AI Adoption in Manufacturing Needs Change Management

“Design engineers are at the front edge of AI adoption,” said Molly Monahan, organizational change lead at Trissential, in a recent interview with Design News. Such AI adoption could include smart manufacturing, smart delivery, or CAD or PLM systems.

But these technologies impact the front lines as much as they do the engineering staff, she said. “So there needs to be a cohesivity between what we're designing and how the front-end staff can support and triage it as things move through the whole product lifecycle management,” she explained.

Monahan will be presenting the MD&M Midwest session, “Built to Adapt: Workforce Transformation in Smart Manufacturing,” in which she will provide her insights into how to bridge the two, to make sure that new processes are right for the entire organization.

Organizational change management (OCM) is the concept that she calls the connective tissue between the two. “Lots of people think of it as a communications plan or the thing that gives us stickers and cupcakes during a project,” she said. “It's far more scientific than that. It really is the human response to the human response.” She stressed that it should be used as early as setting the strategy to ensure the plan is people centric, not just another system deployment.

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For example, when a company is going through change, such as moving to smart manufacturing, OCM involves being able to understand the different groups of people that are going through it and how it will impact their day-to-day work.

Sometimes what feels like resistance from employees is often grief or a loss of hard-won expertise or being seen as a leader, she said. “The worry is, ‘is my job going to change? Am I going to be able to do it,’ especially if you've been an engineer on the floor, or a design engineer, and you've been using hand-drawn tables for a long time, and now you're being asked to use these super-fired CAD systems,” she explained.

“Or you've managed from a manufacturing perspective, putting everything together, and picking and pulling by hand, and now you're using drones, and electronic scans to pull these things,” she said. “That can be pretty intimidating.”

Overcoming this resistance involves getting down to the individual level, Monahan said. “Getting in there and really understanding what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it helps you connect the dots as to what you need to mitigate in order to get them over that bump,” she said.

She cited an example of a group of receivers in a warehouse who went from scanning items three times to now having to scan them 26 times. “In their minds, they couldn’t figure out why this was better,” she said. “And what actually happened was that it wasn’t better, but nobody believed that. Everybody was told the system was going to be great and a big timesaver, and here they were tripling their time just to receive products.”

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This illustrates her point of how important it is to bring the end-users further up in the design process of the system so that they understand what is being changed and how they will use the new technologies. “So that as you're building it and designing it, it has the flexibility to accommodate the needs of both of those groups,” she said.

In her presentation, Monahan will discuss some of the challenges companies face when incorporating AI. She said that collectively, organizations have not done a great job setting policy and guardrails to enable educating employees to most effectively use AI. “The best way to use it is partnered together with humans,” she said, noting that AI will take on some of the more repetitive, transactional things. “Enabling organizations to then refocus their employees toward higher-value work that requires rational thinking, critical thinking.

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“AI is only ever going to be as good as the humans who are teaching it, training it, talking to it, and engaging with it,” she said. “And we kind of forget that because the fear of robots taking over our jobs is pretty real and pretty big.”

Monahan welcomes anyone in managing, supervising, directing, and leading engineering departments as well as warehouse managers, manufacturing managers, and HR personnel to come to her session. “Even businesspeople who are on the product and sales side [should come] to understand how it's going to impact and where they can help support that as you move into deploying a smart solution in your warehouses or your engineering departments,” she said.

“I think there is a strong partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence,” Monahan concluded. “One meets the other to move into the next phase of our evolution as a workforce. And OCM is part of the strategy.”

Monahan will present “Built to Adapt: Workforce Transformation in Smart Manufacturing,” on Wednesday, October 28, from 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in the MedTech Theater at MD&M Midwest.