by Gary Mintchell | Dec 3, 2024 | Operations Management, Software, Workforce
Anthony Murphy, Vice President and Head of Product Management at Plex, a Rockwell Automation Company, met with me for a bit at the recent Automation Fair. I had toured the show floor captivated by the demo of the connected factory worker. I’ve followed the workflow technology for many years. Companies keep improving both the technology and the utility.
Murphy explained that Plex has a design philosophy of building a platform then constructing apps on top.
We’ve written about the “coming” worker shortage for more than 20 years. The fat is evidently finally in the fire. I know that my neighbor in suburban Chicago, by means of example, cannot find workers for his sheet metal fabricating company. Often when someone is hired they show up for a day without returning. This story repeats often.
The connected worker solution provides digital tools to retain, attract, and reskill workers. It empowers them with real-time guidance, visual aids, and multimedia content, enhancing comprehension and reducing errors on the job. By streamlining the number of applications manufacturers need, the solution also reduces total cost of ownership, time to value, and cybersecurity risk.
The connected worker offerings provide the following benefits:
- Recruiting and retaining a connected workforce: The new capabilities provide digital tools and real-time information to enhance worker productivity and engagement.
- Addressing the talent gap: Through these offerings, Plex helps manufacturers empower their workers with advanced training and tools to stay competitive in the evolving workforce landscape.
- Knowledge retention and transfer: As a large amount of the current workforce in manufacturing retires, safeguarding industry expertise is critical to ensure smooth knowledge transition to the next generation. The capabilities create and capture the corpus of manufacturing knowledge in an organic way.
- Guided and Interactive Work Instructions, providing step-by-step task guidance for people, machines, and devices.
- Interactive Work Instructions—developed in partnership with Canvas GFX and currently available—enables users to author and work with model-based 3D and 2D multimedia formats within a single document to drive better understanding of the work at hand.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 30, 2024 | Workforce
The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society features research into such things as how humans focus on displays and controls, how humans work to lift, reach, and twist in various occupations. The Society has been mostly academic, but Susan Kotowski, outgoing President, has led an initiative to reach out to practitioners fostering joint collaboration into research.
The sessions I attended explained research using video-based experiments evaluating tools such as exoskeletons that might alleviate any of a variety of work-related injuries.
I thought maybe I would meet engineering grad students, but Kotowski told me members of the Society hold a variety of titles and jobs, usability, goal, jobs, tasks, processes, fit to person using them, designing to people, span every industry, cognitive and physical.
The conference was dubbed ASPIRE, which is both an appropriate word and a letterism standing for Advancing Systems and Practices through Innovation, Research, Education.
I mostly attended sessions in the Occupational Ergonomics track. Some of the research focused on hands—the best way to grip, move, assemble tools and parts. Other research focused on exoskeletons. The goal is to reduce muscular/skeleton injuries and repetitive lifting injuries.
Much of the research turns out to not be practical. Seeking more collaboration with industry will help focus research into more useful channels.
Talking with researchers in the hall, I was told that exoskeletons have so far been oversold. They are OK for straight lifting, but if the subject is also given a cognitive task problems ensue. Further, any movements other than straight, say requiring twisting or turning, are not viable.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 9, 2024 | Automation, Robots, Workforce
Another article just appeared on my news feed—Will Robots Take My Job?
OK, that’s just click bait. People searching for something to touch a fear emotion have written these articles for probably 40 years. I first worked with robotics in the 1980s. Writers tripped over themselves to write doom articles either about Japan having so many more robots than America or about how robots will take all the jobs.
Consider another look at the situation.
1. Robots took the place of humans in many applications that were backbreaking, monotonous, dangerous (welding, painting, press loading).
2. Jobs requiring continuous precision at process speeds and consistency impossible for humans to match.
3. Other quality and inspection tasks difficult for humans to perform minute-by-minute without blinking or mind-drifting.
4. Demographics—women are having fewer babies world wide with a recent survey in the US revealing many women of child-bearing years don’t even want a child. Fewer people to work, more need for automation.
5. Collaborative robotic technologies have enabled robots to work with humans performing complex tasks.
By the way, it’s the same with artificial intelligence (AI). First comes a glimmer of the new technology. Then doom-and-gloom pundits start writing about all the negative effects on people. Then we learn to work with the technologies in order to do better jobs more effectively.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 7, 2024 | Asset Performance Management, Operations Management, Workforce
Tools for connecting workers with each other and with processes empower faster and better decision making crucial with reduced workforces. This partnership between Fluke Reliability and Augmentir pushes the meme forward.
- Augmentir’s connected worker solution helps to digitize frontline operations and increase worker productivity.
- This aligns with Fluke Reliability’s commitment to provide workers with enhanced decision-making capabilities across their enterprise asset management operations.
- Both vendors provide AI-powered technology that empowers workers on the plant floor with solutions to simplify their jobs and enhance overall efficiency.
Fluke Reliability has entered into a formal partnership agreement with Augmentir to integrate their connected worker platform with Fluke Reliability’s AI-powered enterprise asset management solution to increase productivity, enhance employee experiences and improve Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) for industrial customers.
Augmentir is a leading connected worker solution, providing a suite of AI-powered connected worker tools that help industrial companies deliver effective skills management, training and collaborative digital workflows, by digitizing and optimizing frontline work processes.
Fluke Reliability enables customers to adopt a connected approach to their reliability strategies, bringing together hardware, AI-powered software, services and their eMaint platform within one workflow. The solution helps customers shift from reactive to predictive maintenance strategies, assessing the health of their assets and utilizing their AI diagnostic engine, which means customers can predict faults up to six months in advance.
