"Our company is from here and it is generating employment in Galicia"

Interview with Xavier Barra, person in charge of the "Ingeniería y Control Merasys" business project, participant in the first Acceleration Phase of the Business Factory Auto initiative (BFA).

What specifically does your project consist of? 

Our project consists of the development of hardware and software for the mass collection of data. The project has two phases. In the first one, where we are now and which is very advanced, we are developing an artificial vision camera and a multiparametric sensor.
The second phase of the project has to do with the management of such data, the creation of algorithms and data mining in order to anticipate and predict deviations from key process parameters that affect to the efficiency and, therefore, to the costs.

What problem solves or what innovation brings the technology incorporated in the project to the production chains?

Merasys tries to solve, with its technology, the registers in process parameters, which in the 20th century were mainly manual. In the 21st century, with Industry 4.0, it is necessary to have data and it is also imperative to be able to anticipate or correct process parameters more quickly to reduce costs, improve efficiency and performance. With our products (hardware and software) we pretend to be able to define the combination of parameters that produce the defect or inefficiency and, once identified, to predict and correct the deviations.

What is the current employment of Merasys? Already generating employment in Galicia?

Our company is from here and it is generating employment in Galicia. At present, we have 2 technicians working full time at the BFA facilities in Porto do Molle.

What has the Business Factory Auto (BFA) initiative contributed to the development of Merasys?

The BFA program has given us a very comfortable coworking place, for most of us it is a new experience in a different environment. Without forgetting a tutoring and mentoring with professionals of the Sector, that provide a global vision which complement our points of view.
With the participation of our project in the BFA initiative we were able to access financing and, above all, it is giving us visibility within the automotive sector with more than 100 companies, thus expanding our networking.

What do you think your business project brings to the Galician Automotive Sector? How can it help to promote the competitiveness of the Sector?

We integrate technology to compete. We try to solve the problems that the customers present us in a simple, robust and with contained costs. The search for the solution, within very tight cost parameters, helps us to engineer innovative solutions. And it is with this novelty, with a robust solution, with proximity and with contained costs, as we intend to improve the competitiveness.