Manager: “Torrential rain at our customers location means we’re going to have to move priorities, I just got the email 5 minutes ago.”
Sup 1: Our new pioritizes mean we’re running the lathe. We cant pivot to project Y because the metal for that was cut incorrectly and the new order is on backorder. We can use that metal to make order K but well have to manually cut it down."
Sup 2: “Tim called out this morning, I can rearrange my department to cover most positions but not that one, can I get John from you to run the lathe? Gary is the most qualified but his sister filed for divorce from Doug on saturday. Doug has to interact with the lathe position all day and itll cause issues.”
Sup 1: “I can give you John if I can get Frank from department X to help cover down.”
Sup 3: " I can give Frank up but were having a baby shower for Rachel at 1400 and Ill need him back for that."
Sup 1: “Thats fine we have maint scheduled for today well just do that then.”
Manager: “Now that we’ve had our 5 -10 minute start up meeting no one do anything. Lets call the IT guy on the other side of the country who hates meetings and get him to program the details of todays resource allocation into joemos skynet. He says its way more efficient than us talking for 5 fucking minutes at the start of the day. It definitely has a section for you’re most experience lathe operators sister is divorcing the forklift driver in another department. Joemo skynet can then text its plan into the ether cause 10% of the floor doesnt even have a working phone number and 99% dont have computer access. Joemo definitely understands the manufacturing industry.”
If you know of a good way to automate leading humans out of manufacturing then youll make millions and CEOs will love you. Because if theres one thing computer systems are definitely great at its dealing with completely unique and non black and white information especially without a human having to manually input it.