How did the Ellistat adventure begin, and what vision guides you today?
When we started out, nearly eight years ago, there were just two of us, whereas today we're just three.
twenty-five of us. Over the last few years, we've given our vision more structure,
because our goal is to continue to grow, and to do that we need a base and to know where we're going.
where we're going. Our vision is to make every plant capable of autonomous production.
and flawless. Our mission is to develop software that will enable us to
to automate every stage of production. At Ellistat, we're not in the business of
hardware, we're focusing on the software that automates the process.
production.
Your company is growing fast. How do you explain this trajectory without recourse to venture capital?
Last year, we recorded 40 % of growth on our products, which is a lot.
This is also one of Ellistat's particularities, since we have achieved this growth without suffering from the
start-up effects: i.e. some start-ups will buy their growth from
through investment funds. That's not what we do: we grow our business.
is organic and financially very stable. And we're proving it by
we benefit from a very good quotation of the Banque de France [G1, one of the
best marks for a company in its category with sales between
1.5 and 7.5 million euros].
How do you manage the specificity of your APC software?
Today, our APC [Automated Process Control] is 1,230,000 lines of code, so
it's starting to become a very complex product, but that's what's so interesting about it.
it's in Ellistat's structure: just because we have a complex product doesn't mean we're not
not able to start from scratch and rewrite. In other words, what we
interested, it's not enough to have written these lines of code and kept them ad vitam
aeternam, we know that the software industry is something that's constantly evolving, with new
new standards, with new things coming up, and so we're constantly rewriting our
modules and we are able to take a module that can be huge and put it in the
to rewrite a completely new one, so as to always remain at the cutting edge.
technology. That's something that's really important.
Faced with the emergence of competitors, how do you position yourself today?
Indeed, we're starting to meet competitors. While we were responding to a
tender for a plant in India, we were able to observe the presence of competitors.
So we turned our attention to them. Right now, we estimate that we have five years
in advance.
What do you think are the prerequisites for successfully automating production processes?
The first thing to do with Automated Process Control is to be able to
set up a closed loop on the machines. The first thing is to be able to correct complex parts, and this is something that not all our competitors can do. We have competitors who can do it, but only on simple parts. The second thing is to be able to configure complex parts without error. Then, you have to be able to connect to the whole machine park, i.e. to create the closed loop, you have to send the data to the machine, knowing that you have many different NCs on the market, such as Siemens, Mazak, Fanuc, Heidenhain, among others. So you need to know how to connect in order to send the data to the machine. If you do that, you'll be over-correcting, so you need to rely on machine learning, which enables you to improve corrections and stabilize production in real time.
How does your solution transform the organization of production workshops?
At Ellistat, we have acquired a certain expertise, that of being able to apply our soft
in the industry and be able to replace a setter with an operator, although we
is not yet able to replace the operator, i.e. the entire handling part. But if
you think differently, i.e. if you say «I don't need any more
skills to set up my machine», you can think about your workshop differently, and
you can make gains you never imagined. But if you think
reorganize my workshop», you have even greater gains. And last but not least
scale. And that, I'd like to say, is the key. In other words, if you really want to make
Automated Process Control and benefit from all the advantages, you need to be able to
you say, «I want 100 % references to work in closed loop. And then you
have a totally different workshop.
