I am writing this blog post because I want to share my understanding of how AI can help a country’s industrial resilience. The UAE is the leading country in the world for implementing AI into its industry and it would be interesting to see how AI could improve our fortunes. According to the official website U.ae, The UAE’s industrial strategy code-named “Operation 300bn”– aims to raise the industrial sector’s contribution to the GDP from AED 133 billion to AED 300 billion by 2031.
I am often asked this question: “As a Quality Manager, COO, Plant Manager, Finance Director, or General Manager I want to implement best practices that will ensure my company succeeds in the future”. AI has already proven itself as an innovative technology with many companies using it for their supply chain management, production lines, and even customer service. It would be great if we could use this cutting-edge technology so that the UAE can lead the way into the future of global business.
Although the term AI is not new, it is worth agreeing on a definition. AI is a term that has been trending heavily in the past few years. AI has been taught in Universities since the ’80s of the last century. The technology of today and the availability of data makes AI more accessible to us. AI- short for artificial intelligence- is a technology that can be used to monitor, predict, and simulate many different things. AI is being developed by companies such as Google who have invested over $1 billion dollars into developing AI software. This technology will help improve the industrial resilience of nations such as the UAE through the resilience of the UAE National Industrial sector. With the implementation of AI, employees are able to use their time more efficiently which leads to increased productivity for businesses like yours.
AI has been a hot topic for decades. We have heard of the benefits and the risks, but only now are we starting to see its potential impact on organizations. With AI becoming more affordable and accessible there is no better time than now to start exploring how this could change your organization for the better. In order to explore the benefits, I will be sharing with you three ways in which implementing AI can affect organizational performance: increasing efficiency, improving decision making, and reducing costs.
Increasing Efficiency
AI can be used to improve organizational efficiencies for things like scheduling meetings, taking attendance at events, or finding information quickly. For example, AI could be used to schedule meetings more efficiently by determining who should attend based on certain criteria. AI is a type of technology that simulates human intelligence and decision-making capabilities by identifying patterns. It can be used for a variety of tasks such as data mining and classification systems. AI impacts organizational performance from two perspectives: The employee perspective and the systems thinking perspective. AI is a hot topic nowadays because it has the potential to change how we do business. Not only can it automate tedious tasks, provide predictive analytics and lead to new innovations; but with the right tool, AI makes systems thinking more accessible to organizations. I had the honor to meet with one of the most influential figures about systems thinking back in 2009 in Abu Dhabi. In the book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge discusses how a company can be successful by implementing an organizational learning system. He outlines five disciplines that he believes are key to achieving this success: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning conversations, organizational learning culture, and Systems Thinking. These disciplines allow for a company to continually learn from its successes as well as its failures in order to adapt accordingly.
Systems thinking is a business management term used to describe the idea that all things are related and should be approached as part of a larger system. Systems thinking has been described as “a mindset, an approach to problem-solving, and a way of looking at the world.” This term can be applied in many ways throughout your business; for example, it could help you understand how one change can impact other areas or allow you to look at your assembly line as part of a larger system involving everything from procurement and sourcing all the way to sales and collections. Understanding systems thinking will help improve intra-departmental processes and make for better overall decision making throughout your company!
Every company has a different way of manufacturing its products, but there are some common trends. One trend is the use of robotics to make assembly more efficient and flexible. Robots can help with repetitive tasks, freeing up time for other employees to do other things on the production line. This also helps reduce errors in assembling parts because they’re done by machines instead of people who might be distracted or tired from doing it over and over again. There are many benefits that come along with using robots in your manufacturing process, so what’s stopping you?
If what is stopping you is the question about the effect these robots will have on your overall profitability, then you are probably asking the right questions. Many organizations embark on improvement projects that do not necessarily have an impact on the key metrics of the organization; namely profits, on time and in full (OTIF) delivery to customers, and availability of capacity at bottleneck resources.
Throughput’s ELI is the AI tool available for industries globally to understand and analyze manufacturing and supply chain systems end-to-end. For global manufacturers, ThroughPut’s ELI is the first #AI platform for systematically removing manufacturing and supply chain #bottlenecks leading to consistently improving #manufacturing outcomes and processes. It is the unique AI platform that uses existing data to provide insights into what is blocking your organization from achieving its goals. It harnesses the power of technology to analyze your existing data and verbalize and analyze what you may have been feeling all the way through.
Throughput ELI AI tool gives manufacturers the necessary insights to take the right actions now. It automates systems thinking, by identifying where bottlenecks exist and further analyzing root causes. It is the 80/20 rule on fire. It brings focus to #leanmanufacturing and #Kaizen efforts. And it is the only #artificialintelligence tool that uses the #theoryofconstraints and algorithms from all improvement methodologies. Many manufacturers around the world have started achieving smoother Manufacturing operations with the least #waste and the highest outputs. Manufacturers are saying goodbye to high inventories and defects. With such a tool, manufacturers are able to achieve higher overall efficiencies that lead to higher profits and high OTIF.
