Starting the day with IntelliAM featured as the  ‘page lead’ in the business pages of Yorkshire’s national newspaper, is not an everyday occurrence. But it is happening more regularly: and for all the right reasons. So thanks to the Yorkshire Post and its business team.

 

Our partnership with Sweden’s SKF, celebrated here in @chris burn’s top story, is more than a business arrangement: it is a meeting of minds. People think SKF is an engineering firm – and yes there are many application, design, mechanical and electrical engineers among its 22,641 employees, 1,250 of whom work across its 13 locations in the UK –– but it is much more than that

You might say it keeps the wheels of industry turning: or, as SKF put it, they create ‘a life with less friction”.  For IntelliAM and our global clients in the food and drink sector, it is hard to think of anything more important. Friction is our enemy. And SKF are in the front line of its avoidance and elimination; keeping anything that spins, turns or rotates on the factory floor of the UK’s largest manufacturing as free from friction as possible.

But everything wears out in time. Which is where this incredible partnership comes in. By embedding our machine learning platform into SKF’s exceptional products, we are not only enhancing their performance but also unlocking potentially huge productivity gains and energy savings for a manufacturing industry, as Yorkshire Post columnist, @Amanda Johnson reminds us, contributes £434M GVA to the South Yorkshire economy alone, employing an estimated 9,000 people across 170 businesses and is experiencing 33% faster business growth than all key manufacturing sectors.

While the fine details are still to be worked out, we share the ambition of SKF’s Erika Morichetto to “continue to grow together and explore this market with joint product and customer development now with the intention to extend this to machine learning.” As Chris Burn and the business team at the Yorkshire Post recognise, this partnership between two fast growing European engineering/manufacturing companies can only be good the region, the UK, Sweden and Europe. A world with less friction: what’s not to like?