Welcome! First of all, welcome welcome welcome!! This is our virtual tour with Accenture. We have several members of Accenture. What you see on your screen we're going to be able to visit today. I'm Lesa Verbick. I am with the student organization, Agency M-1. John Heinrichs is here who is our faculty advisor and Gabi Tremp is also here helping us with all of the tech stuff and we also have members of our team of Agency M-1 actually at the innovation hub in Livonia and so we're glad to have them here. Kristen can you hear me okay?
Yes, yes I can. We're just muted here. So we're ready to start when you are and we will step back put ourselves on mute and we'll watch for any questions that come up with someone that might raise their hand during the process. Excellent. All right welcome everybody. So I cannot see myself so we're out of screen just somebody pull me back. So, welcome! We appreciate your patience while we figured out some technical stuff like we were telling the team before we were a very well oiled machine a year ago but this is the first time we've done this since we've been Covid'ed. So, thank you very much for your patience I think we've got a really good virtual experience for you it's one of our first times doing this full walk through in a virtual experience so we hope you enjoy it and have the questions answered that you may be coming in with. Please feel free to interrupt, raise your hand, ask questions. Typically we do these in person and they are very interactive so please take the time we will have a afterward and we will have quite a few opportunities for questions and I will pause and ask for questions but please don't hesitate. That really helps us understand if we're on track and giving you anything relevant and also kind of helps guide because we have quite a bit to share and if it's not interesting we'll jump to something else that you might want. So thank you very much for joining giving us a couple hours of your time today. We're really excited to come show you what we're what we've built here with at Accenture. It's kind of nice that's in our own backyard we're here in Livonia so we are Accenture we are a global company we're a massive global company over 500,000 people right now. We've been around for many years actually spun off of Andersen Consulting many years ago and really focused on the technology side of things, the strategy, the management consulting, now we're really venturing into innovation and interactive. We're starting to see that business is not just about the solution; it's about what the customer wants and what that customer experience needs to be to to make everybody successful and so we're really trying to meld all elements together and be as successful for our clients as we can be for our own team here at Accenture. So we are in Livonia. We are the Detroit innovation hub. We focus on what we call Industry x.o. So that's what we consider like the latest industrial revolution. It's the idea of connected products, connected things, making tangible things smart and and you will kind of do a little walk around here with a Matterport I don't know if anybody has any experience with the Matterport you guys ever seen like those doll houses that people use for real estate selling homes and stuff now. So it's built with this what we use is a Lidar camera - a Matterport camera that really shows all aspects and you can kind of walk through the space. We're gonna actually give you that experience you get almost an in-person experience of our space right here today and we'll talk about a little bit about what we do in this space and give you a couple demos about or show you a couple solutions that we actually built with real clients based start to finish based on their customer needs. So getting started any questions anything anybody wants to bring up before we jump in?
Okay. We've got about let's see we got about half an hour a little bit more maybe to talk about this space and really talk about what we do in this area and then we're going to take a real quick break just while we reset get our panel ready we've got a really interesting panel ready set up for us that will jump in from four o'clock until never you guys stop asking questions but we're happy to to jump in and really explore what the world looks like on our side. So, first thing I want to talk about and talk a little bit about innovation it's very important for Accenture because it's very important to our clients and when we say innovation it's not just coming up with something new it's very robust very specific process that we use and we actually dedicate and have invested in quite a bit of support teams to help us on that path and so you can see here kind of our six pillars that we consider most important to innovation. We call it our "Innovation Architecture" and so it really starts at the beginning with research. So we have a whole team global team that really works on thought leadership. They're really the ones that are building the white papers they're doing the research they're understanding what the trends are, what the technologies are, what the customer needs are, and they're putting that all together into white papers or points of view that we can then share out to clients or bring to bear in a client situation. They partner with Accenture Ventures. So, Ventures is out there looking at startups. So we recognize that we're not going to have all the best ideas first. But we know that there are some people out there who are so dedicated to a certain solution or technology that we want to partner with that. So it might be a merger and acquisition, it might be just a partnership, it might be just pulling them in on something that we're already working on and we know they solve that that problem whether it's better faster cheaper first in the world so we are not precious about being the the only ones to be able to do things we want to make sure that we're doing it the right way and our partnering with people who are also doing it. Our Accenture Labs this is where everybody plays. So this is where we kind of bring together that thought leadership when they bring together that technology and we really start to experiment with what's possible. This is not all of this is usually not for client facing once you get into the studios this is where we start to apply what we've done. So we we take the technology you know we have a quantum lineup that we have here right downtown Detroit. We take that technology and then how do we apply quantum to