February 2024
Company Spotlight
Cumulus Digital Systems
For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed Cumulus’ Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (Matthew Kleiman). Cumulus is a Quality Management System that digitalizes manual work that is mission-critical, high volume, and difficult to automate to ensure that this work is done right the first time, every time. Its software improves the quality and productivity of safety-critical workflows and is used to configure and visualize work activities across a wide range of industries. For more information on Cumulus, please visit www.cumulusds.com.
Background: Before co-founding Cumulus in 2018, Matt Kleiman began his career in the aerospace industry helping companies commercialize technologies. After the Deepwater Horizon incident, he worked on a project that was tasked to adapt quality management policies and procedures from the aerospace industry to the oil and gas industry. This led to his co-founding Shell TechWorks, which was essentially a commercial start-up within Shell’s ecosystem to rapidly deliver technology solutions to Shell’s business. During his six years at Shell, he realized that no matter how many quality management solutions are implemented in the planning and procurement process, field operations were a “black box” when it came to quality management insights and data. As a result, Matt co-founded Cumulus with the mission to solve this problem in the industry. Today, Cumulus provides the energy and other industries with IoT-enabled real-time visibility and accountability for critical field work, including bolted connections, electrical connections, and pressure testing.
Value Proposition: Cumulus empowers project managers with a single pane view of who did the work, when they did it, and most importantly, if it was done correctly. By digitalizing the actual process/workflow of critical field operations, Cumulus provides its customers with the following features and benefits:
More than a Checklist: Cumulus’ cloud-based software platform leverages artificial intelligence and a dedicated support team to build custom digital workflows in as little as seconds for basic processes and in a matter of a few days for the most complex processes. Once built, these workflows guide workers with intuitive instructions and capture valuable quality data through the mobile application and/or connected IoT devices (e.g., Bluetooth-enabled tools).
Minimizes Rework & Accidents: 30% of all construction work is rework that is almost entirely a result of human error, adding hundreds of billions to global project costs. Further, rework is responsible for more than 1 million workplace injuries in construction each year. By ensuring that the job is done correctly this first time, every time, Cumulus’ customers can minimize these incidents.
Significant Cost Reduction: Cumulus has saved its customers up to 60% in costs associated with quality control and data review, largely by enabling quality assurance personnel to manage by exception rather than having to manually inspect every single site/project. In addition, Cumulus’ platform automates reporting workflows, allowing quality assurance personnel to focus their time on more important tasks than preparing paperwork.
Closing Thoughts: With the recent news about Boeing employees forgetting to install critical bolts to a panel of the Alaskan Airways airplane that was damaged shortly after takeoff, quality management technologies like Cumulus’ are essential in ensuring that the trillions of dollars that will be spent constructing infrastructure in the coming years are not wasted. We look forward to following the Cumulus, as it continues to expand its offering into additional use cases.