Podcast: AI best practices for manufacturers – Lessons learned from Ford and Girtz

Podcast: AI best practices for manufacturers – Lessons learned from Ford and Girtz

July 17, 2024
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Sean O’Meara and Jason Ryska describe how AI is transforming the manufacturing industry.

Sean O’Meara is the chief information officer at Girtz Industries, a company that specializes in engineer-to-order power packaging solutions. At Girtz, he has championed the company's technological transformation and integration of advanced technologies with strategic business processes. Jason Ryska is the director of manufacturing technology development at Ford Motor Company. Sean and Jason recently spoke at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit in June. During the panel, “AI's Potential for Manufacturing,” the two discussed how they successfully leveraged AI for their operations. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Scott Achelpohl, managing editor of Smart Industry, shares the audience questions and expert answers from the session.

Below are some key quotes from the podcast:

Your org structure and the interactions within the company and how you manage that space is really, really important and critical. My peer at work every day is my IT group. My peer director and IT, we're on speed dial. We talk five times a day, and so there's a healthy tension there. We're supportive of one another, but what we also do in the projects, I said I have 75 people, but there are 250 plus people that come every day into my environment. They work together, so we collaborate and co-create with team members from the centralized IT department. So, we allow them in an environment to be a little bit unconstrained and creative. We're very conscious of what starts as pilots and a proof of concept, and we monitor it and navigate that space of when do point solutions become platform solutions?

And then me and my partner say, “OK, we need to scale this” or we're conscious about it. Yes, you can do this, but you can do it in these confines, in this plant, in this architecture. So we watch that space, but we manage it together very, very carefully. Again, it's that healthy tension. Yeah, the people feel like we tell them no very often, but we also tell them yes. It can't be yes to everything or you're going to have some real data security breaches and problems, or just sustainment and maintenance of fragmented systems all over the place is a nightmare. So, the org structure, the relationships, in creating an environment where you can co-create new things in the safe environment that's supported and you know when to pluck out things that can be scaled. So that's how we do it for you. It's definitely not perfect, but that tension is there, but be conscious and cognizant and manage that tension. – Jason Ryska

Over a while, I have found what I consider my tinkerers and my champions. So they're the ones that I roll that new technology out to first and foremost, and then they go, “Oh my gosh, that's so cool.” And they instantly start using it in their team to adopt it.

A good case in point is right before the pandemic, we implemented Zoom as a workspace communication platform. And just as we finished up the project, the world shut down, and Zoom was this major new product. Well, now we're rolling out Slack because Slack has all of these great AI features that interface with everything else that we do, and I've got my team saying, “We're not switching. We're doing too much work in Zoom. I'm not going to move over to Slack.” And I said, “No, no, no. You don't have to. Don't worry about it. By the way, do you realize Slack is summarizing our meeting notes? By the way, do you know, Slack AI is looking through your CRM?” And now I've got people pounding on my door saying, “When are you rolling slack out to our department?”

In my role, I do a lot of misdirection and selling value, so I don't want them looking at Microsoft Teams, so I better have a better solution than Microsoft Teams ready for them and selling it to them before I get some guy coming in and saying, “Hey, look what I can do with Microsoft Teams.” And then in the meanwhile, for us, big time is tying that data all together. I want one stream of data, one single pane of view for everybody in my department or everybody in my organization. So they don't want to use another tool that isn't tied in to that data. – Sean O'Meara

About the Author

Scott Achelpohl

Scott Achelpohl is the managing editor of Smart Industry. He has spent stints in business-to-business journalism covering U.S. trucking and transportation for FleetOwner, a sister website and magazine of SI’s at Endeavor Business Media, and branches of the U.S. military for Navy League of the United States. He's a graduate of the University of Kansas and the William Allen White School of Journalism with many years of media experience inside and outside B2B journalism.

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