This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Gerben de Haan, the Co-Founder and CEO of
AlisQI, a solution that helps you automate and integrate everything within a week to save time and reduce waste.
Please describe the story behind the AlisQI: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
AlisQI started as a dedicated Quality Control solution, optimizing QC processes for manufacturers. While speaking with quality managers and engineers across the industry every single day, we learned more about their pains and it became clear to us that they were struggling with their Quality Assurance and QESH processes as well. Quite a number of our customers stretched the use of our QC-intended software to the QA/QESH domain. That sparked the idea that manufacturers need a fully integrated quality platform, rather than isolated solutions for Quality Control, Document Management, and QESH Management.
We gradually transformed the system to the integrated solution it is today. Our customers’ input in this proved invaluable. The product and its usability are the results of many years of iterating and improving.
This certainly resulted in a product the industry appreciates. Today around 100 factories across the globe trust our product for their continuous improvement. We are proud to serve leading players across almost all manufacturing verticals, except for pharmaceuticals.
What is the mission of AlisQI?
Our mission is to help manufacturers to make their quality operations smart and omnipresent. We see that many companies struggle with a multitude of systems, manual processes, and laborious data analyses and reporting. AlisQI makes the lives of quality teams much easier. It reduces manual work and replaces it with automated workflows, users can enjoy automated non-conformity detection and seamless system integration. This saves them a lot of time, that can be spent in solving root causes that will ultimately improve the quality and yield of the factory.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
Our main customers are mid-market manufacturers in chemicals, technical textiles, plastics, or packaging. They are challenged with an ever-increasing workload for their quality teams. They are collecting more and more data, and need to create more and more reports for their customers and partners.
Without smart automation, they will need to keep adding people to their teams. Smart automation enables them to cope with this increasing demand for quality inspections, analysis, reports, and procedures. This increases their resilience and improves their position in their own markets.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days?
The big hype in our industry these days is Industry 4.0, the digital revolution on the shop floor. However, we value this as a marketing hype primarily. Many manufacturers, including the big ones, are still dealing with yesterday’s issues, and are not ready to implement Artificial Intelligence or Augmented Reality. Instead of blowing them away with all kinds of hyped technologies that are still in their infancy, we take them by the hand and help them to get their operation to the 2021 standards. Once that is done, we will jointly walk the path of quality intelligence, adding smart capabilities to our platform.
The trend that intrigues me most these days may sound low tech, but is the trend of making enterprise software actually usable. Ever since we started 15 years ago, we have run a cloud-only model, with a web interface. As a consumer, we are used to superior user experiences, but in the enterprise software domain, UX is often neglected. Presumably, this is because software vendors make significant money with consulting and training.
We take a different approach. Applying bleeding-edge front-end technology to our enterprise software results in a super performant system that is highly appreciated by our customers. Apart from some fundamental functional differences, the UI/UX makes us stand out in our market. This is underpinned by the Capterra award for ease of use we won last year.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
We see a large part of our industry focusing on pharmaceuticals, developing great but very heavy tools optimized for regulated industries. Manufacturers in non-regulated industries suffer from this focus. We see a bit of vendor-selection fatigue, as these industries are ill-served with all those pharma-focused solutions. It would be better for the industry if more vendors would develop tools for less regulated industries.
What are the plans for AlisQI for the near future?
For AlisQI, we see a very bright future. We are growing at a rate of 50% per year, with lots of international traction. Our product team is currently working on a number of big projects. Integrating our DMS with the desktop Word client and a full overhaul of our already leading UI/UX are just two of them. We have so many ideas on how to improve and extend our product. It will be exciting times in the AlisQI world!
