Most businesses are built around a degree of human labour – some excessively so. Labour-intensive businesses have tried many things over the last few decades to improve the productivity of the workforce – some experiments have worked, some have not. One problem is that organisations that take a ‘strategic shift’ in s particular direction will find a way of proving that they were right. But they may not have primary data to support that claim.
Of course in recent years such labour-intensive industries have looked to automation, to robotics and now to AI to support the efficiency and effectiveness of their labour. The problem is that, understandably, they tend to build that technological support on top of the ‘old’ way of doing things. Tthis means they are still using systems and procedures designed for human execution and support, even though the humans might have been totally or partially replaced by technology.
The biggest improvements in productivity tend to occur when the overall system architecture changes – not when subsystems, tools and equipment change.
We need some bold and creative architectural designers to take a fresh look at manufacturing processes but from technology up, not people down. I am now too old and out-of-date to know whether engineering and design schools are encouraging and facilitating such bold, creative design work. If not, we are destined to remain sub-optimal.
(Of course this post is written from an efficiency/productivity perspective. I realise there are political and social considerations to the kinds of changes I am talking about – there is also a need for bold, creative solutions to how we run society alongside how we run industrial operations. I am not sure we are addressing those problems at all)