IBM Maximo application and iPhone deliver defect detection at a fraction of the cost.

Visual inspection is an opportunity. It is estimated that the market will be worth more than $25 billion worldwide by 2027. Companies are excited about the prospect of cost-savings, error reduction, better accuracy, and higher quality output. Automated quality assurance is the utopia all manufacturers want to achieve. The pandemic helped the process along, as companies tried to reduce the amount of human intervention. But finding the right skills and experience to manage a visual-inspection system can be challenging and it is an expensive investment.

Visual inspection is an application of computer vision with machine learning and artificial intelligence that helps humans make better products with fewer defects. It is much more efficient to find the defects during the process rather than fixing issues later or having to initiate recalls.

We have been working with Professor John Ward and his team at the University of South Carolina on a new way to perform visual inspections. Rather than waiting months for a system to be designed and installed, Professor Ward has created an easier answer. This leverages the IBM Maximo iPhone application as an input device to create a visual model using photos. The iOS devices are installed on the production line.

There is a beauty in the simplicity of using smartphones, but any visual-inspection system creates significant amounts of data. High-speed, 5G, millimeter wave, low-latency networks have to move high-resolution images to a system to analyze the information and communicate results in split seconds to stop a line in case of a defect. Having a system to collect information is only the first step. The power is in the data.

Our contribution is a comprehensive business-intelligence analytics suite that allows companies to drill down all the way to see the image of the defect. It means companies can look at the return on investment (ROI) per defect caught as well as all the way up to the line or plant or number of plants so the company can start aggregating quality data and use it more broadly. Instead of being a point solution, the visual inspection is now a company-wide node in a manufacturing machine.

We also bring an agile way of working and a focus on collaboration, iterative development, and continuous learning. This enables the rapid delivery of business value so ideas get to market faster. In addition, we further amplify the impact of agile methods by providing specialized expertise in the latest technologies, including cloud, automation, artificial intelligence, and high-speed private networks. From idea to launch, the advanced technology delivery team working from the development center in Columbia, South Carolina, helps visionary companies turn ideas into business value at industry-leading speed.

Dashboards make managing corrective actions easy. This can include identifying areas that need more training, since people are a huge variable in building products. The immediate feedback of real-time data makes operators more efficient. It also paves the way to a continuous improvement culture and mindset.

Visual inspection is about more than just quality; it can also be applied to sustainability initiatives that seek to decrease waste and increase accountability through managing more variables at greater levels of detail. As manufacturers trend towards Industry 4.0 with smart plant-control towers, private 5G, and edge computing, this visual-inspection application can provide the rationalization for these foundational technologies to finally present a clear business case for adoption.

Find out more about our partnership with IBM.

Metaverse has taken centerstage in many enterprise spend conversations. Although the current global economic downturn may see limited investments or pull few brands out of metaverse, the immersive technologies continue to mature. As technology evolves, the market predictions will materialize (USD 993 Bn by 2030) with more brands and customers foraying into metaverse.

56% of consumers, surveyed by Capgemini, expect their banks and insurers on the metaverse. Being part of a heavily regulated industry, only few insurers have experimented with immersive use cases, however a winning business model is yet to emerge.

Insuring the metaverse and NFT worlds

With the increase in digital assets valuations, we would see traditional insurers taking the plunge alongside their DeFi counterparts in insuring these assets. Find out more in our expert perspectives on Riding the NFT wave – a guide for insurers.

Metaverses today still reside in silos with limited interoperability, system integration, and transaction infrastructure. Adoption would be determined by how easily insurers can integrate their metaverses and core platforms with immersive ecosystems. The critical mass may take years to reach but, the early movers will surely have an advantage by locking in consumers into their insurance metaverse ecosystems.

Download the full infographic to find out more about – Metaverse: Potential and current use cases in Insurance

Technologies in the telecommunications industry are evolving at a dizzying speed, driving the need for automation.

From the times of old “physical” network functions (PNFs) that were updated once a year with significant effort and complex procedures, to the VNF/CNFs that are updated monthly or weekly – implementing automated processes is essential for CSPs to remain competitive.