Reducing Costs
It’s a well-known fact that automation is a great way to reduce costs in a business. However, it can be difficult to know which tasks are the best fit for AI and when those tasks should be automated. One way that AI can help with the bottom line is by reducing costs when applied in the right place at the right times. Here are some ways you might consider using artificial intelligence to reduce costs:
- Automate high volume processes with repetitive sequences of steps where delays in customer deliveries could be a recurring thing
- Make sure you are always on top of the game with real-time intelligence
- Understand better what is happening in the market
By automating these kinds of tasks, organizations can focus on higher-value activities and improve their customer experience at the same time. This not only reduces costs but also improves reputation and repeat business.
Improving decision making
Today, it is essential for businesses to use data-driven decision-making. This means taking the time and using the necessary tools to make informed decisions based on evidence rather than gut feelings or emotions. To be truly successful at this, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its capabilities improve our ability to make better choices in a timely manner with accurate with timely accurate metrics to support all decision-makers at all levels and geographic locations to support achieving the organizations’ Goal. With the variety of SKU’s that manufacturers and retailers hold at any point in time, it becomes essential to know which ones to produce and hold in inventory at any single point in time.
Many modern-day AI softwares augment the human decision-making process making it more suited towards achieving organizational goals either by focusing on the big picture or the minute details. Achieving better decision-making capabilities can only be done when both the big picture and the fine details cause-effect relationships are well identified. This is systems thinking in action that leads to performance excellence.
National Industrial Resilience
Organizational resilience is a term that has been used in the past few years to describe how well an organization can handle disruptive forces. Companies should be able to survive and even thrive after a disruption, which requires both strong leadership and organizational structures that enable people to work together effectively. The biggest challenge of this day in age is VUCCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Constraints, and Ambiguity). To ensure business growth for positive and negative stressors, the right decisions will need to be made. To become “Anti-fragile”, manufacturers need to have the mechanisms in place to deal with two things:
- Making use of the upside whenever it happens
- Lowering the risks of the downside when and if it happens
Artificial Intelligence will play a big role in the UAE industrial sector’s resilience by lowering manufacturers’ exposures to risks and increasing their ability to make use of the opportunities the markets will offer. Throughput’s AI ELI is one such tool that has the capabilities to augment the global and local decision-making process to benefit manufacturers in both the continuous and discrete manufacturing domains. The overall waste globally in Supply chains is 33%. With lots of parts that have to be synchronized to get what the customers want, bottlenecks are happening everywhere across the supply chain affecting industrial profitability and cash flows. Making manufacturing and supply chains in sync with the market needs creates big opportunities. Although business intelligence tools offer the ability to visualize disparate sets of data, this is not enough by itself. AI and machine learning techniques are able to quickly identify where the bottlenecks are and more importantly what is causing them. COVID19 has been the largest ever disruption of our time to supply chains, and the trend of disruptions is not expected to wane anytime quickly.
With throughput’s Eli, our promise is to increase output, improve working capital turns, and improve profitability. This is what counts for the CEO, The COO, and The CFO. What makes us unique is that we focus to communicate that to the CFO. In the end, it is all about the Earning Per Share or company valuation. The UAE has set its UAE’s industrial strategy to achieve National Industrial Resilience. AI will support industrial growth and foster solid industrial foundations in good and bad times. Initiative 5 of the strategy is aimed at “catalyzing the adoption of the 4IR technology to boost the productivity of anchor industries”. Throughput’s ELI is a pillar of success to achieve this initiative and make the UAE industrial sector more resilient and even antifragile.
Success Stories
Among the success stories within the clothing, footwear & accessories industry AI helped a manufacturing facility identify suppliers with consistently poor lead times, which resulted in a 10% reduction in wait time of unused production capacity. In apparel retail, the same software Prioritized Product Demand to realize 3x savings from eliminating products with low value & low demand within weeks. While in distribution, it identified percentage portfolio allocation for Never-out-of-Stock items to ensure the business profitability targets, while creating 10-20% free capacity to test new product lines.
Conclusion
Whether it’s tackling the ever-increasing complexity of global supply chains or improving decision making, Artificial Intelligence is a valuable tool for any organization looking to improve its outcomes. In this blog post, we explored how AI can help UAE National Industrial Resilience and the benefits that come with increased efficiency and automating systems thinking. By increasing efficiency, improving decision-making processes, reducing costs, and more- AI impacts all aspects of our lives – for better or worse. With these considerations in mind, book an online demo today so you can learn about how Throughput’s AI-powered software could benefit your organization’s bottom line!