Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
21–30 of 236 posts
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#22To counter other’s points on pricing - in the end it’s a question of utility vs price. 1k$ per year to cut time to count by 80% may be a great deal to many.
the article said it saved about three months of labour. if best alternative is someone counting in old labour intensive way with annual salary of around $50k then that's an O($10k) profit.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#23terrible example. You can just make a square from pearls and multiply. If you need to do a lot of it make a box with numbers on the side, tilt it then count and add the remaining row. The weight is probably not irregular enough to justify the tool. There are better examples on the website. Pricing is just silly. I'm sure it is worth that much to some 0.001% of the potential market.
Natural pearl sizing varies widely and they aren't perfect spheres either.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#24They are using an app https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
> This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're saving a lot of time like in the OP. > and limited with the templates for things it can count It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you can probably co…
1k a month wouldn't seem ridiculous unless individual companies currently have several devices
All these comments make me wonder if these people have ever worked with B2B pricing
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#25Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
probably more difficult because of the irregular sizes of the pearls.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#26Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
Pearls are going to be far less uniform than coins, a software solution is likely going to have better accuracy.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
People outside IT field generally don't even know how counting thing from picture is very trivial computer vision task. This is common everywhere in the world.
Are there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making an app from scratch?
The old method used to be template matching, and it probably still works well enough for problems like this. There are almost certainly now better approaches possible using Machine Learning.
In my experience, the main challenges with problems like this are dealing with varying lighting, scales, orientation and perspective. These can quickly become of diminishing returns – especially if the solution is provided as an app that provides near-immediate feedback.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#28Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
This scales better. Also, going by the pictures in the article, the pearls are of varying sizes, so making a machine to count them would be a tad more tricky.
When you're counting things of uniform size and density (like screws or coins, one type at a time), the usual trick is to weigh them all, then weigh a single one, then divide the two numbers.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#29They are using an app https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
> This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're saving a lot of time like in the OP. > and limited with the templates for things it can count It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you can probably co…
> Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year. After installing this app, the time needed for counting pearls has been reduced by 80%. It takes only 20 hours now.
Depending on what the salary is it barely breaks even, it's saving 2 working weeks a year. Depending how spread out the process is it might not even be time that can be put into something else, if it only save 5 minutes a day for instance, that's 5 minutes that's probably going towards lunch.
It's fairly disappointing for an off the shelf product that does exactly what you want, if you had to pay for any customization or RnD it's probably not worth it.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#30They are using an app https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
Some of those counting templates are very niche, which makes it intriguing to think of who is using them.
For instance, there is a 'Movie Tickets' counter, but it's not counting paper tickets. Instead, the example photo looks like a screenshot of a 'pick your seats' page from a theatre's booking process. So who is doing the counting here? It can't be the theatre, as they would already know the numbers. So is the customer using this with an automated process to find out how many tickets another company is selling?