However, the process of implementing automation across multiple functions creates its own problems in the form of costs, incompatibilities between systems, and general disorganization. What’s needed is a strategy for automating that simplifies the setup, operations, deployment, and validation of telecoms networks by introducing automation and CI/CD/CT pipelines into the telecoms world. Like Lego blocks, we need tools that make it possible to quickly construct new solutions built out of solid, proven components, saving time and reducing the risk of error. In this blog, I’ll share my experience with automation in the telecoms world.

The need for simplicity

When we started working in the automation arena, it was a different, largely physical world. When two systems needed to be connected, you could simply grab a cable and connect them. Today, all that’s done virtually. But despite these differences, our goal remains the same: simplification. No one wants a tangle of cables cluttering their office, and a virtual mess is no better. It’s one thing to automate a system; it’s something else entirely to simplify a network setup and operations and save effort and time.

For example, one of our initial projects was as simple as a connectivity setup between different network elements. The solution was to create a user interface where the source and destination IPs were introduced along with the required port. The automation engine identified all the routers and firewalls joining these two points and configured them to allow traffic flow. This wasn’t a complex activity, but we reduced the effort and time for its execution by 70 times – from hours to minutes – and freed the network engineers from a very repetitive task, avoiding many potential errors caused by human intervention.

Today, with the current 5G NF Continuous Deployment and Testing Pipelines we are implementing, we face tasks of far greater complexity. But the basic principles stay the same: analyze the process, identify efficiencies, and implement a structured and maintainable solution reusing as much as possible. That’s what we do.

Solutions should feature cloud-native technology, be based on containers, and be scalable and replicable. They should be able to connect to and include any tool, system, or application that offers an API. This architecture allows us to quickly implement any automation use case.

Beyond time and cost saving, automation brings many benefits: it’s faster than manual execution, provides reliable results, avoids human error, frees our engineers from repetitive tasks, and simplifies network operation.

Any player in the telecoms market who wants to remain competitive should introduce automation into their networks to cope with the herculean effort required to keep networks up-to-date and provide best-in-class, fast services to customers.

Architecture

The main features of an automation architecture should include:

• Dynamic GUI to provide a fully customizable graphical user interface that reduces the complexity of the network and automation components, allowing any user, even one without deep network/automation experience, to launch complex tasks and review the results in the same GUI.  
• Centralized logging system that gathers all the logs and information from the network and automation components to analyze and present the relevant KPIs and dashboard in the GUI. This service should be easy to integrate with OSS element(s) present in the target architecture.
• Centralized Notification System able to connect to any communications service (such as email, Teams, Slack, Jira, etc.) that allows the solution to contact users requesting validations, send test reports to the user who launches it, or register an incident in the appropriate system, etc.
• Integration with Traffic Generator and Commercial Testing Tools that allows the triggering and orchestration of testing from the GUI leveraging commercial test tool capabilities.

The architecture must be flexible and highly adaptable, allowing for the addition or replacement of any components according to the target environment and its technological architecture.

High-level architecture and components example

Implementation option

Our recommendation is not about commercial products – that would require a lot of effort in customization and adaptation. Rather, it is an open framework that can be tailored according to the required use case. It will remain an asset that can be maintained and further expanded by the customer. It can be also used as accelerator to launch the automation journey as a base architecture to form the foundations on which to build the automation strategy.

In this sense, different European CSPs are following this open source-based approach to drive 5G Core Network Functions deployment and validation. Pipelines are built to automatically execute the deployment and update of 5GC NFs from different vendors. Our collaboration with several of these CSPs has reduced fourfold the time needed to put an automation framework in place and automate the first NF deployment.

The short term and the long term

Automation is crucial in order to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of telecoms technologies and the increasing complexity of networks. Companies that embrace automation can streamline operations, reduce costs, and stay competitive.

