Over the past 7 years, working at Augury and on my own initiatives, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to thousands of manufacturing executives and leaders on what their problems are, what their goals are, and how those align with the company’s digital transformation strategy. The responses have varied over time – increasing capacity and supply chain efficiency, hiring qualified talent, and more. But when an organization was serious about their culture and workforce – one thing always made the top 3 list – “We care about our employee’s safety”.
When implementing technology that solves problems across uptime, machine health, and energy savings – my focus was always on leveraging technology to improve the hardware, the machines, and the utilities in place. Finding ways to increase productivity and drive a healthier bottom line are valid goals, but in the back of my mind, there was always a small voice reminding me that I wasn’t doing enough to better the lives of employees living the experience – having focus on human health and not just productivity (after all, I have been voted Most Likely to Get a Perfect 100 on the OSHA Exam. True story.) It haunts me when I see the BLS post statistics like this: On average 13 US workers die from workplace related injuries every day.
As I began to look more into human health and what manufacturers were doing about it, I had to question – are these plants really taking safety seriously? Anyone who walks a manufacturing floor knows the dangers, but did they really have safety as a top 3 initiative? Judging by the common safety intro video that looks like a home VHS tape, which every manufacturing site will have you watch before entering, how serious could they be about this type of investment?
Spoiler alert – they are very serious.
They just haven’t leveraged technology to mature as fast as their counterparts on the OT side.
Looking back at the digital journey I’ve helped some of the largest global manufacturers go through, it’s clear that the EH&S teams are about half a decade behind their counterparts in the manufacturing space. Safety managers collect data for safety scores through manual routes and site visits, mirroring what I’ve seen the maintenance industry go through over the past 5 years. Maintenance teams would analyze data that was collected by walking around machine to machine manually gathering data (vibration & ultrasound) off critical machines. Fast forward to what Augury has helped the industry become…. manufacturers are now using A.I. applied analytics on autonomously collected data to deliver machine health insights.
So what about the EH&S teams? What if we think in human lives instead of dollars. How many injuries or deaths could have been prevented over the past 5 years if we focused on the employees and not solely productivity?
Cue my new mission, and why I am so excited to join a company like Intenseye – a company where my passion in bringing cutting edge technology to manufacturing can be aligned with a sense of purpose that makes me proud.
Whether you are a tech professional interested in a new role, or a manufacturing executive looking to bring your EH&S team into 2022, I hope you all are as excited as I am when you look into the potential that Intenseye has to offer.
And so I begin the #JourneytoZero.
Our website uses cookies