When 12-year-old Herbert Henry Dow set out to invent a chicken egg incubator, it took 40 tries before he was successful. For much of the past 125 years since he founded his namesake chemicals company, scientists at Dow have followed in his footsteps, spending months in the lab researching formulations for new products.
But what used to take months can now take seconds. Dow’s polyurethanes division, which creates custom formulations for everything from sneaker soles and mattresses to insulation and flooring, has transformed the labor-intensive research process into a digital one. The data that scientists once pored over manually is now fed into Microsoft Azure’s machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, which can instantly run through algorithms and suggest new formulations for scientists to explore.
And Dow’s machine learning and AI use hasn’t been limited to the polyurethane lab. “We are using this platform to develop and deploy analytics through Dow’s end-to-end processes, from accelerating innovation to agile supply chain planning and helping our customer service reps improve our customer experience,” says Brandon Schroeder, associate director for enterprise data platforms and business intelligence at Dow.
For instance, Dow’s digital operations center uses web-connected cameras, Azure Video Analyzer and Microsoft Power Apps to monitor facilities and provide real-time analytics to detect containment leaks in the company’s production environment and alert operators so they can take immediate action.
“Azure offers Dow the ability to quickly scale up and down, provides the right level of security controls and enables us to more quickly realize our digital aspirations,” says Schroeder.
Continue reading: https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2022/03/ai-platforms-cloud-businesses-reinvent-their-processes-and-themselves
But what used to take months can now take seconds. Dow’s polyurethanes division, which creates custom formulations for everything from sneaker soles and mattresses to insulation and flooring, has transformed the labor-intensive research process into a digital one. The data that scientists once pored over manually is now fed into Microsoft Azure’s machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, which can instantly run through algorithms and suggest new formulations for scientists to explore.
And Dow’s machine learning and AI use hasn’t been limited to the polyurethane lab. “We are using this platform to develop and deploy analytics through Dow’s end-to-end processes, from accelerating innovation to agile supply chain planning and helping our customer service reps improve our customer experience,” says Brandon Schroeder, associate director for enterprise data platforms and business intelligence at Dow.
For instance, Dow’s digital operations center uses web-connected cameras, Azure Video Analyzer and Microsoft Power Apps to monitor facilities and provide real-time analytics to detect containment leaks in the company’s production environment and alert operators so they can take immediate action.
“Azure offers Dow the ability to quickly scale up and down, provides the right level of security controls and enables us to more quickly realize our digital aspirations,” says Schroeder.
Continue reading: https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2022/03/ai-platforms-cloud-businesses-reinvent-their-processes-and-themselves