sports and that's what happens here in the studio where we start to really seek finding application. Then you go into innovation centers. That's where we are today. This is where we bring our clients in. So we invite our clients into this space. We'll do workshops. We'll sit and talk with them about what their problems are what their challenges are in business and really help them we use a methodology called "design thinking" and it really helps these clients look at their challenges in a different way and kind of approach it with a different methodology that helps them break down the issues break down what they think are barriers that maybe aren't and we get those key stakeholders in the room to really start to build up what is possible in terms of fixing the challenges and and coming up with the solution that benefits everybody and that's kind of the demos that you'll see here today. That all of these demos came out of a workshop experience with a client who can't I've got a problem help me fix it and we don't just come in and fix it we sit down and really talk to them about what's going on and we co-create with them. Then finally we have our delivery centers. So they can work with us clients can work with us on every on every level of this if we Accenture innovation center we can walk away with just a strategy and a roadmap for how to fix it or you can partner with us and we'll help actually deliver and implement that solution. So a wide spectrum this is just an innovation we do a lot of other work in strategy, interactive, actually my background is in digital marketing. So not really related to innovation at all but I've had the opportunity to be a part of this innovation hub and it's been a really great experience. Any questions about our innovation architecture or our dedication to kind of bringing business and tech together? Okay. Cool! So let's go to the Matterport we'll show you a little bit about the space that I'm standing in right now. I'm kind of squished over here in a corner. I'm going to come over here. Oh, perfect. Okay. So what you're seeing here is again this doll house this Matterport camera that we have does is it Lidar yes Lidar so you'll see as we scroll through this space it has taken shots and really mapped the entire space so I'm standing right in the middle of this this was filmed previously but you can see this is our our demo space and it's really a hands-on experiment center. You can come in all of these demos we've probably got 95 maybe 100 here and they're all hands-on, they're all working solutions that we co-created with clients and have implemented and so if you kind of start in this first corner kind of where we're standing right now. Thank you, Perfect. This is kind of the process of product development. Now our Detroit innovation hub is specific to industrial and manufacturing mostly because we're in Detroit and that that tends to be what a lot of the industry is around us. We have similar in innovation hubs around the world. For example, we've got one in Houston that is more focused on utilities and resources. We have one in Chicago that is more on customer experience and the retail experience. So it really depends on what the industry is where we've put you know we've got our kind of a federal services government version in Washington DC. So here you can see it's mostly about industrial manufacturing making things smart and really building out products that are relevant and experiences that are relevant to customers and so you know we start the experience with how you know really understanding what consumers like. What is it that they want to learn about. How do we create experiences that are relevant for them. How do we the one we're looking at right now is kind of a software it's like an advanced Kanban software system that really helps us test and make sure that the tools and the systems that we've designed early on are going to be applicable where they need to be. Then we move into manufacturing. So once you are ready to once you're ready to design something and once you're ready to actually build it we have live working models here. For example, that's a fisher model. So it's a miniaturized model of an actual manufacturing line and it shows all the different capabilities that are available on a factory floor if we were to digitize it. So it shows quality assurance, it shows monitoring, it shows you can look at temperature you can look at speed you can look at quality there's all different things that you can be measuring and monitoring. So that's just one example whereas if there's a maybe a more traditional or more legacy company looking to revive their digital or revive their manufacturing processes they may come to us and say hey, "What can I do to make my manufacturing lines smarter?" We'll give them that example right through there so we talk a little bit about you know how do we make the manufacturing lines smarter then it goes into some really cool stuff where we're talking about connected products connected assets connected people connected workers so if you're looking you know say you're not you're you're not in your factory you're not in your store one night and something changes maybe a fan stops or a light goes off it's critical to the manufacturing process. We can be monitoring all of that we can capture all the energy usage, we can connect we can connect all of that information, and really narrow down how to be as efficient as possible and then it goes into servicing and connected workers. So a big issue that we've got in the industrial world right now is a lot of the workforce is retiring. They've been doing manufacturing for 30 years on the same line and they've gotten really good at it and now they're retiring and they're really struggling to find people to take those roles and if they do, they don't stay for 30 years. So knowledge transfer becomes a big issue and how do you train somebody new and ensure that there's no slowdown of the line that there's no quality issues or anything. So how can you offer whether it's over the shoulder training or maybe some virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality solutions that helps make sure that they are completing the job in a similar way as everybody else so that you make sure that nothing impacts the quality of your product. So these are all just again we've got about 95 different examples. We've got a couple here that I want to show you in person. Any questions right now about what we do in this space or why we do it?
