Quite clearly, the company had lost some of the very seasoned workforce skilled at managing the production line with great diligence. The board knew where the hold-up was.

What was, however, unclear was what would be an appropriate response to the problem at hand.

While the patriarch owner was a protagonist for providing gainful employment to people, the younger Director and heir-apparent believed in using technology where it made eminent business sense. The question at hand was whether to invest in technology for production or invest in upgrading the skills of the people.

The Director presented the statistics on seven key criteria that contrasted the impact on business from two workstations performing identical tasks.

One was controlled by people and the other by machines.

He justified the need for embedding automated intelligence at the workplace and allowed the facts to speak for themselves.

The parameters of the study were material fed in excess; ability to maintain consistency in production process; level of rejections at end of line; frequency of interruptions to production schedule; facility idle time; variation in standards of infrastructural parameters; and level of adherence to delivery commitments.

How the data connects

The argument of the Director was that it was ‘inhuman and highly inappropriate' to expect the humans to produce the level of precision and quality that only machines were capable of.

More significantly, the business stood the risk of losing out in the market if the company did not upgrade its facilities technologically to a level where the workstations were enabled to think for themselves.

Asked the young director: “If you can fly in an aircraft equipped with ‘auto pilot ‘ facility and drive a car that is equipped with automatic transmission, will you still go for a technology that required handcrafting each piece of production to a level of automatic sophistication?”

Number Sense: >http://numbersense.blogspot.com

Related Topics