We positively impact our customer’s Topline and Bottomline by improving Skill levels of their Blue-Collar workforce. Our solutions don’t just improve Cycle Times, MTTR, Fuel Efficiency and Service times but also vastly improve safety in a mine. With deployments at 14 sites across the Indian Mining sector and the
first of many in Indonesia, we are happy to play a role in enabling real-world upskilling, which can be a truly transformation force for society across the world with the potential to boost global GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030.”

Q. Tell us about the ideology behind Cusmat? Which industries are you focussed on?

Anirban Chakravorty – Cusmat’s Skilling Platform and technology were born out of the idea to help improve, aid and accelerate learning for Concepts that require more than Pen & Paper to be understood, generally which have an element of third dimension to them. Mining, Manufacturing, Logistics and Pharmaceuticals sectors have been early adopters of our platform.

Q. What are the pain points that Cusmat is addressing for customers? How does immersive learning help in this regard?

Anirban Chakravorty – We positively impact our customer’s Topline and Bottomline by improving Skill levels of their Blue-Collar workforce. Skills levels are critical to industrial units as they have a direct correlation with the Productivity, Efficiency and Safety standards of the operations. Current up-skilling efforts involve classroom training, which suffers from poor retention when it comes to implementing what has been learned. Also, certain critical aspects and
real-world situations relevant for the job are impossible to teach in the classroom and are best learnt experientially.

This is where Immersive learning enters into the picture, giving Operators & Technicians the specific operational inputs they need, besides safely exposing them to dangerous situations that they might encounter in the protected confines of an immersive environment. Having tackled these successfully in the virtual environment, the operators are far more confident & skilled in correctly operating specific machinery in the real world. One of our customers previously only had 5% operators passing the final licensing test but post implementation of our skilling platform, has 95% clear the screening and move into production
deployment.

The other advantage of Cusmat’s immersive learning solutions is the detailed analytics that are available for all those who undergo the training. These analytics dashboards enable a very precise assessment of each individual along every parameter critical for on the job performance.

Q. How big is the Skills Gap problem at a global level and what are the benefits to be derived from upskilling solutions?

Anirban Chakravorty – As per an Insight Report by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with PWC, investment in upskilling has the potential to boost global GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030. The country-wise impact of upskilling varies depending upon the size of the workforce and the extent of skills gap prevalent in the economy. While China’s GDP could be impacted between 3.6-7.5%, the US economy could see a boost between 3.3-3.7% whereas the Indian economy could see a pick-up between 6.1-6.8% (amounting to $570 billion) if the right investments in upskilling were to be made. Apart from the boost in GDP levels, upskilling could also see the net creation of ~5.3 million new jobs by 2030.

Upskilling can thus be a truly transformation force for society across the world and we are happy to play a role in enabling the same.

Q. How are your solutions relevant for the Mining sector?

Anirban Sen – The Mining industry has been the first mover in adopting this platform. Our focus has consistently been on understanding the Business challenges that could be impacted by improving Skill levels of the Operators, Technicians and other technical roles.

Even if he has undergone elaborate classroom training, letting a new operator man a 100-tonne Dumper in the mine is quite a risky proposition from both a safety perspective as well as its potential impact on smooth operations. The same applies for Winders, Excavators and most other heavy machinery which is typically deployed in a mine. Our Immersive Learning solutions don’t just improve Cycle Times, MTTR, Fuel Efficiency and Service times but also vastly improve safety in a mine. This underpins the rapid adoption that we have seen in the Mining sector in India.

Q. How many customers do you have in the Mining sector in India? And globally?

Anirban Sen – We have had deployments at 14 sites across the Indian Mining sector and have just begun our journey from India to the world with our first deployment in an Indonesian mine.

Q. What kind of benefits/ outcomes have customers in the Mining sector already seen with solutions from Cusmat?

Anirban Sen – The benefits that our Mining customers have experienced are varied. For instance, by inculcating simple better Driving techniques via our solution, one of our customers has experienced a 7% improvement in Cycle Time, while achieving 11% better Fuel Efficiency. Others have seen reduction of Downtime up to 53%, reduction in Accidents up to 70% and up to a 40% reduction of training time of the technician. Similar impact has been observed across our various customers in India and Globally.