The Wetu Manufacturers Story

Overview

High labor costs limit the production capacity of manufacturers.

Wetu Manufacturers is an environmentally responsible company in East Africa which converts agro waste into charcoal briquettes. Compared to tradition charcoal, briquettes burn longer, do not produce smoke and odor during combustion. With a mission to reduce deforestation and carbon emissions from traditional wood-charcoal in Africa, Wetu Manufacturers combines technology with environmental science to produce charcoal briquettes.

Logistify AI provides inventory identification of each SKU and inventory counting of each SKU unit item and verifies against the source of truth from your ERP system. Wetu Manufacturers uses Logistify AI to reduce the number of human checkers at the loading docks of their manufacturing plant. The cost savings are used to dramatically accelerate production.

The Problem

Human errors are inevitable, no matter the number of double or triple checkers at the loading docks.

Most warehouses and factories cannot afford the Amazon-like technology (robotics/automation) to operate cheaper and more efficiently. Instead, they rely on a large human workforce to do inventory verification, order processing, picking, sorting, consolidation and loading/offloading onto shipping trucks. A 7,000 square-foot warehouse will employ on average 40 workers, most of whom are responsible for inventory verification and counting. They are called checkers. Each loading dock will have at least 6 checkers, 3 of whom act as the first line of checking and the other as the second line of checking (a.k.a double checkers). This is to ensure inventory accuracy in order fulfillment. However, no matter the number of checkers, human errors are still endemic because of fatigue & boring, repetitive tasks. This results in inventory losses in the millions of dollars, In addition, this increases labor costs for factories and warehouses and limits their growth.

The Managing Director of Wetu Manufacturers realized that they needed an automated solution for inventory verification without breaking the bank. The challenge was finding a partner with deep expertise in AI and machine learning who could operationalize this solution hassle-free without Wetu Manufacturers having to build out an army of machine learning engineers or data scientists or buy an expensive solution similar to Amazon warehouses.

The Solution

An automated solution that leverages already existing CCTV infrastructure in the factory to automatically verify inventory.

Wetu Manufacturers already had CCTV installation in their factory collecting thousands of video hours of their operations. They were sitting on a gold mine of rich video data & they didn't even know it. With this video data alone, Logistify AI was able to train a bespoke AI model to identify and count their SKUs at above 95% accuracy. As the model continues to process higher volumes of data, the accuracy also continues to improve over time.

Logistify AI relies on a Data-Centric AI approach to train custom Computer Vision models, and Generative AI to quickly generate training data. For Wetu Manufacturers, their base model is further fine-tuned by annotating a small sample of their video data, increasing accuracy levels significantly. The resulting model is used to automate the verification and identification of their SKUs within seconds. This solution is low cost, completely hardware-free, & doesn't require Wetu Manufacturers to become AI automation experts.

The Result

Wetu Manufacturers reduces her labor costs by reducing the number of human checkers.

With their fine-tuned Inventory Detection AI model for charcoal briquettes, Wetu Manufacturers can automatically verify inventory and reduce the number of human double-checkers or tripple-checkers. These cost savings are used by Wetu Manufacturers to dramatically accelerate production capacity.

Today, Wetu Manufacturers is working with the Logistify AI team to annotate more images of their SKU packaging in different scenarios/environments to improve identification accuracy & reduce their labor costs even further.