Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1447212
24 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2022 different types—overproduction, inventory, just scrap, cycle time, not meeting commit- ments. You need to assess what you feel is most impactful to your business, and that's what you target for your first project. Industry 4.0 is based on engineered sen- sors which, when combined with data science, allow the emergence of foresight to improve efficiencies. You put sensors on your equip- ment and make simple control boxes—this is very easy stuff at the end of the day. Engineers coming out of school know how to do this, but they get thrown into a PCB shop with a bunch of dinosaurs, and slowly they turn into dino- saurs themselves. Don't let the Jurassic ecosys- tem absorb them. Get them to focus on what they know best. ey shouldn't be led by pre-existing biases about how things are done. Use their educa- tion and give them information they need to do a better job of it. is is one of the challenges when you have senior people who don't know this stuff. It creates a challenging dynamic to manage younger engineers who do know. You don't want a situation where the young people are leading everything because they're missing a lot of experience too. It requires that the more seasoned folks take some online courses, something very common in different industries. ey don't become the coders, but they learn enough to manage these folks. Johnson: I'm starting to imagine that a one- or two-engineer team is comprised of an elder manufacturing expert and a younger process expert. Stepinski: It could be, or you have two pro- cess people for redundancy who just poll the experts, just because one of the great risks in this data engineering data science is people get enough knowledge in a competitor, customer, or supplier, which then hires them. A big issue with the "AI space," which is data engineering, data science, and analytics, is it's very under serviced. ere is a constant need for a hun- dred thousand people to fill these roles. So, you must keep them happy, and be very care- ful. ere are many cases of companies losing their whole departments because they found a better opportunity. Keeping your folks educated is not hard to do using online courses through Coursera, IBM, Google, and more. Everybody needs to spend a few hours a week learning (think old world apprenticeship). If you've been in the business for 30 years, you don't have to learn how to code if you've never done it. But you can learn enough to say, "Hey, new hire, this is what we're thinking from a scope perspec- tive of how we want to approach this," and lead them in the right direction. en, they can take care of the details for you. at's the most cost- effective way to approach this, and everybody benefits. At the end of the day, you free up more capi- tal for investment, eventually new equipment, but at the beginning, it needs to be a home- grown program. Matties: We oen hear that hiring is a great challenge to begin with, and labor costs for operators generally have gone up. When people think of lowering costs, they think of automation. But in a brownfield site, they'll oen say automation doesn't fit in their fac- tory. How does your strategy help lower labor cost? They shouldn't be led by pre-existing biases about how things are done. Use their education and give them information they need to do a better job of it.