OAKLAND – Silicon Valley Elite Manufacturing, a Santa Clara County-based precision machining company, was looking for a solution. Located in the birthplace of the U.S. technology industry, where speed and automation are hallmarks of success, SVEM saw an opportunity to improve operational efficiency.
Communication on the factory floor was via handwritten paper and whiteboards, and language barriers among the company’s highly diverse workforce meant status reports were often provided inaccurately, said Kate Karniouchina, an associate professor of marketing and director of the Damore McKim School of Business in Oakland.
“It was pretty old school as a manufacturing facility,” said Arnab Mukherjee, a finance and entrepreneurship student who spent his first year at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus. “Displays used to be on machines just to control them, but once you have some technology integrated, that’s it.”
Seeking a solution, the company met with Mukherjee and a team of three other Northeastern University first-year students as part of a professional experiential learning course. This course is a 10-week intensive project that fulfills the University’s experiential learning requirements.
Mukherjee said the students used a variety of AI coding tools to create a digital alternative to SVEM papers and whiteboards, centralizing all related schedules, machine status updates, and analysis into one streamlined platform. The app also includes an automatic audit trail, eliminating the headache of lost or damaged documents.
According to the final presentation, the students estimated that SVEM would save $180,000 annually by implementing the app and reduce processes that once took three hours to complete to just seconds.
Christine Ngo, SVEM’s vice president of operations and business development, said the students’ forward-looking efforts make her optimistic about manufacturing and the prospects of finding new ways to increase efficiency.
“Seeing these students come up with such successful projects in such limited time on the factory floor, I could only imagine what they would actually do on the factory floor,” Ngo said.
This experiential course allows business students to collaborate with corporate partners such as SVEM under the close supervision of management faculty and is designed to provide real-world industry experience early in students’ academic careers.
Using AI tools and real-time translation, Mukherjee and his team pursued an even larger goal: bringing the company’s antiquated workflow into the 21st century, said Karniouchina, who co-taught the experiential learning course with Magda Cooney, a marketing professor and Oakland Co-op faculty chair.
Northeastern’s partnership with enterprise workflow platform ServiceNow gave students access to AI-based development tools that were used to implement intelligent automation in the final product, Karnioutina said. The application hosts pages that provide real-time status updates of factory machinery, as well as task-related pages that allow managers and employees to easily communicate in their preferred language.
According to Karnioutina, it was difficult for SVEM to estimate production costs because workers and managers had little knowledge of the amount of time machines were being used for each item. The students also noticed that the company’s production monitoring system had many disconnected parts.
“In some cases, the manager may have to actually go on the floor and check on the machinery or talk to the workers to find out how long it will take,” Karnioutina said. “There’s a lot of informal communication and things aren’t being tracked very well.”
However, the biggest barrier was the diversity of languages used by SVEM’s employees, Mukherjee said. He said that even if his team were able to develop a technological solution to some of the company’s efficiency problems, it would be impossible to implement that solution if employees could not communicate easily and quickly.
Mukherjee said the students addressed this issue by adding “on-the-fly” AI translation to many pages of the app, which will allow employees to instantly switch all text between English, Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Tagalog.
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“You can change to the next language with the click of a button and the frontend and backend will be translated together,” Mukherjee explained. “If you type in your language, we can basically use AI to translate it into another language.”
At the end of the 10-week course, students presented their developed apps to SVEM and ServiceNow.
“They were very unhappy,” Karnioutina said, referring to the group’s efforts to exceed expectations for the project. “This doesn’t look like a concept or an idea or a school presentation. This is a working solution, more like a very polished prototype.”
Mukherjee, who spent six years as founder and CEO of Nexacore Solutions, a Bay Area software development company that helps startups implement enterprise-wide automation, said some of the skills he learned during the course proved useful in his new role as an asset management intern at Morgan Stanley, where he experienced the same technology gaps that SVEM wanted to address.
“If I have the opportunity to pursue this further, I would love to do something like this again,” Mukherjee said.
