AI for UK
Manufacturers
AI in a plant may sound futuristic, but many plants already use AI successfully, including some that rely on outdated ERPs or MESs and have processes that involve spreadsheets or tribal knowledge.
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Production problems reach the person who can fix them.
Workflows worth assessing
So if you’re tempted by the potential of AI, but unsure how to get started, we can help. These are the workflows we'd assess across manufacturing, including:
Condition-based (predictive) maintenance: Analysing equipment condition data to predict imminent failures, counting false alarms and failures allowed to happen before relying on the model’s advice.
Vision-based quality inspection: Analysing images to predict the presence or absence of specific defects, agreeing acceptance criteria and ensuring that the quality team retains control of judgement calls.
Planning & scheduling: Recommending orders that balance due dates and profitability, factoring in product mixes, past performance, stock, lead times, supplier performance and machine availability before updating schedules, while planners retain control of judgement calls.
Intelligent estimating: Extracting quantities from customer drawings/specifications and past quotes to generate an initial quote, ensuring that estimators can trace the basis of each quantity and retain control of judgement calls.
Shop-floor copilots: Answering questions from authorised SOPs, drawings, past production data etc., with clear escalation routes.
We can help you get started with AI by scoping an opportunity to improve a process that relies on tribal knowledge.
How it works
The works manager knows what slows the factory down. The planner’s schedule is drawn up on a whiteboard every Monday. The estimator relies on gut-feel to arrive at a price in their local spreadsheet. Machines are repaired when they stop. Quality checks rely on human eyes, viewing a sample of products. The answer to any question about how to do anything is ‘ask the person who knows’.
The challenge is finding processes that could be improved using AI, ideally, processes that rely on the expertise of two or three individuals. The next stage is agreeing boundaries: data sources, decision-making and how to improve performance over time.
Firstly, we visit your site and tour the factory with you, talking through processes on the shop-floor and in the office with the works manager, planner, estimator etc., to identify processes that would benefit from using AI, this is a fixed-fee shop-floor audit. We recommend a first use-case for AI and agree success criteria.
We can then scope the next steps and agree a price before starting. For example, building a plant brain, a single source of truth for SOPs, technical drawings, machine details, BOMs, routings, supplier details etc., with revision control, traceability and search. Then, scoping an initial deployment that includes a human-in-the-loop using your production data. We may also scope Made Smarter funding or other AI adoption grants with a local adoption partner where applicable. We’ll agree a fixed-fee for the first phase.
What happens to existing systems?
We can work with your IT team to agree boundaries for new and existing data and integrate with ERPs or MESs such as Sage or SAP where applicable, but we’re not going to replace these systems, these systems of record remain authoritative. We won’t interfere with machine safety systems and we’ll follow your data protection and quality procedures.
What does it cost?
The shop-floor audit to identify opportunities has a fixed-fee, we’ll quote the fixed-fee for the next stage on our intro-call, subsequent phases are fixed-fee per-phase.
Get in touch
To find out how much you’d save in scrap, how quickly you could send out a quote, how often machines fail or how accurately you can predict when you’ll fulfil an order, book your shop-floor audit below.