Many startups are acknowledged as technology leaders in their fields, making them a great source of innovative solutions to help BSH address and resolve business challenges. In order to better develop partnerships with these young tech players, BSH Startup Kitchen was born. Here we highlight two partnerships from their portfolio that could thrill and delight consumers.

What is the BSH Startup Kitchen and what do startups get out of it?

BSH Startup Kitchen is the Corporate Venturing Unit of BSH Home Appliances Group with a strong focus on the Venture Clienting approach, a unique way for startups to establish long-term partnerships with BSH. In this way of work, BSH acts as a venture client: This means that BSH becomes the startup’s client when it is still in the venture stage, with both the solution and the company not yet as mature and stable as incumbent partners. This way, young companies are able to get a supplier status, supplier number, purchase order, and revenue, besides having BSH as a new client in their portfolio. The cooperation areas cover a wide variety of products and technologies. From young players like Inspekto, a machine vision startup that improves inspection processes in factories, to other exciting tech solutions, like Fluent.ai's voice control software. 

The criteria for startups to enter a cooperation with BSH Startup Kitchen are:

• Offering a solution with the potential to solve a relevant BSH innovation challenge in its product, production, or process area
• Aiming for a scalable business model that will allow the startup to become a future partner/supplier of BSH; 
• Being an independent legal entity based on its wholly-owned intellectual property, majority-owned by founders and venture capitalists.

There have been some highlights among the BSH Startup Kitchen’s fascinating portfolio of partner startups throughout the years. We selected two of our favorites when it comes to tech: 

Fluent.ai – Voice Controlled Factory

Managers at BSH’s Traunreut factory (Germany) noticed that manual assembly line control was slowing down production processes. Operators relied on button controls and had to let go of their tools in order to access the control board. 

In 2016, a small internal team experimented with open source solutions using voice control to improve time efficiency. The results were rather disappointing: Background noise in the factory and the presence of multiple user accents and languages made voice recognition a challenge. That is where Fluent.ai’s solution stepped in: 

The 2015-founded Canadian startup developed a highly accurate and intuitive speech understanding solution capable of running fully offline. The software maps the spoken input of a user to their intended action without speech-to-text transcription. This unique approach makes their solution highly effective for different languages and accents, which allows scalability towards various user groups across the globe.

Results

During the testing phase, the solution was implemented on one of Traunreut’s factory assembly lines. The result exceeded expectations: Fluent.ai’s voice control system was able to shave off over 75% of the time spent for certain tasks in production. With such impressive results, Fluent.ai has since been rolled out to an additional four workstations, and Traunreut’s managers are preparing for even wider implementation.

 “A simple way to think about this is like having a third arm or an extra hands-free tool at your disposal. With Fluent.ai’s embedded voice control solution, workers can operate heavy machinery simply by speaking the command.” Vikrant Tomar, Fluent.ai’s founder, and CTO

 

Synthesia.io – more AI training, less video production costs 

With over 60,000 employees around the globe in various positions, BSH as an organization possesses a great deal of talent and knowledge in different fields. From process optimization in manufacturing plants to marketing and communication in the customer-facing fields, there is a lot of expertise to exchange. For that, e-learning is a powerful tool, since it makes education available regardless of time and location.

While relying on slides for workshops and training was an option, our personnel qualification team believes that interactivity is key. When looking for a solution, our colleagues from BSH Startup Kitchen identified Synthesia, the leading startup in the “synthetic media” field: This software company uses AI to develop video content without the need for actors or expensive equipment.

Results

With the help of Synthesia’s software, our training and qualification team developed a virtual avatar to guide learners through a training session watched 30.000 times per year by BSH employees. According to the results observed so far, Synthesia is expected to increase engagement rates of e-learning by around 30%, while simultaneously reducing the external costs of speakers and video production by over 70%. With more than 20 other applicable use cases in marketing, onboarding, and customer training, BSH plans to further implement the solution in other departments.

“A virtual training like this is a great representation in terms of professionalism. We are on the right track. I’m happy to be able to provide something so great for our end users worldwide” Dennis Hein, Head of Global Planning and Logistics, Supply Chain Management - Standards, Processes