Using Intelligent Agent Technology to Transform Industrial Operations

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 AI technology in all its different forms.

A short-time ago, the least costly approach was to outsource the manufacturer of finished products to China or some other low wage rate country and then to simply to distribute these within the USA.

With the breakdown of Global supply chains and the widespread imposition of tariffs, this is no longer a viable option. Instead we are seeing componsents of the finished products being outsourced to a variety of low wage countries, with just final assembly, packaging and labeling being done by high labor cost people in the USA. Please see the white paper "Using Practical AI to Mitigate Labor Shortages in Manufacturing" for more details about this.

Most mid-sized US companies are doing a good job of automating these last steps in 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? "