The digital and coding printer manufacturer hosted a tour of its Cambridge facility on Friday (9 September) to show off its production and development capabilities, including a demonstration of its ink development robot, ‘The Big Kahuna’.
Domino, which develops hundreds of bespoke inks for its clients monthly, has had to meet strong demand over the past few years: supply chain challenges have meant that many customers have had to change substrates and limited Domino’s own raw materials; regulatory changes, too, have required new formulations for the market.
These challenges - and thus demand - will not stop soon, said Andy Clifton, Domino’s chief technical officer, who explained that rather than just keep up with demand, the company had decided to enable its team to think more strategically.
“Part of our job was to free up these people that we’re talking about, to actually solve more of those future challenges, rather than be - basically - turning the wheels,” he said.
Domino’s ink development team had begun its digitalisation process five years prior - but in 2020, the firm decided to step it up a notch by bringing in a machine to automate the development of ink samples, allowing the speedy gathering of data.
In April 2020, therefore, The Big Kahuna was installed - a robot that now makes half to two-thirds of the firm’s ink samples - and helped a skeleton crew at the facility double the firm’s formulation output during Covid.
Introducing automation is not always easy, however, said Julian Philpott, the firm’s automation manager - but if handled sensitively, can make everyone feel like they’re part of the process.
“Automation can be pretty scary for a lot of people. They think: ‘I’m going to lose my job’. That is not the case - it’s about wrapping people up with all the tools and the infrastructure to enable them to do the best job they can.”
One of the most important pieces of infrastructure is the interface, and how users interact with the new equipment. For Domino’s robot, making a visual difference in results was paramount.
Philpott said: “We’ve seen other people in different sectors that have this giant robot, and spent millions on robotic labs - and then they’re still using Excel sheets to look at their data.
“People disengage because they can’t visualise the data with the tools they have.”
Choosing the right people for the project was just as important, he added. To ensure the robot hit the ground running, Domino carefully picked the project staff that were most excited to work with the new technology.
There were, naturally, sceptics, Philpott said: “[But] we asked people who were least likely to work with [the robot], to tell us why right from the beginning, so that everyone was involved.”
The Big Kahuna, however, has been only one of the technological improvements behind its significant productivity gains: statistical analysis and, more recently, machine learning have helped the team slash the number of experiments needed for a successful outcome.
Philpott said: “We wanted to go from a data-frugal to a data-rich decision-making environment. So instead of guesstimating and thinking and feeling about [for answers], the scientists like to have all the data to back up the formulation.”
Domino’s data-heavy approach involved developing its own data architecture, to create something that would fit exactly the scientists’ requirements - there was no off-the-shelf solution that managed that.
“We wanted to put the people at the centre of what we’re doing,” said Philpott.
And while machine learning has had no different a journey to the robot - including healthy scepticism - it too has become a continually improving part of the team’s process.
Phipott said: “It’s taken us a few years, but I think these things always take a few years.
“But hopefully, we’ve embedded what we’ve done.”