Kristen. This is Lesa. Maybe you could explain what type of items that you would produce in this area. Okay. Make there. So good question! We don't make anything here. We make ideas. So we actually so this is where we do our thinking. We'll have a client in we'll have them come into what we call our design thinking space or our generator and we really have a workshop. It's an interactive workshop where we're using sticky notes and voting and whiteboards and grouping and breaking down building backup kind of methodologies. We use this demo space here as inspiration. So we'll say, Hey okay so we're talking today about your customer is unable to get from point a to point b without these three hassles. Let's go out and look at the solution that we built for xyz and see how we might be able to apply that technology to your challenge. So we'll come up here we'll play for 30 minutes we'll go back in and say okay now we solve that and see how we might be able to apply it but we're looking at things a little differently and so it really is more of a box starter and an example of what's possible one of the cool things is around here that there's a lot of similar technologies with the same technologies or platforms that is underpinning the demos that you see. So it's saying we're not just taking solution a and applying it to your problem we're saying we've got the engineering, we've got the thinking, we've got the technology, we've got the business insights, how do we bring that all together specific for your challenge. I think that's really what we make here we then go off depending on what teams that they are where their clients are not all of our clients are from Detroit we have an industry x.o center just like this in Germany and in China and so it's basically regional anybody any manufacturing company that wants to work with us we do a lot of work here. Kristen, we've got a question from Antonio who's got his hand raised. So Antonio if you could go ahead and ask. Well yeah I was just curious about I was just wondering so what you're saying you do is like say if you already had like some sort of technology and customers were having issues with it that they were complaining about you would take that technology and then take take their feedback and then create like a solution for it where you can maybe make an extension of that technology and make it a little better for them. Exactly. Yeah just give me sorry sorry guys. Lucy we're here I'm the I'm the working analyst here at the center yeah so for example take into consideration things like for cloud services. We have Microsoft, Google, and AWS. We don't tell them which one they they should pick we just tell them the different solutions and based on what they want they usually pick the provider and we build something custom on top of what they already have. The reason is because we like to be very platform agnostic. We want to be able to for example if you're already working with Microsoft products we don't want to force you to switch to AWS but we do know that you know out of the box not every solution that Microsoft has works for your needs. So we customize that using already existing assets that they might have or tools that they might have. But yes in essence at the end it ends up being a custom solution for the client. Okay all right thank you. I just couldn't not mute it for a second I was just wondering out of curiosity like who's your main clientele like who do you guys approach to like I was just curious about. Really everybody. We work with 99 of the top 100 companies in the world in all different elements. Obviously around here a lot of our business is tier one suppliers, OEMs. I was wondering more so of like like are you guys more regional or do you guys expand like around the nation or even like abroad I'll just you mean specific to the Detroit innovation or Accenture as whole? So Accenture is a global company. We've got 500,000 people in, I think, 200 countries. We're a massive, massive company and so we we work with almost every other corporation out there. Kristen, one quick question before we go on, Jeffrey wanted to know Jeffrey Vale, what's an example of beginning idea to or problem to end solution what's an example of that Jeffrey it's like I put you in there to ask that question.
So lots of different examples of this. We also have one where we just show how we've worked with AWS this is a kind of what you were saying about marinade technology. We use facial recognition. We can use voice recognition. This is an example just as if you were you know a drink so if it's if you're a child and you come up and you want to ask for a drink it's going to give you the orange juice in the milk. It's me it's Friday afternoon it's been a long week maybe it offers up something a little stronger and it's just talking about how you know showing how we can use those different platforms like Louise was saying. How can we pair those with technology to really solve a problem that consumers may or may not know. Questions about kind of that example does that answer your question?
Good.
I think so yeah we're in good shape. All right great on time. So what I'd like to do is transition over we've got another example again if you guys were here in person and be cooler because it's your virtual reality. But Julian like holly is going to put on some gear that we use a lot both in co-creation and building some of these tools but that also we supply to clients when they are building out prototypes or if they're training some of their employees. Some of these technologies are in works right now at say a dealership. So if you need to know how to change the oil in something and it's a remedial example but if I've never done it before wouldn't it be cool if I could put on glasses put on things and really just train without actually even touching a vehicle and how could we do that. So I'll let Lisa and Julian show you a little bit about what we do. Okay so like Kristen was saying so we took something that you know it's kind of mainstream for usually for games and we try to see what we could apply this to to make things easier and more entertaining and the best thing we found was essentially worker training and manuals and stuff like that things that are repetitive and they're boring because you usually just read a manual or somebody tells you how to do it once and you have to figure it out on your own afterwards. So what Julian is showing you here is usually a VR headset and remotes these are connected to two cameras on the ceiling and then if you can turn that one real quick so what we did is instead of having someone teach one-on-one how to build a turbocharger we had someone tell us exactly how it would be built how the experience should look and we designed that in a VR environment and now instead of having one person one-on-one we have one person training probably 20, 30, 50 people and how this made it better is you no longer have a mess to pick up or reset if you want to retry again and again. So if somebody wants to I don't know train 20 times today instead of just once, he just has to you know restart everything will reset to where it was and he's you know able to keep going as many times as he needs to. So what you're seeing here this is what Julian is looking in his glasses at the moment. So right now we have all the parts set up as in the training environment as they would be and then on his right is the actual initial steps for the server charger and the table. So I'm going ahead and let him run through it real quick here so you guys can see how it looks. Usually this is the part where we have you guys actually try it in person so you see the experience but based on people that train others and companies we've taken like the most important factors of this so for example highlighting the pieces so they know the exact order in which they're supposed to go arrows so they know where they need to put them you can't hear it because we're in a zoom skull but if you try to ratchet something it will actually do the effect. I also had Julian here drop apart because I'm going to show you something that happens at the end.