Automation not only saves time and effort it also simplifies network setup and operations.  By automating repetitive tasks, organizations can free up their engineers to focus on more strategic initiatives and avoid potential errors caused by manual intervention. An open cloud-native architecture enables organizations to quickly implement automation use cases and seamlessly integrate with various tools and systems. This scalability and flexibility empower companies to adapt to changing technological environments and efficiently deliver best-in-class services to their customers.

TelcoInsights is a series of posts about the latest trends and opportunities in the telecommunications industry – powered by a community of global industry experts and thought leaders.

Why connectivity in autonomous vehicles and robots matters

Across industries, big bets are being placed on business models that leverage autonomous vehicles and robots. The trend seems irreversible – from fleets of drones in our skies to deliver goods, autonomous cars on our roads, driverless trains on our railways, and robots in our factories and warehouses.

It is not hard to see why – the potential economic and operational benefits are huge. According to Pedro Pacheco, senior director analyst at Gartner, “Autonomous drones offer a lower cost per mile and higher speed than vans in last-mile deliveries. When they deliver parcels, their operational costs are at least 70% lower than a van delivery service.”

While  most focus is rightly placed on AI to power autonomous decision making, connectivity is often overlooked. Yet connectivity unleashes the potential of autonomous vehicles and robots to receive information about their environment, acting like a second brain. In this blog, I will focus on connectivity’s role in deploying autonomous mobility solutions and explore this in both a non-safety and safety-critical context.

The four dimensions of the engineering challenges of autonomous mobility

While the range of application areas varies, from a technological perspective, four primary dimensions shape the nature of the engineering challenges of autonomous vehicles and robots:  

• Mobility scenarios context: the diversity of mobility scenarios, for example weather conditions, road/premise characteristics, or driving rules
• Vehicle or robot context: the complexity of the architecture and software, the volumes of data generated and managed, and the computing power close to the real-time processing, acceptance, and human interaction with the autonomous system
• Communication context: Interaction with the environment, for instance other vehicles, local infrastructure, edge, cloud; requires executing real-time information from different sources or updating software over the air
• Regulation and standards: A safety-critical system must comply with local regulations and converge on standards to accelerate the deployment of common tools and processes.

Safety-critical applications and connectivity

Imagine an autonomous shuttle crossing a complex intersection. Since the shuttle’s sensors cannot provide coverage of the whole intersection and because the intersection is not a completely controlled environment, random events, such as a cat crossing the intersection, could be missed.

Installing a camera and lidar in areas not covered by the shuttle’s sensors would make it possible to detect unreported work, an accident that has just occurred, or an object falling from a vehicle – The perception system makes it possible to detect and flag such situations.

The question then becomes: “How can we take this into account?” The information must be processed and sent to the shuttle as soon as possible to be considered in the trajectory planning to stop, decelerate, or direct the trajectory toward a safe lane. For this, connectivity is key. In this case, we need an offboard intelligence system installed in the infrastructure with vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

In other complex situations, such as a highway with a high-speed bend, an offboard perception system could be installed on the bend. The perception system comprises sensors, including cameras, lidar, or radar equipped with software breaks. As the embedded perception in the vehicle is not sufficient to interpret all the hidden events, a cloud-based intelligence can serve as a second brain to interpret the scene.

REMOTIS is a remote intelligent autonomous transport system, a real-time self-driving prototype managed by a remote server through 5G communication. Remotis is a disruptive concept for connected vehicles that makes possible the demonstration of new distributed architecture and collaborative services and functions based on 5G technology.

Even better, a fusion of the onboard and offboard perception can help to anticipate dangerous situations or support autonomous vehicles that are unable to stop safely. Here, 5G technology can be useful regarding the latency and volume of data to be transported between the embedded system on the vehicle and the nearby infrastructure / cloud.

Mercedes Benz, at the forefront of technology in the large-scale deployment of the ADAS and AD systems, has recently been granted first authorizations to market ADAS level 3 (semi-autonomous driving) in Europe and the US! Mercedes team said “Car-to-X technologies enable a completely new form of information exchange.”

