Press release
Seagate Wins Manufacturing Leadership Award from a Jury of Its Peers
The National Association of Manufacturers honored Seagate for a solution democratizing AI on factory floors that can offer up to 300% return on investment.
About this update from Seagate Technology Holdings Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\nThe National Association of Manufacturers honored Seagate for a solution democratizing AI on factory floors that can offer up to 300% return on investment.\n\n FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nSeagate Technology likes to keep its factories smart.\n\nToday, the company received an award for an achievement in smart manufacturing from a group of its manufacturing peers—a national association of manufacturers with 14,000 company members.\n\nSeagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in data storage solutions, won a 2022 Manufacturing Leadership Award for its outstanding innovation from the Manufacturing Leadership Council (MLC) at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).\n\nThe winning project provides a powerful foundation for high-volume AI analytics in the factory. Dubbed OPICA—Optical Inspection with Centralized Analysis—the novel strategy supports analytics at the factory edge. It is a no-code application of deep learning that identifies defects that can occur during production, and prevents them from escaping downstream.\n\n“The judges who evaluated this entry noted that it pushes the envelope on inspection and demonstrated an advanced use of technology with strong, proven results,” said Penelope Brown, MLC’s senior content director.\n\nBuilt with inclusivity in mind, the award-winning solution democratizes AI on the factory floor. It does it in at least three ways:\n\n\nIt uses AI as an augmentation of human work, not its replacement: factory floor operators whose functions were taken over by AI were freed up to move to higher-functioning roles, with none of them leaving the company.\n\n\nIt offers a no-code neural network training and validation solution, which makes it accessible to non-coders.\n\n\nIts development brought together people across various skill sets—engineers, data scientists, and computer scientists.\n\n\n“Computer vision challenges are common in manufacturing,” said Gary Kunkel, an engineering director who helped develop Seagate’s solution. “Historically, solutions would be developed by specialized resources such as computer vision engineers. Early on it became apparent that with deep learning techniques we could develop no-code tools to train neural networks to identify defects and features in images. This allowed for democratized development and an exponential growth of sol...