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A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

countthings.com

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Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#31

Post by joosters »

flukus wrote: post #29
steinuil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You missed an important part of the article:

...this app not only helps Eiko Pearl to cut 80% of the time needed for counting pearls, but it also helps them reduce 3 months of labor cost.

3 months, not 80 hours.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#32

Post by kasperni »

morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

First, this looks amazing. I have a couple of very specific questions.

Would it be able to count diamonds? I'm just wondering because the refraction of diamonds is very high.

Would it be able to count items located inside clear zip lock bags?

Also can it do any kind of categorization of the items? For example, 10 of type X, 20 of type Y?

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#33

Post by pjc50 »

sellyme wrote: post #19
notimetorelax wrote: post #7

To 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.

Of course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better deal. I can only assume that their support for custom requests is absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a tenth of the price and still be making a profit. But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose. The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that…

I absolutely expect this to be harder than it looks. If it was easy Google lens would do it.

I had a similar shock when trying to do OCR from photos of receipts.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#35

Post by joosters »

kasperni wrote: post #32
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

First, this looks amazing. I have a couple of very specific questions. Would it be able to count diamonds? I'm just wondering because the refraction of diamonds is very high. Would it be able to count items located inside clear zip lock bags? Also can it do any kind of categorization of the items? For example, 10 of type X, 20 of type Y?

There's a 'raw diamonds' counting template listed on https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates

The categorization is an interesting question - those templates all seem to be of similar items.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#36

Post by morsanu »

kasperni wrote: post #32
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

First, this looks amazing. I have a couple of very specific questions. Would it be able to count diamonds? I'm just wondering because the refraction of diamonds is very high. Would it be able to count items located inside clear zip lock bags? Also can it do any kind of categorization of the items? For example, 10 of type X, 20 of type Y?

Yes, we should be able to count them if they are visible in the picture. Please email our support with a couple of sample images. We are also doing classification for some of our templates/clients.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#37

Post by joosters »

morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

How accurate is the counting? For examples like the case study, I presume your customers will want very close to 100% accuracy, but many other use cases will only need rough numbers. How do you calibrate / verify your app?

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#38

Post by flukus »

joosters wrote: post #31
flukus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You missed an important part of the article: ...this app not only helps Eiko Pearl to cut 80% of the time needed for counting pearls, but it also helps them reduce 3 months of labor cost. 3 months, not 80 hours.

It's not really clear where that 3 months figure comes from. Do they have 6 people all saving 2 weeks? And if so do the share the device or is the cost scaling with employees? There's also another part:

> When taking inventory, they had 2 members of the staff counting pearls and it took 2 full days.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#39

Post by morsanu »

joosters wrote: post #37
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

How accurate is the counting? For examples like the case study, I presume your customers will want very close to 100% accuracy, but many other use cases will only need rough numbers. How do you calibrate / verify your app?

For most of our clients, we get to 100% accuracy. For some more difficult scenarios, a lower accuracy is ok for estimations (e.g. estimating the crop in agriculture).

It's also super easy to correct mistakes or to add items that are not visible in the image.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#40

Post by foreigner »

This is great! A really simple technical idea paired with the right business model = success.

I've often wondered if there are other instances of this pattern - a phone app which solves some niche problem and is successful commercially being sold for a high price. Can anybody give other examples?

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