The story of MotionMiners

The initial idea for Motion-Mining® came to Sascha Feldhorst in December 2014 while jogging and looking at his fitness tracker. He asked himself whether it would not be possible to perform efficiency analyses in companies using a similar principle. This led to his dissertation "Automatic Activity and Context Recognition for the Analysis of the Picking Process" at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics in Dortmund.

This idea, an automatic analysis of manual logistics processes using sensors and artificial intelligence, developed, thanks to the collaboration of Sascha Feldhorst, Rene Grzeszick and Sascha Kaczmarek, into the foundation of MotionMiners GmbH (October 2017), a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute. The full spin-off did not take place until last summer. Along with the final steps of the spin-off, the move out of the offices of the Digital Hub Logistics also took place at the end of 2019. The hub goes back to an initiative of the digital association Bitkom and is part of the Digital Hub Initiative (de:hub) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) with a total of 12 hubs. Since then, we have stood completely on our own two feet.

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First successes, further development and our products

The first success of our founding team was the acquisition of the Exist research transfer in fall 2017, which enabled the foundation of MotionMiners GmbH in October 2017. Winning the main prize at the German national competition Digital Innovations in 2018 was another important step for the funding of the first two employees, who have been instrumental in shaping the project and product business to date. We are also particularly proud to receive the VDI Innovation Award 2019, the first non-startup award for us.

Since its foundation, MotionMiners GmbH has been growing steadily. Over the years, the team has grown from 3 to 30 miners today. Our team consists of employees of various nationalities and fields of expertise, from logistics process engineers to hardware developers and data analysts.

Along with the team, our offering and technology, above all the recognition of movements using machine learning and the handling and evaluation of Big Data, has also developed and improved over the years. We started with the development of our artificial intelligence, as well as the learning of process-specific movements for process analysis back in 2015. With the foundation in 2017, our service offering then also started. Here, we accompany our customers on site during the measurement of their manual processes and also during the subsequent evaluation. Our customers benefit from our experience in the areas of process mining and data analytics, among others. Through the automatic analysis of manual work, an effort reduction of approx. 80% can be achieved compared to analyses such as REFA, MTM or the Leitmerkmalmethode. Today, in addition to Motion-Mining® as a service, our portfolio includes our Manual Process Intelligence (MPI), the Motion-Mining® product solution, and the Motion-Mining® Tracing Solution (MMTS), a Corona countermeasure. In the further course, we will discuss these solutions in detail.

Last year, the beta phase of our MPI was launched. Since then, 14 customers have taken advantage of our new offering. For the first time, MPI enables our customers to independently perform automated efficiency and ergonomics analyses for their production and logistics processes. This year, in March 2020, it was awarded Best Product of the Year 2020 by LogiMAT, just in time for the exit of the beta phase.

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The MotionMiners in times of Corona

2020 was also a special year for us. Many trade shows were cancelled or only offered digitally. We had to come to terms with the "home office" concept and accept that we would not be able to work together physically for an indefinite period of time. In addition, planned projects were postponed because many companies had to send their employees on short-time work and analysis under normal conditions was not possible. In addition, there were contact restrictions and, depending on the industry, absolute bans on visits. This led to a deceleration of our project business. An increase in our Exist II funding came just at the right time and helped us a great deal during these and the following months.

Against this background, we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to use our technology and experience in the field of process analysis and process optimization to make a contribution to the fight against or to life in times of COVID-19.

In May, we then began developing our Motion-Mining® Tracing Solution (MMTS). The technology relieves and supports companies and employees in complying with hygiene and distance rules. It is an infection prevention tool. Consisting of an APP-beacon combination, the MMTS makes it easy and fast to trace infection chains and automatically categorize contacts to avoid a complete lockdown. The APP also provides real-time feedback to notify staff when clearances are not met or contact time exceeds 15 minutes. In case of infection, information on further measures can be retrieved via the APP. In addition, contact clusters can be detected to identify potential "super-spreaders".

We already recorded the first success with our new technology in July 2020: In the Santander X Tomorrow Challenge, in which 2,200 companies from around the world participated, our Corona solution won in the Re-Invent category, the "reinvention of working life.

Another milestone we wanted to fulfill this summer is this blog. We are very excited to be able to give you even more interesting and in-depth insights behind the scenes at MotionMiners GmbH. We plan to share a post with you on a regular basis. The focus will be on topics related to logistics, production and MotionMiners. But we would also like to use this platform to give others the opportunity to present their know-how or innovations. We are excited to see how this blog will develop.

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With this in mind - Stay in Motion!