HELLA wins 2021 Manufacturing Leadership Award

Northville, 05 May 2021. As one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers, HELLA celebrates the announcement of being a recipient of the prestigious Manufacturing Leadership Award winner from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). HELLA and partner Drishti take this honour in the category of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics Leadership. This award was based on HELLA’s implementation of Drishti’s Artificial Intelligence to reduce cycle time and increase productivity. The partnering companies will be recognized at the Manufacturing Leadership Awards Gala, which will take place as a virtual event on May 19, 2021.

HELLA Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of HELLA, originally scouted the Silicon Valley start-up, Drishti. With an investment from HELLA Ventures, HELLA’s Operational Excellence team, led out of the Headquarters in Lippstadt, Germany, worked to develop a proof of concept using its own manufacturing lines in Guadalajara, Mexico. The system uses Artificial Intelligence and continuous camera recordings to understand the reasoning behind downtime on manual manufacturing lines. An active partnership from both teams have led to significant improvement in cycle times. HELLA continues to work with Drishti to develop different use case scenarios for future customers across all manufacturing realms.

“The HELLA team embraces lean manufacturing principles and sees the impact Drishti’s AI technology has on bringing lean into the next generation of manufacturing, AI-powered production,” said Prasad Akella, founder and CEO, Drishti. “The biggest transformations occur when technology and people work together. HELLA’s enthusiastic embrace of this new technology, as well as its commitment to empowering front line associates to make better decisions, enables them to derive the full promise of AI on manual assembly lines.”

“Together with Drishti, we are so proud and honoured to be recognized for this implementation by the NAM,” Said Vice President of Electronics Operations for North and South America at HELLA, Michael Hammoud. “We have a strong Lean Continuous Improvement Road Map which is further strengthened by deploying and leveraging Drishti digital platform. We are proud to work together to solve problems that all manufacturing plants face, in a new efficient way.”