The E- and S-Class is already equipped for the next step: for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. Use cases are aiming to inform if the crossing is blocked or in case of a poor visibility…the information passes through a secure server before being shared. The volume of information becomes more important when the infrastructure participates in the perception. Thus, the Federal State of Hesse in Germany became the first region to deploy a traffic light and vehicle communication with warning functions, offering services participating in the protection of drivers, pedestrians but also maintenance workers!

Another example of Safety-critical application is Automated Valet Parking, where the connectivity is mandatory to ensure and secure the service. Bosch Said: “Parking your car yourself is a thing of the past!”. The Automated Valet Parking system generally uses a combination of wireless communication based on the vehicle communication standard (DSRC) and cellular communication dedicated to vehicles (C-V2X).

However, parking a car automatically from a drop off zone in the parking garage to a free place require a continuous collaboration between the vehicle and the infrastructure. The complexity of the maneuvers and the distance between the vehicle and a possible obstacle such as a child emerging from an area outside the field of vision of the onboard system implies that the processing and communication chain must be less than 100 ms to allow the vehicle to brake on obstacles at 1 m. The network must be secure and providing uninterrupted service throughout the parking procedure.

Non-safety critical applications and connectivity

Consider the case of a maintenance application. Pipelines transporting all fluid types, such as oil, gas, and water, often degrade over time. Monitoring and repair can be challenging, especially as these pipelines run across large geographies and often remote areas. Imagine a vehicle with shape/dimensions adapted to this context, moving autonomously and equipped with sensors supervising the ducts and detecting anomalies. This information must be communicated in real time, and/or the data must be unloaded from time to time due to limited storage capacities on the vehicle. Connectivity can ensure continuity of service and high performance. The connectivity solution must be adapted to situations where coverage via a 5G network, for example, is unavailable. A road-side unit ensuring local vehicle-to-infrastructure communication can provide the capabilities to upload data and store it in the cloud.

Capgemini’s concept of a miniature autonomous vehicle named TITAN is equipped with sensor fusion and V2X communication. It can access hard-to-reach zones to ensure the control mission of the pipeline.

In the above use cases, safety-critical or not, the objective isn’t to bridge the embedded systems with edge or cloud by the latest generation of connectivity, but rather to do so with an adapted solution that takes usage, network availability, performance, and cost into account. Designing systems to onboard a technology isn’t the best approach.

The right approach is to select a technology solution from that wide range available today that makes it possible to deploy the right communication system for each use case. Connecting the world becomes a real scaling accelerator.

TelcoInsights is a series of posts about the latest trends and opportunities in the telecommunications industry – powered by a community of global industry experts and thought leaders.

Nowadays, the extent of FinOps’ success depends heavily on how well it fits into the organization of your business. The challenges that businesses face along the way will also vary accordingly. Every cloud endeavor can benefit from FinOps; the question is, where should you focus your team’s energy?

FinOps in traditional organizations

In a traditional organization’s structure (one without a lean / agile management structure / DevOps), the primary challenge to implementing FinOps is the limitation on providing – and reacting to – real-time cost data. In this context, FinOps would aim to provide visibility on cloud costs on a regular basis (ideally weekly/ bi-weekly, but no less than monthly) as required by the organization as a starting point. The speed of change to enable cost-optimized and scalable cloud environments will be somewhat slower than what an agile organization might achieve, but significant nonetheless.

In traditionally structured organizations, FinOps practitioners work best when they’re able to collaborate across different departments while organized under a clear corporate identity. They might be a team under the finance department or, preferably, an IT or cloud center of excellence. The FinOps team thus provides a holistic view of cloud costs and plays the role of advocates, enabling better decisions by leaders on how to manage their cloud spending.

FinOps in agile organizations

By adopting contemporary IT management practices such as agile and DevOps, organizations can react faster to changes in business and technological demands. One of the key elements is to group the developers and engineers together with the operational people to develop, run, and enhance IT solutions faster. This is where FinOps should also participate in the DevOps teams to provide input to ensure that the cloud solutions deployed and operated can create the intended business value at the lowest possible costs.

