How AI can eliminate plant tasks people despise

You hire people for how they think and how they do their jobs, not how well they fill out TPS reports.

Most of the talk about the power of AI in manufacturing has centered around productivity or quality. For Sean O'Meara, self-described AI "technologist" and chief information officer of Girtz Industries, a major benefit is making people's jobs a little less awful.

Podcast: AI best practices—Lessons learned at Girtz and Ford

AI can automate tasks, freeing your best people to do their jobs better and exercise their creative muscles to find further operational improvements. O'Meara shared his thoughts recently in Indianapolis at IndustryWeek's Operations Leadership Summit, which Smart Industry also sponsored and SI managing editor Scott Achelpohl co-hosted.

During his presentation, O'Meara discussed:

How Girtz connects ERP to HR to IT, allowing leaders to check information through simple queries instead of tracking down people in different departments.
How AI can capture ideas and data that can easily get lost, like amazing insights or project status updates shared during staff meetings.
How to eliminate garbage-in/garbage-out problems by making sure you're capturing data automatically instead of forcing employees to key everything in by hand.

The following is a partial transcript from the Sean O'Meara program:

O’Meara: At Girtz Industries, we do some really amazing things.

Basically, we are custom-order, made-to-manufacture power packaging company. That basically means we build the big old MW generators that you see at FEMA sites you see being towed behind. Semi-trucks, you see them at airports, you see them everywhere, but you never see our name on them. What we do is we partner with actual manufacturers, Caterpillar, Cummins, United Rentals, things like that. And we work with them.

They come to us. And my engineers … design the solution in their CAD programs. And then right on the other side of the wall from where they're working is our metal fab shop where we are making all the components that go into that generator to get it to do what we promised it would do.

I'm the chief Information officer, which means I do absolutely none of that. So, my job is to help all these smart people make sure that they have the tools that they can do to continue to do smart things. And unfortunately, I don't know how many in here are engineers or who ever worked with engineers. But I think that they're absolute nemesis is the IT guy. I don't know how many times I've had engineers break my security, bring in new programs that we didn't want to see, and just make my life exciting.

Is that my No. 1 role? As the CIO of Girtz industries, I make sure I don't close the door on technology that I don't know about. It's always important for me to make sure that every move that we make in technology keeps the doors open because I don't know what new program the new engineer we hire is going to want to run. And I don't want him to come in and say, “Hey, this is the best tool in the world,” and I go, “Sorry we don't have the network to run that or sorry we don't have the databases for that." So, the No. 1 job is to make sure that we're poised to take advantage of the things that we don't even know about.

Podcast: AI best practices—Lessons learned at Girtz and Ford

The second thing that I have to do is make sure we protect ourselves. I’ve got to make sure our intellectual property doesn't get on a thumb drive and walk off the plant. I got to make sure that when that guy was working from home and actually went to the coffee shop, he didn't get hijacked, was at the coffee shop, and then he brings his laptop back into the plant, and pretty soon all of our CAD drawings are gone.

I love technology. I love using technology in business. I love using technology at home. But I don't love using technology just for the taste, just for the sake of using technology. I always want to make sure it fits, that it works, that it has a purpose and makes our lives better when we use it. That's kind of how I look at myself. And like I said, I'm a geek. If you want to talk about “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” anything like that afterwards, just come see me cause, because to be a real IT guy, in my opinion, you always got to be a geek at heart.

But today, we're here to talk about AI, and I want to give you a brief history of Girtz's role with AI and pretty much how it all started. I think that was last Christmas or the Christmas of 2023. That holiday season, we were on a turndown at the plant, and I'm laying in bed one night over the holidays. I'm looking at my phone and everyone's talking about this thing called ChatGPT. So, I pull up my phone, and I go to look at what everyone's talking about, and pretty soon I am up all night long chatting with this AI chat bot, doing everything under the sun, you know, making business proposals, writing blog posts, theorizing about new technologies.

I didn't sleep at all that night, but what was important for us is at that same time Girtz was in the middle of evaluating a new ERP platform and we had narrowed it down to two different vendors. And after I played with ChatGPT that night, I ran into the office and said, hey, we need to talk.

Because I wasn't aware that Generative AI was as close as what it was when ChatGPT released that announcement, and my world completely changed that night. Because for the first time I realized, we always hear that data is important. If you talk to any of us CIOs, any of us IT guys, we're gonna tell you data, data, data because that's the only thing we have to sell. But for the first time in our history I saw that not only is that data important, but our access to that data was going to be important.

So, as we were evaluating two ERP companies, I run and I go wait a minute, stop the presses, everyone quit. We have to go with Company A because they are going to give us free range access to our data that will then be able to go use to train AI in the future, whereas Company B is a closed system and the only way I can get to that data is through their reports. Data is going to be key.