In 1999, the founder of Clevor, Ravi Maithel was working as a consultant for Hitachi Canadian Industries (Hitachi), in Saskatoon, Canada, where they manufactured large casings for gas turbines for their clients in North America. Maithel was engaged to assist Hitachi in their acquisition of an ERP system for this operation. His assignment included the development of a Request for Quotation (RFQ) from the mid size ERP software vendors after understanding the needs and opportunities of all the senior managers of the company. At this time, Hitachi had a very healthy backlog of orders and Maithel found out that one of the central requirements for this ERP system should be its ability to maximize the throughput from this capital intensive facility, given the various engineering and resource constraints. Realizing that their business objective could change in the future, he generalized it as the “optimization of the production schedule”. The CFO of Hitachi considered this to be the most important feature as far as the return on investment was concerned.
This RFQ was sent to approximately15 mid size ERP vendors who all responded with the assertion that their software had this capability. On closer examination it became clear that none of them had this capability. Furthermore, when plant visits were made, Maithel noticed that none of the companies using the ERP system were actually using their production scheduling module. Hitachi management understood this and decided to acquire a mid range ERP system for other features.
This led Maithel to realize that there was a need for a real schedule optimization system and that such a system was not available. Later on, he learnt about the “intelligence systems” technology’s possible ability to solve the schedule optimization problem at a conceptual level. This led to the formation of Clevor Technologies Inc. in 2000. Knowing the computational load, in the beginning, he expected that it will take a bank of 100 computers to solve this problem.
It turned out that the initial ideas did not work. Fortunately, we were able to come up with some new methods that have enabled us to solve this problem much more efficiently. This has also enabled us to use our system on a lap top computer. Not only that, we were able to take advantage of many other “available flexibilities which has resulted in much greater savings than we had anticipated.
Later, Maithel remembered his past experience in the construction of an Ammonia / Urea plant where, he worked as the project engineer for the compressor house (12 large compressors including piping using 23 MW of power). He had noticed that the contractor, Larsen & Toubro who were working on a fixed price contract had a lot of extra manpower during the construction phase. He realized that Clevor could help the contractors improve their productivity and margins. This insight led to Clevor being used by contractors with dramatic results. Use of Clevor by professional service firms was the next logical step.
