Slashing Manufacturing Drudgery with AI

Aug. 15, 2024
Productivity's great, but your best improvement ideas will come from your front-line workers, so using AI to free up their time and mental energy can pay huge dividends.

You hire people for how they think and how they do their jobs, not how well they fill out TPS reports. Most of the talk about the power of AI in manufacturing has centered around productivity or quality. For Sean O'Meara, chief information officer of Girtz Industries, a major benefit is makings people's jobs a little less awful.

AI can automate tasks, freeing your best people to do their jobs better and exercize their creative muscles to find further operational improvements. O'Meara shared his thoughts recently at the IndustryWeek Operations Leadership Summit in Indianapolis.

During his presentation he discussed:

  • How Girtz connects ERP to HR to IT, allowing leaders to check information through simple queries instead of tracking down people in different departments.
  • How AI can capture ideas and data that can easily get lost, like amazing insights or project status updates shared during staff meetings.
  • How to eliminate garbage-in/garbage-out problems by making sure you're capturing data automatically instead of forcing employees to key everything in by hand.

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