Augmentir has been added to Fluke Reliability’s Industry and Technology Partner Program, which is designed to enable customers to better integrate and automate connected reliability workflows for improved operations. This move underpins the commitment from both companies to help customers shift to more digital manufacturing operations; empowering them with decision-making capabilities that accelerate efficiency across global operations.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 29, 2024 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software, Workforce
Writer and computer science professor Cal Newport writes in his new book Slow Productivity about a condition we probably all have found ourselves mired in—pseudoproductivity. When I was younger we called it “busy work.” That is work designed to make us appear busy even while accomplishing almost nothing.
I began doing promotional work for a company called Quickbase this year. This company was completely new to me. They develop software for manufacturing and construction industries—ERP, Project Management, MES, and the like. Their competitive differential is no code. When you purchase their solutions you don’t need a few consultants and huge computer system.
They have defined an enemy to productivity they call “gray work.” Their solution is designed to render gray work moot.
Recently, Quickbase surveyed 2,000 workers in the United States and United Kingdom on the state of work and productivity. 54% of respondents reported that it’s harder than ever to be productive day-to-day.
58% of respondents said they spend less than 20 hours per week on meaningful work—the truly important stuff that that drives actual results. And 45% of respondents say they are spending 11+ hours per week doing nothing but chasing information from different people across multiple systems.
And despite our best technological innovations and intentions, more tools do not necessarily make things better—an immense nine out of 10 respondents report feeling overwhelmed to some degree by the sheer amount of software solutions they use daily—the very solutions that are supposed to increase productivity.
Now overlay this with the fact that 66% of respondents report that their organizations are actively increasing investments in software designed to theoretically enhance productivity, work management, and collaboration, and it adds up to a productivity gap that is growing every day. What can we do about it? You’re about to find out.
You can download the report at this link. It is worthwhile reading. And thinking about. And figuring out how to implement solutions that eliminate (or minimize) gray work or pseudoproductivity.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 25, 2024 | Generative AI, Operations Management, Workforce
Marketing people are pressing the accelerator all the way to make sure we all know they are using artificial intelligence (AI). I think this is a mistake because most of us know that we have been using AI within software and control products for decades. So, when I receive a press release that looks relevant to The Manufacturing Connection (which is becoming ever more rare), I probe.
Seeq is a pretty cool company in a software niche that is often difficult to explain. They recently sent a press release regarding the use of AI in workforce training. Possessing an inquiring mind, I had to ask for more. The following Q&A with Dustin Johnson, CTO at Seeq, satisfies most of my curiosity. There is some marketing stuff in the answers that I didn’t cut. You all know what that is.
Oh, and it’s not just the usual AI but the current hot topic of Generative AI that is the subject.
What areas or skills are being taught?
In our experience, the best way to encourage adoption of any new technology is to use it to solve a pressing problem quickly. This helps users build the initial trust and interest needed to pursue future work. Thus, integrating AI into our Foundations Analytics Skills and Bootcamp courses, or whatever courses a company is using to introduce a new technology, is crucial.
Our hands-on, industrial analytics AI training, which kicked off with Seeq users at our industry conference Conneqt 2024 in May, details how users can leverage GenAI to generate a workflow for solving an industry-specific problem. From generating an overall plan for an analysis to digging into specific analytics approach questions, such as how to cleanse a specific data set, to completing and modifying bulk calculations, then following the workplan through to visualization and reporting, the course empowers users to unlock new value throughout each step of the workflow. At each step, we emphasize the power of collaboration between people and AI: how to get and clarify answers, validate and adjust calculations the AI has performed, and troubleshoot if issues arise.
Above all, the Seeq AI training focuses on hands-on problem solving with real, relevant data, and does not shy away from the questions and concerns we know our users have. The bottom line is that users are still wary of using AI, which has, after all, only become “net productive” for most users in the past few months. So, it’s crucial that they experience value-add in the context of their own work as quickly as possible, while being realistic about the state of technology.
How successful has this initiative been?
After leveraging the Seeq AI Assistant, customers have reported that they can now complete tasks eight times faster and without interrupting other teams for help. Additionally, the ability to perform advanced calculations and obtain knowledge documented by previous team members has helped users cut the time required to become advanced analytics experts in half.
What are they learning?
Our approach includes integrating AI into our Foundations Analytics Skills™ courses and offering hands-on, industrial analytics AI training. These initiatives are designed to foster adoption from the start and empower users to apply AI for real-world problem solving.
The most needed skills include data analysis, problem-solving with AI, and applying AI for specific manufacturing challenges. Seeq is addressing this through in-product learning, in-house training programs, like our Foundations Analytics Skills™, and hands-on workshops at industry conferences.
Are they showing signs of retention?
More than 100 customer and partner organizations and thousands of users (and growing) are already leveraging the Seeq AI Assistant to accelerate insights and improve decision making in pursuit of operational excellence and sustainability.
Are these used in conjunction with other tools?
Seeq is at the forefront of integrating AI within the manufacturing sector, primarily through our AI Assistant and in-product learning tools. We’re focused on making advanced analytics accessible to industrial organizations, thereby accelerating their digital transformation journeys.
Seeq provides on-demand access to critical time series data, data contextualization capabilities, and established intellectual property. Utilizing the extensive body of advanced analytics, data science, machine learning and coding knowledge held in Seeq technical documentation and its knowledge base, Seeq is operationalizing the power of GenAI for its customers. Combining these competencies with prompt engineering curated by the world-class analytics and learning engineers at Seeq, the Seeq AI assistant generates accurate and actionable suggestions for analytical approaches and techniques, code generation and more. Seeq also supports multiple providers and LLMs for organizational flexibility.
