PortaCount Success Story

Overview

PortaCount was an idea that took shape after the founder of the company realized that technology could be used to monitor and improve the efficiency of their industry. Having spent over 35 years in prescription drug packaging, he realized that many facilities were still doing things the old way… manually counting their production lines to determine production rates. Doing things this way is a time-consuming process and is always prone to human error. So what could be done to streamline the process?

Challenge

PortaCount had a great app idea to solve this problem. To implement it, they reached out to Swip Systems to see what custom solution we could come up with. Our team at Swip worked with them to develop a mobile app that takes advantage of video processing to capture a production line. We then used video analysis tools to slow the video into individual frames, which allows the app to determine how many bottles are flowing through a production line at a given time.

To use the app, a supervisor simply points their smartphone at the production line and takes a video to capture the line. They then use finger gestures to draw a shape around a bottle on the line in the video, so the app can detect and count the bottles. Once the video has been captured, the user can input other stats into the app to account for employee shift lengths and breaks, all of which are factored in to calculate the overall efficiency of the line.

Results

With this app, PortaCount has been able to help manufacturers or distributors automate the process of monitoring the efficiency of their production lines. It has been extremely useful in allowing manufacturers to quickly assess their productivity without having to do things the old manual way.