Effective FinOps also comprises collaboration with operations teams – especially cloud operations teams. This is where FinOps plays its critical role of integrating with its counterparts, such as DevOps and SecOps, to ensure they can measure and create the intended business value from their applications and architectures. FinOps practitioners should work closely with cloud and IT security architects to define KPIs and accountability. Through this collaboration, FinOps experts can enable and advise on real-time cost visibility, thus building cost-effective architecture and solutions.

Centralized vs. decentralized FinOps

Another organizational discussion is on whether to centralize or decentralize FinOps-related activities. This too depends somehow on how flexible or agile the organization is. Take reservations purchases as an example. On one hand, decentralizing the reservations and savings plan purchases can ensure accountability of the application owners on their own cloud costs. On the other hand, these purchases (and their management) would preferably be centralized from a risk management perspective, in order to avoid generating idle reservations as a result of resource class or architectural changes.

The central role of centers of excellence

No matter what organizational structure a company has, the existence of a FinOps expert team is crucial. Your FinOps team, which might evolve into a center of excellence, maintains the holistic cloud spend picture while enabling cost accountability down to the lowest organization level possible.

Individual organizations will always face different challenges. The strength of a well-run FinOps team is its ability to adapt to the terrain and provide consistent visibility and savings. Hence, it is time to start building up your FinOps team and move your way through the journey of realizing the values of cloud.

A leader in cloud and operational optimization, Capgemini is helping organizations around the world to optimize their cloud services, saving money and lowering their carbon footprint.

Looking to go deeper into FinOps? Read more in our new white paper here.

Improving finance processes through an automated self-service platform builds lasting relationships with your customers

Customer experience is a crucial differentiator across industries, as everyone wants to interact with companies in a pleasant, efficient manner.

As a result, seamless support for finance and accounting queries, transactions, processes, and other various operations is now the norm in the finance industry, as this offers your clients access to your services through any device using simple messaging and self-service technology.

But what if you’re struggling to implement a setup such as this? And how do you ensure you can keep pace with everything your customers expect? Especially, in a world where they can now do everything on-the-go – from paying bills, to booking a vacation, and even working.

The benefits of a self-service finance platform

One of the easiest ways of addressing this challenge quickly is to implement a next-generation, self-service finance platform that provides a single-source of information for all your finance teams and processes.

By delivering augmented, frictionless interactions and transparency across your entire finance chain, a platform such as this maximizes the efficiency of your finance processes and significantly increases your customer and employee satisfaction alike. It also meets the needs of your ecosystem of employees, suppliers, procurement, organizations, and service providers to drive value across your finance cycle, including:

• Deploying a one stop shop mindset
• Putting business transparency at the center of your operations
• Injecting automation into your assignments and workflow
• Improving services, experiences, and productivity.

Automation helps deliver the experiences customers expect

Self-service finance platforms achieve all of this by automating key finance processes including supplier onboarding, master data management, exception-handling, input checks and rejection, and query management processes.

Additionally, by implementing more automation into your finance processes, fewer agents are needed to run your key financial tasks – giving you more time to improve your finance teams’ way of working, whether they work in order-to-cash, accounts payable, or controllership etc.

All of which improves employee satisfaction, service quality, and customer satisfaction as a result – while also giving you the ability to adapt faster to market changes when they occur moving forward.

Putting customers first makes overcoming challenges easier

Capgemini’s Digital Concierge Intelligent Portal – powered by Zendesk – connects and automates data across your finance teams to provide a single-source of finance information in real time.

Built on designing, implementing, and optimizing solutions that drive personalized, flexible customer experiences, Capgemini and Zendesk’s approach keeps you connected, which helps you build lasting relationships with your customers, despite any disruptions or challenges they might encounter.

Learn more about how Capgemini’s Digital Concierge Intelligent Portal, powered by Zendesk, drives synergies across your upstream and downstream finance chain to ensure smoother finance operations by contacting: ewa.lichtenstein@capgemini.com