Smarter manufacturing: How Ubisense aims to bring together the physical and the digital

Adrian Jennings, chief product advocate at Ubisense, has a useful analogy for why implementation of enterprise-focused IoT initiatives invariably struggle. Imaging that you kept losing your slippers, and that every time you found them there would be the innocent yet entirely guilty face of your new puppy staring back at you. What do you do? What most people do is hire slipper finders,” explains Jennings (left). The concept of paying someone to be in your house and do nothing aside from find slippers – instead of training the puppy – is absurd. Yet it is redolent of what many organisations do, by fixing the problem, rather than the process. Ubisense’s primary product is SmartSpace, a platform which enables customers to create a real-time digital twin of their production environment. It is Jennings’ job as chief product advocate – or ‘chief talking officer’, as he puts it – to make sure the industry understands the size and scale of the problem that Ubisense is trying to solve.