With this also the other thing you can see here is for example when you start to clamp things up things like that so it will give you haptic feedback and both audio and you know feel and again these are very even though this is a very crude technology at the moment because those for example the remotes don't resemble you know an arm at all but it this is as you can see this in real life this looks very close to what you would be looking at and it's helped a lot of people train faster more amount of people in the same amount of span. For example if one worker used to train 10 people in a month now he can train probably 60, 70 and they end up being more proficient because of it again. It's all about gamifying the experience essentially. Another thing is which is what we like to show people when they come in is that okay so Julian has done this multiple times because we have to showcase it for clients or people that come visit but this is very intuitive. So you'll see that if you even if you have never used VR ever probably the first few parts will be hard to do but once you finish probably the first or second assembly you're off to the races. You start to understand what the game expects of you how it expects you to behave and it it becomes like second nature essentially. So he's about done. Okay there's one last thing.
Okay, so now that he's when when he finishes what we're gonna see is the other aspect that this brings to the table which is what do you do with this how do how can you evaluate because they don't they no longer have an actual teacher showing them. So what we did was also include into this metrics for example in this case we have each of these three columns is one piece one will tell you how fast the person attached it how accurate his attachment was and how many times he dropped that piece you can use this to make the training more efficient. So you can actually for example if you see that there's a step where they take so long that it doesn't make sense it's probably because that instruction is too complex. You should break into more bite-sized pieces or show better either diagrams pictures or better instructions themselves. So you can see whenever he highlights the piece he will the the graph it will tell you what that graph belongs to and then you can see for example if you show there so there's some green bars those are the parts that he dropped it will tell you how many times he dropped them and you can use this to measure how he hasn't been improving throughout the training throughout the months and again if you need to revise your instruction manuals and stuff like that. So I'm going to pass it back to Kristen if anybody has any questions please now that we're here or how we would use it.
One of the this is Lesa one of the attendees and Paul if you want to jump in here that's fine and un-mute yourself but it's mentioning how this would be a great piece of technology to train on very sensitive items and applications that I had not considered I was just mesmerized by the actual VR itself. I was a patriot missile systems repair and in order to fix parts of the radar you had to deal with 53,000 kilovolts of power and discharge the capacitor and all this kind of stuff and quite a few people got blown 30 feet plus by the bus bar on that thing and this would have been a very neat safety tool to be able to train people instead of them losing their life over it. Great point! I think that would be a fantastic application and I hadn't even considered that Paul thank you for that. That's really interesting. So that's another thing yes this also helps because you don't have to train under dangerous circumstances and again it not only helps the company and cost but also the actual users because it's less strenuous for them like they're not actually picking the item if it's heavy things like that and I'm going to show you real quick now that you mentioned that one other solution that we did in VR was this one which was for airplane repairs. So instead of actually going out and sometimes it might be either windy or anything like that instead of actually going out into the elements or anything like that people can actually train in a room and a 10 by 10 with a virtual plane and they could actually pretty much you know do all the validation and see different pictures either virtual pictures or actual pictures as you can see he has kind of a tablet in his hand if you look down for a little bit there that will show you more or less how it should look. You can put pictures here of the actual real-life item or in this case virtual because again this is supposed to be a generic demo we weren't supposed to attach it to any client or anything so that's why that picture is not a real one. But again yes this this is a very great tool for this type of thing and learning and whatnot and another thing that it's also very good for is for example in university and schools to teach kids any type of you know any topic honestly either chemistry, math, physics, anything we've had an event once where schools came around and we showed them that they are for example things for astrology where it would actually show you the entire solar system you could actually zoom in zoom out get information specific stars planets galaxies etc. and again it's a matter of making the learning a lot more fun so that it's more efficient for kids and and users are more you know into the actual training process instead of it being a torture essentially. And it's becoming so much more relevant now in this time of Covid. Right I mean how much manufacturing or design or development has slowed even education you guys are probably experiencing it too just what has changed and so more interactive more virtual more digital environment it's only going to grow. We've seen such an acceleration in the past year and we don't expect it to slow down.
