Machine Learning

Almost every business runs on some kind of ERP-MRP-MES. These are necessary but also have limitations. Don’t get me wrong, these are amazing, powerful, comprehensive pieces of software. Up until now this was about the best one could do to stay on top of things.

However, it remains that most businesses we visit are less than enamored with their current system. We only met one customer that liked theirs and I have only personally heard of one other that liked theirs.

Any Production Manager will tell you; information is gold! A PM’s job is to make many daily decisions based on best known current information. Making mistakes or misinterpretations can be costly and wasteful of operator’s valuable time.

ERP systems capture millions of transactions and store the data for later use if needed. They are not designed to yield many insights. For that, PM’s mostly resort to extracting past stored information on the ERP, organizing it into a spreadsheet and looking for patterns, trends and insights as to what might happen in the future.

Now, creating these spreadsheets works! That’s why people do it. It is also incredibly time consuming. This can run PM’s afoul with senior company leaders who wonder why PM’s spend so much time gathering this information instead of spending time on the floor with the value creators as they should.

There is also another camp of PM’s. Those that do not gather this information and do have more time to circulate and communicate between their production teams and upper management but they are really basing decisions off gut feeling or intuition from experience. They are guessing.

So we are caught between those who are willing to guess and those who take too much time to know. Both are not good...

But there is a better way! We can level up. We can go a step further now with machine learning. We can switch to more leading and less lagging indicators for our businesses. We can do this automatically, and without human intervention or cost of time and labor. We can make use of all that gold that may otherwise go under-utilized in the system. And we can finally free up our time to do what’s right by spending max time with our people and also KNOWING what’s REALLY going on...!!!

Best of both worlds.