Can a thirty-year-old IT solution provider for the manufacturing industry be relevant in the age of AI? Kingslake, Sri Lanka’s leading manufacturing solutions experts, is harnessing its strong industry acumen and experience in advanced algorithms and AI technology to help manufacturers stay competitive through its mission-critical software solutions.
“At Kingslake, we harness our deep knowledge of the manufacturing industry as well as our research DNA to use the latest AI techniques in niche areas in order to provide specific solutions to problems that were otherwise not solvable before cloud computing and the recent advances in AI,” says Dr Dharmavasan, Founder and Chairperson of Kingslake. “We are continuing to invest in other niche areas so that we will always be in a position to provide manufacturers with really smart tools with which to increase both their visibility and productivity.”
With the complicated line-balancing flow-oriented production strategy for instance, scheduling is an issue common to most textile and other manufacturing industries, especially when absenteeism runs at an average 5% and production lines need to operate seamlessly for maximum productivity. Kingslake’s original Kingslake Blue Line Balancing product uses data of skills inventory, attendance, and the required skills to re-schedule dynamically. The method using traditional mathematical models has now been expanded to cover a wider scope to optimise the entire factory using AI techniques.
What differentiates the company even further however, is an ecosystem which nurtures and invests in the professional growth of young talent while also retaining key staff; many of whom have been with the company from inception. The cross-functional and diverse team of bright young graduates and experienced older professionals working together is what the company feels has driven innovation within the firm, leading to a unique stack of newer and more useful products.
“We use the typical academic model where a fresh PhD student becomes an expert on a particular niche area within 3-6 months together with the fresh graduates,” added Dr Dharmavasan. “But this requires experienced senior professionals to guide them. We are fortunate to have some of the best brains in the business.”
It would seem that with this approach of combining deep industry know-how and a finger always on the pulse of emerging AI trends, Sri Lankan companies like Kingslake can not just thrive within the country, but also become global players.
With its roots in the UK -set up first to commercialise research carried out for the Oil and Gas Industry-, Kingslake was involved with AI developments as far back as the early 1990’s. When the Sri Lankan operation commenced in 1993, the focus was to build capacity to implement ERP, production scheduling, and tracking systems for local manufacturers using local talent. This long history of implementing systems has provided the deep knowledge of the unique problems that need to be solved for the manufacturing industry, as well as the expertise and corporate memory to build new cutting-edge solutions.
Today Kingslake builds and delivers software that enables manufacturers to increase the visibility of their operations, be it customer service, inventory management, planning, procurement, manufacturing, engineering, HR, transport or finance.