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WHAT ARE THE EASY AI WINS FOR MANUFACTURING? Colin Elkins, VP, Manufacturing Industries, IFS discusses why AI is about to drive more value in more parts of a manufacturing enterprise than is generally thought
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anufacturing has been an early adopter of artificial intelligence (AI) at least in some areas like predictive maintenance. Reliability and quality are both essential for delivering a successful customer experience, so an intelligent approach to enterprise asset management (EAM) have been a natural fit particularly for repetitive manufacturing and regulated sectors. In a 2019 IFS study, 90 percent of respondents had some plans to implement AI in various parts of their business. Industrial automation was the most commonly reported area of investment with 44.6 percent planning AI projects, while customer relationship management (CRM) and inventory planning and logistics tied for second place at 38.9 percent. According to a Deloitte study, 93 percent
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of manufacturers believe AI will be a pivotal technology to drive growth and innovation.
built up, processes can be automated entirely.
It is obvious that well beyond maintenance and factory automation, AI is about to drive more value in more parts of a manufacturing enterprise than many industry executives suspect. Just as automation revolutionized the plant floor, AI will bring dramatic changes for middle management and administrative roles.
Intelligence must not just be bolted onto the outside of manufacturing ERP. It must be woven into the fabric of how an organization operates and creates value.
In our work at IFS, we see that this technology will need to be at first assistive ‌ imagine the way a smart tax form anticipates your entries. This predictive approach becomes more powerful when it is combined with the business rules underlying an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. In time, where use cases warrant and where trust has been
CXO DX / NOVEMBER 2020
INTELLIGENT PROCESSES
A cognitive service in that ERP application can, as you release an order to manufacturing recognize the product as a reciprocating compressor. It knows what the finished goods deliverable should probably look like based on the contract, order history, the NAICS code of the customer, their geological location which can affect the regulatory environment and taxation and other factors. The application can then route a manager through administrative steps with mostly pre-populated data. The ERP software will be able to spot
