Flexibility over productivity

The Saginaw facility would automate production, revitalizing GM’s business at a time of intense competition from Japanese automakers Toyota and Nissan. GM had posted a loss of $764 million two years earlier – only the second losing year in its 72-year history. When CEO Roger Smith returned from visiting a Toyota factory, he resolved that GM must automate to compete.

The Saginaw project envisioned an army of 4,000 robots running production. The goal was to increase productivity and flexibility. The robots would slash up to two years from GM’s five-year production cycle and be capable of switching between diverse GM models. Employee productivity would increase 300%. Manual systems and interfaces would be eliminated. The robots would be so effective that people would be scarce – it wouldn’t even be necessary to turn on the lights.

But GM’s “lights out” experiment was a mess. Production costs in the factory of the future exceeded those in plants employing thousands of workers. Amid chaotic futurism brought onto the business, GM shut the Saginaw plant in 1992.

Despite advances in automation technology, both hardware and software, the promise of lights-out, fully automated production is far from reality. Focusing only on maximizing productivity tends to limit the flexibility of the automated workforce primarily through rigid, non-adaptable environments in which businesses suffer the black box syndrome. Elon Musk has tried to implement a similar approach in 2017 to mass-produce Model 3. The company introduced automated lines to help boost productivity, but instead ran into production delays and struggled to navigate what Musk described as a “crazy, complex network of conveyor belts”. Like GM, Tesla had reversed the course and and decided to guide the future production with flexibility, creativity and some improvisation of his human workforce.

To achieve positive-sum automation, companies must design systems for both productivity and flexibility. They need to design easily comprehensible tools and invest in training, or rather let us at Robotiq.ai help them discover their processes and design intelligent automation to support agility and ensure smooth operations.

At Robotiq.ai, we ensure that the process is comprehensively understood in direct collaboration with people who perform these tasks regularly. We actively solicit feedback from line employees to share their closest perspective. With their input and ingenuity, we establish not only a perfectly ran process (with zero-errors over time), but we support employees’ insecurity over using the very automation in their own department. It is no longer a myth that one of the key challenges of introducing automation into companies is employee fear of losing their workplace. Throughout the process discovery and design, we warrant the knowledge transfer, up-skilling and build innovation capacity so that employees can further improve the processes and continuously monitor performance, thus becoming more productive in their respective departments, yet flexible at all times.

Many of our clients decided to pursue a bottom-up approach to automate administration and other repetitive, mind-numbing tasks. With a carefully designed and ISO-certified process, we collaborated on implementing the bots which ensured mundane tasks are done by digital workers who didn’t need breaks, vacations nor raises. The trust put into the line workers by their management was particularly encouraging and led to greater creativity, workplace positivity and overall productivity within departments, while businesses benefited with optimized costs, savings and growth.

GM’s vision for a factory of the future was productivity and flexibility without the need to light the way for workers. But the experience shows that marrying productivity with flexibility requires humans to be in the loop, learning where technologies are working well and where they can be improved. Companies are best served by a positive-sum automation that draws on the strength of intelligent machines, managers, engineers and line workers alike. The future is not one without human workers but one in which automated systems make humans more capable and more vital at work. This powerful dynamic is then absolutely limitless. And that is what we, at Robotiq.ai, strongly root for. We’re limitless together.

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Credits: Ben Armstrong, Julie Shah (MIT), Harvard Business Review