving efficiency, and reducing costs and waste.
The activity of Intemic relies on its cloud platform, which allows any company to create the digital twin of their own processes, which is basically a virtual replica based on data and simulation models, without having to program a single line of code.
Interview with Albert Mestre Escod, Co-Founder & CEO of Intemic.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Albert Mestre Escod: We focus on the chemical and biotech industries. These traditional sectors have huge potential for digitalization and sustainability gains. Our founders’ engineering backgrounds inspired them to provide the missing software tools. Companies had data but no way to analyze it automatically.
We work in 2 different services:
1. The software as a service, consists in the commercialization of the cloud platform that Intemic developed, which allows engineers and other profiles who aren’t programmers to create the digital twin of their manufacturing processes, creating advanced machine learning models and deploying them in their organization. The platform continuously learns from the operational data and gives predictions and insights to improve their KPIs based on their specific objectives, which can be reducing process costs, water consumption, ensuring product quality between a specific range, etc…
2. The development of customized solutions for specific clients, which usually occurs when the standard platform is not sufficient to cover a specific problem in the client organization.
We use our platform as a base and our experience in software development and artificial intelligence to create or adapt new functionalities to the specific needs of the client.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
A.M.E: In the new version of the Intemic platform we have two new capabilities: Creating diagram flow and adding hybrid models.
1) Creating diagrams is key to design the data workflow, from ingesting data to presenting the desired results or KPIs. One of the current problems that companies face when trying to implement machine learning solutions is the data cleaning, preparation and synchronization of different sources.
With the Intemic platform, it’s easy to create diagrams defining the ingestion of different data sources, the data pretreatment, and also the connectivity between different digital twins.
For example, in a food processing line the material flows across different processing units, and each unit performance affects the other. Having the capability to create a digital twin of the whole processing line allows to take global conclusions and optimize the overall process, which would not be possible when considering the different units separately.
2) Hybrid models are based on a combination of physics-based models that define the physical system and its experimental data. That allows a better understanding of the system and better predictions with less amounts of data.
That approach is crucial in the manufacturing industry where there are not always huge amounts of data and companies have a strong engineering knowledge about what is going on in their process. The only problem is that they don’t know how to merge both experimental data and physics knowledge to learn from both,
Diagrams simplify complex data tasks like cleaning and preparation. Hybrids combine physical equations and real-world data for accurate forecasts from less data. Physics knowledge complements machine learning.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
A.M.E: We have the freemium version which is free and allows any company to create simple machine learning models from their data without coding.
Then, the basic, pro and enterprise versions, allow more functionalities (hybrid modeling, creating data workflows, etc…), customization, number of users, etc…
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
A.M.E: Industrial software is a traditional market where the big players (Siemens, AVEVA, etc…) had the majority of it. It is more conservative than other markets and the adoption of new technologies has been slow during the past years.
Nowadays the adoption of new technologies is starting to move faster due to the innovative offers from small players, and the demand from companies to be faster, smarter, more efficient and sustainable.
New technologies like artificial intelligence are starting to be relevant in the market, although most companies are not ready yet for an AI implementation:
It takes a culture shift to start digitizing their processes and storing the information in the right way so they can start creating machine learning models that learn from what they do: Their processes, their products, etc…
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
A.M.E: The industry is clearly moving their infrastructure to the cloud, so they can centralize databases, connect new APIs for specific services, etc… That makes it easier to adopt new cloud technologies for optimization like the Intemic platform, and connect their different data sources they use (google sheets, databases, etc..) to start learning from them and obtain AI-based recommendations on how to improve their processes and products.
Sustainability is another trend that makes companies want to improve their processes, reduce their waste, be more efficient… and AI is the perfect solution for that once they have reached a minimum digital maturity AI will help decision making in the company.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
A.M.E: In the area of no-code AI platforms and digital twins for the industry, our competitors have innovative products, built in companies like Basetwo, c3 AI, Siemens, etc…
Some of the solutions are more complex and more industry-specific than the others. What ‘s clear is that everyone is bringing AI into their products.
E.E: What estimations do you have for the rest of 2023?
A.M.E: We have now customers around Europe, and we would like to consolidate our Software as a service to be the main activity within our company. We want to receive as much feedback as possible on the new version of our platform, that is the reason why we offer a freemium version, so if you have not tried it yet, you can do so by starting the free trial from our website.
