en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Hershey Company is driving workforce digital transformation at its candy factories, leveraging the artificial intelligence-powered connected worker platform "Augie" from U.S. software firm Augmentir to enhance employee capabilities, addressing the labor shortages and efficiency challenges commonly faced in manufacturing.
Chris Kuntz, Chief Marketing Officer of Augmentir, noted that while significant progress has been made in the digital transformation of equipment and machinery, limited advances have been achieved in making humans smarter and more connected. The platform, designed specifically for factory workforce scenarios, collaborates with workers while capturing data on their task execution, solving issues such as relying on experience rather than data to measure work performance.
Against the backdrop of labor shortages, an aging workforce, and widening skill gaps, manufacturers are increasingly dependent on worker behavior data. Missing data directly leads to prolonged machine downtime and frequent quality and production issues. By capturing signals such as the time workers take to complete tasks and assembly line employee participation rates, the platform generates insights on shift performance, work order handovers, and maintenance requests, providing decision-making support for customers.
Hershey applies this connected worker platform to corrective actions for factory floor issues, while using quality agents and training agents to identify areas where workers need additional guidance. The company also leverages agents to schedule machine maintenance processes and control production line start-ups and shutdowns. Additionally, Hershey has created digital workflows that guide workers through specific tasks using instructions and embedded insights. Augmentir also offers a root cause analysis agent to help workers analyze multi-source data input into the platform.
Application scenarios typically revolve around equipment operation, equipment maintenance, quality control, safety monitoring, and workforce development. Besides Hershey, other customers of the platform include Biochem Fluidics, Hunter Industries, Duracell, Andersen Windows, and Keurig Dr Pepper.
For example, at Keurig Dr Pepper, the company faced waste and product recall risks during aluminum can product changeovers due to barcode misalignment or fading. Operators had to manually read aluminum can barcodes to ensure they matched the beverage to be filled, but manual operations were prone to errors. Last year, over 19,000 cases of Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar were recalled because 12-ounce cans labeled as zero sugar were found to contain the full sugar content of regular Dr. Pepper. The company subsequently conducted a three-month pilot, placing Augie in the middle of the changeover process. Augie took photos of aluminum cans and performed optical character recognition to ensure code matching and that the correct liquid was filled into the correct container, thereby avoiding human errors.
Augmentir has a pre-built library of agents, and each customer can build their own agents based on their specific workflows. Some chemical industry customers have expanded the platform from small-scale pilots to complex workflows. The platform can integrate with existing enterprise systems such as SAP, quality management systems, and maintenance execution systems, typically connecting to 5 to 6 different enterprise systems during implementation.
Kuntz stated that regardless of a customer's digital maturity level, they can use the platform's AI capabilities to collect worker performance data and present actionable insights.
