Secondmind’s decision-making ‘brain’ launched out of PROWLER.io

Secondmind has introduced the Secondmind Decision Engine, the company’s first product since being relaunched out of PROWLER.io last week (September 29).

The company has been developing the Secondmind Decision Engine for four years. The machine-learning powered software-as-a-service platform is designed to supercharge decision-making across myriad industries, including those in which visibility is low, data is sparse, and uncertainty is high.

The technology’s predictions are intended to help non-technical staff make complex decisions – demand forecasting, planning and asset allocation decisions within global supply chain operations – with ease.

“At PROWLER.io we had great ambitions but found great for a brand worth £100m, but if we are to become a multi-billion company we had to grow up,” Vishal Chatrath, co-founder and CEO, said of the relaunch.

Currently in limited release, the Secondmind Decision Engine is helping decision-makers in leading transportation and logistics companies to make better demand forecasting, planning and asset allocation decisions within their global supply chain operations.

The Secondmind Decision Engine is powered by a unique combination of Gaussian Process-based probabilistic modelling and decision-making ML libraries.

This technology suite is adept at quantifying uncertainty, identifying operational trade-offs and explaining outcomes using sparse and low volume data, capabilities that meet business decision-making demands where other machine lerning techniques like Deep Learning struggle.

As an example of how Secondmind’s platform can enhance and streamline decision-making, Vishal says: “In the supply chain, if a customer has ordered 1m shoes to go from China to the UK, you need to make the right choices at the warehouse and plan space and capacity on the ships.

“There’s a lot of variables and if you get it wrong you lose money. The decisions proposed by our decision enginie reduce the gap between AI and humans. At the end of the day the decision is always in the hands of our customer.”

A spokesperson for leading logistics company Brambles said: “As a pioneer of the sharing economy, Brambles is one of the world’s most sustainable businesses. Secondmind worked with them to better forecast demand for inbound collections, an integral part of their circular share and reuse model.”

Kuehne+Nagel is the number one sea logistics provider in the world and coordinates the movement of nearly 13,000 shipping containers every single day. Kuehne+Nagel chose to partner with Secondmind to learn more about how AI can complement their human experts in the area of sea logistics and supply chain management.

Otto Schacht, executive VP sea logistics at Kuehne + Nagel International, said: “Logistics is about gaining transparency of the key supply chain trade-offs and striking that balance between cost and performance.

“Kuehne+Nagel has been excelling in this field for decades. The best supply chains and the most resilient ones of the future will be the ones that make good decisions systematically; teaming together human and machine intelligence at all levels of decision making; strategic, tactical and operational. The Secondmind Decision Engine is helping us to test whether it is possible to make even more effective decisions and build even greater resilience in our Sea Logistics planning processes by utilising Artificial Intelligence.”

The scalability and versatility of the machine learning technology in the Secondmind Decision Engine is also helping leading automotive companies including Mazda to significantly reduce engine calibration time in production and accelerate time to market for industry leading fuel-efficient cars.

“With Mazda,” says Vishal, “there are a lot of sensors for the engine such as fuel use, brake fluid temperature and oil use. Based on the data we receive we can model the absolute optimum between fuel use, horsepower and other factors.

“If you have a 200bhp car which the regulator sees as producing 98g of CO2/km, if the temperature varies you can only produce that bhp by adding more fuel or air and that adds on to the 98g/km, and the regulator will fine you.

“The decision engine improves not just the quality but also the speed of the application.”

A Mazda spokesperson said: “We’re collaborating with Mazda to optimise automotive engine ECU tuning with the Secondmind Decision Engine to significantly reduce engine calibration time in production and enable Mazda to be more competitive.”

Concluded Vishal: “Today marks an exciting milestone, one that takes us one step closer to achieving our mission of empowering people with AI to make better decisions. The Secondmind team has done an incredible job in transforming leading-edge ML research into impactful decision-making technology and solutions that are already making a bottom-line impact to the businesses of our global partners.”