Records and Data for Industrial Engineering

 21 April

The pioneer of industrial engineering F.W. Taylor recommended records for supporting productivity improvement and cost reduction. Data needs to be collected for engineering alternatives to assess their life time costs. Economic analysis of engineering alternatives needs data and industrial engineers have to set up record keeping systems to accumulate data required for their decision making.

A New Application of Process Data and Information

Analyzing Process Chart Information Using AI Models   - Computer Aided Process Chart Analysis

The success of ChatGPT makes us aware of the potential of Generative AI. GPTs can take images as input and can analyze them. It can create new images. For example it can create pictures of one cat, two cats or a dog and cat. GPTs can also take tables as input.

For instance, the following information is given.

Make a table

Serial Number  Operation   Time taken in seconds

1             pick material         20

2             Go to machine      40

3             Drop the material  20

4             Go to bin                40

ChatGPT made a formatted table.

For the question: What is time taken for pick material?

It gave the answer: The time taken for pick material is 20 seconds, as indicated in the table.

So can see that GPT can study the process chart information presented as rows separated by commas, and understand the process chart symbols, element or operation description, time taken for the element, machine used, tools used, operator employed, industrial engineer who did the study and remarks etc.

Industrial engineers can give process charts as input to GPTs. They can capture discussions on the process chart based on brain storming. They can give improved process charts subsequently as inputs. Based on these inputs and training based on them, GPT can give suggestions for process improvement for a new process submitted to it for analysis. It can find elements in earlier processes, similar to elements in the current process and retrieve information from the brain storming data and improved process charts.

In computer aided process planning there are retrieval systems and generative systems. In computer aided process chart analysis also we can think of retrieval support and generative support. 

Thus we can see the benefit of maintaining various types of records for processes being used in the organization.

Part of 

A to Z of Industrial Engineering - Principles, Methods, Techniques, Tools and Applications

https://nraoiekc.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-to-z-of-industrial-engineering.html