BY Fast Company 3 MINUTE READ

PiLog Group, honoured as one of Fast Company SA’s Most Innovative Companies 2020, brings ‘data doctors’ to your fingertips by turning unstructured Big Data into quality master data through a specialised hub of artificial intelligence and innovative machine-learning. 

PiLog provides a mobile SOS app that allows users to activate personal emergencies nationally through an intelligent Data Quality Hub. The hub integrates specialised emergency services that allows users to choose between armed responses, medical, ambulance and roadside assistance. Essentially, the aim is to help save lives by improving the efficiency of service providers. 

PiLog started this initiative with the idea of making South Africa a safer place by integrating existing armed response providers into a network, and enabling them with technology. 

Now more than ever, exceptional and effective health and safety responses and services are needed in South Africa. With the coronavirus pandemic still in its growth phase, PiLog’s innovation can be utilised as a key driver in helping to flatten the curve. We caught up with the company, to see how  they’re operating under the current conditions. 

1. How is your company faring under the current circumstances?
PiLog Group, like almost every other business in the lock down world, experienced disruption as all our clients are effected. Contracts are changed, rescheduled or cancelled. In cases where clients are willing to proceed with projects, PiLog are supporting them remotely. Most of Pilog’ s offered solutions, can be implemented virtually which is a huge advantage for many businesses during these challenging times.

2. How has remote working encouraged innovation in your company?
PiLog Group, being an innovative company in the digital space, just extended and readjusted our current “out of office/working from home” practises. It is more an aspect of time management and discipline than innovation. PiLog as an International company is used to remote working across time zones.

3. Have these unprecedented times revealed any particular strengths and/or challenges in your business offering? Has it prompted you to make a change in the future?
Yes. We had to adjust to immediate actions to change traditional face to face “scrum master” design sessions to remote digital communication with orchestrated client interaction and delivery. We find a 30% to 40%  delivery slip, largely due to adjusted client interaction and payment extensions. We currently work on the improvement of resource and time management measures. This is extended to improve client interaction.  Most of slippages on projects are mainly due to challenges on the client side not fully ready for remote work.

4. The future is so uncertain right now but is there anything exciting in the pipeline for your company?
Absolutely. Pilog Group solutions are focused on data quality in digital transformation. The current wake up call for industry and business to shift to improved digital and automated processes, backed by machine learning and artificial intelligence, escalated to a necessity. We extend the Pilog Data Quality Hub as an enabler for the migration of mass data collection towards governed and trusted quality data for automated machine processes and business decisions. It is at the core of our R&D initiatives with leading international universities through the Pilog Academy. 

5. Do you have a message of encouragement for other start-ups wanting to be successful in your field?
Concentrate on innovative means to deliver focused solutions to precise customer requirements. Never under estimate attention to detail. Focus on your core business and do not try to be everything for everybody.

6. A buzz term right now is “essential service”. What do you think makes your offering essential for the success of other people/businesses/society at large?
“Essential service” is more than just a buzz term. The pre-covid-19 world tolerated too many strap hanging inefficient activities in core business delivery. These can only be discovered and improved through proper data generation, collection and analytics of the holistic system within the ecosystem. The Pilog Data Quality Hub backed by Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence is integral data governance and a solution to ensure that big data generation be turned into actionable data for trusted process and business decisions.    

7. What are your ultimate hopes and goals for your business, post-Covid-19 and beyond?
To directly contribute with the Pilog Data Quality Hub solutions towards the evolving digital world of the future in the essential field of data management. Also to ensure connectivity and transparency in integrated human augmented algorithms shaping the new world of the future. This need to be balanced with proven and trusted applied value systems, allowing humanity to evolve into the new emerging world of truthful transparency.