06 Dec 2021 Aspire to Tech – Motion Metrics

Member Spotlight

Tell me about your company. When were you founded? What do you do? Where are you located?

Motion Metrics International was founded and incorporated in 2004, out of UBC’s electrical and computer engineering department by a PhD graduate from that department. It is still based in Vancouver BC.  We have maintained our headquarter head office on UBC campus from day one.

We use machine learning and primarily machine vision and computer vision to solve tough challenges in the mining industry to improve productivity, improve safety, and also make the mining more environmentally friendly.

What is the big problem your company is tackling?

Over the years, we’ve looked at various problems and challenges in the mining industry, and have come up with innovative solutions to make the mining industry safe and more efficient. For example, our shovel metrics platform is a feature that is used for mining shovels in an open pit mining environment. We use computer vision, cameras, and intelligence to detect missing teeth in the pocket of the shovels and inform the operator if a tooth goes missing.  If a tooth breaks off from the shovel – which can happen when digging in tough material – it can disrupt the next stage of the process by getting jammed in a large crusher.  That can halt the whole process and cause long periods of down time, which is quite costly.  Preventing the tooth from getting jammed in the crusher in the first place solves a major safety issue.  That’s just one example of one of our products.  We use the same computer vision to do a lot more as well. We have been focusing on overall optimization and productivity improvement in all areas of mining.

What are you most proud of in terms of company milestones?

Obviously, there’s been a lot of achievement in terms of hitting internal goals and milestones in revenue and growth of the company. I think one of the important milestones for us was investing in AI in the early years of AI and computer vision.  That has proven to be a very beneficial move for us, and has paid off in terms of opening new doors for us and also improving the performance of our existing systems.

How would you describe your company culture?

I’ve heard this from many outsiders who have looked at our company and have seen us – our culture is based on innovation, collaboration between teams, and transparency.

Our company values are trust, collaboration, innovation, and determination. The company has been built on trust internally between teams, and the trust from our customers that we would deliver the best and the greatest of the technology for them to solve their issues, or the challenges they face.

What are three words that you would use to describe your company

I would put innovation at the top of that list. Then collaboration.  Collaboration internally within our teams, but also collaboration with our customers, clients and users of our products.  Then, trust. Having transparency, which comes right from the top from our leaders and from our CEO, has been a great asset to keep everybody engaged and focused on the same goals within the company.

What is it like to work at your company? Why is it a great place to work?

There are many exciting challenges, working with Motion Metrics. We are continuously using innovation to look at the new problems or challenges that are brought in from our customers. It is very engaging as an engineer. I always find it quite motivating to be in that environment.  It’s a great environment.  The people are very friendly, and we have continuous discussions. Despite having less face-to-face contact due to the pandemic, we maintain good moral within the group.  We’ve grown quite a bit, but that core identity is there, and we collaborate well with each other, which makes the workplace fun. We feel good about the contributions we make, and you can see the progress of the company. It’s knowing that our company contributes to safety and environmental sustainability aspects of the mining is quite attractive for a lot of young talents that are joining us.

In their own words – what do your employees say?

Are you hiring?

We are, we have been hiring quite a bit over the last year. Please go to our website. There are quite a few openings in technical and business roles and all different disciplines. We do need people and we’re continuing to expand.