These days the hot topic is AI. Just look at Industry Today’s current home page for September; I count five articles where the headline contains AI, and is likely at least mentioned in most of the other articles. One of them is How AI is Transforming Skills in Manufacturing, in which author Gavin Verreyne, Senior VP Client Success and Digital Transformation at SYSPRO, maintains that rather than replacing workers, AI actually improves worker engagement and loyalty.
“Perhaps the most near-term benefit of AI is that it will be able to perform a high volume of repetitive tasks, empowering people to focus their attention on higher value tasks,” Verreyene says. “Just as robotics and automation have transformed much of the factory floor, AI will uncover trends that can be used to identify and automate informational tasks such as transferring data across systems, processing orders and completing a wide array of queries and calculations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
What that AI iceberg encompasses includes ramifications for:
- Maintenance. AI can predict when machines are likely to fail and implement repairs, increasing productivity and preventing shutdown of critical operations.
- Supply chain. AI demand forecasting can identify potential bottlenecks and find opportunities for optimization to make more informed decisions and streamline supply chain operations.
- Quality control. Machine vision can identify defects that human eyes might not ever catch. Determining the causes of these defects can facilitate changes to significantly improve customer satisfaction, reduce returns, and increase profitability.
- Engineering design. By automating routine, mundane design tasks allows engineers to focus much more time on the more complex issues that truly require their skills.
Workers in this brave new world of AI need to develop new skills that include:
- Learning new tools
- Gaining insight from AI-generated data
- Applying established manufacturing principles and methodologies to AI-generated data
- Collaborating with colleagues to solve problems
“AI will transform the way we work in manufacturing, and nearly every job will be affected. That said, AI is a tool, and, like any tool, its impact depends on how it is used,” Verreyne says. “So long as the workforce is trained and upskilled to work with AI in an effective way, AI can improve productivity, increase efficiency and also create a more engaged workforce — all of which are critical to success in an environment where skilled employees are difficult to recruit and retain.”
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Susan Poeton 