Operations Transformation for Survival

In these challenging times, industrial organizations have to deliver high quality products and services, with a high level of customer satisfaction, with fewer and fewer people. This can only be achieved with the application of technology.

Most organizations have, or are in the process of substantially reducing the cost of labor required to make products, either by outsourcing production to low wage countries, or by using a high level of automation.

With the breakdown of Global supply chains, the former is no longer a viable option, in most cases, resulting in the need to make products in-country, using a high level of automation to keep production costs down.

Most mid-sized US companies are doing a good job of automating production, in one case reducing the number of production workers from over 100, to just six people running highly automated machines at a plant in the USA. But, at the same time, over a decade, the front office staff swelled from under 20 people to over 32 people.

The next challenge for many companies like this, is how to operate the business with as few people as possible in the front-office and in many cases, just like for the US Government, to get rid of bureaucratic bloat that crept in over the years. The answer lies in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace many of the functions performed by these people.

In transitioning to the use of AI in industrial organizations, we have to ask what do these front-office people do? They do jobs like inside sales, materials management, production planning, quality control, warehouse management, expediting customer orders, customer support, shipping coordination, accounting, human resources, and process improvement. All sound very important and critical to the successful running of the business.

But when we examine what their jobs consist of, we find that they include attending time-wasting daily planning and coordination meetings, reading reports about what went wrong yesterday or last week, entering duplicate data in multiple systems, “walking the floor” or staring at endless screens to find the status of customer orders, or to try to spot what is going wrong now, as well as creating and analyzing endless numbers of Excel or other spreadsheets.

Many of these “management” functions can be automated through the use of Artificial Intelligence, and especially real-time intelligent-agent technology, enabling these tasks to be performed much more easily by fewer people.

Please click here to learn "Why use Intelligent Agent Technology? "