Katharine Cooney - Business Intelligence

"Market conditions are obviously always changing, but so too is the pace of technological development, what’s possible and at what price point? If you’re not engaged with that, for whatever reason, then you can be sure your competitors are.”

One of the key challenges in managing a fast-paced manufacturing environment is finding the time to plan effectively for change. It’s a paradox associated with success that any thriving enterprise is a busy place and it’s not unusual for senior managers to get so caught up in day-to-day affairs that they have no time for future planning and strategic development.

“When you’re running a plant, it’s natural that operational issues take precedence. Improvement projects, future proofing and strategic planning can fall, unfortunately by the wayside. They can end up being the things you only get to when everything else is done and you have free time but in reality, they need to be prioritised,” said Katharine Cooney, visualisation and business intelligence specialist at DMI.

‘If you don’t make time for these things, it’ll come back to haunt you. Change is happening all around us and in lots of ways that impact industry. Market conditions are obviously always changing, but so too is the pace of technological development, what’s possible and at what price point? If you’re not engaged with that, for whatever reason, then you can be sure your competitors are.”

Cooney is a data analyst who spends her time preparing assessments for customers to help them understand how to solve the production issues they are struggling with. She’s a graduate of the University of Oxford and University College Dublin and has done extensive stints working with major tech companies such as Intel.

Her role at DMI is to look at customer’s existing data and drive as much nuance as possible from it to help inform the various options the company can present for moving forward.

For example, a company that wants to drill down and improve their equipment availability might share their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) data with Cooney, who can use this key performance indicator to focus in on operational efficiency.

“OEE encompasses things like equipment availability, quality and throughput, and it’s a good measure of how a place is running. I take that data and drill down into it to see any particular periods of downtime and question what preceded them? Could the company put in place preventative measures such as regular periods of downtime for scheduled repair, rather than letting the machine run to failure,” she said.

“That kind of analysis can produce an improvement in equipment availability. It’s a fairly universal process and it’s transferrable from industry to industry but it does require us at DMI to understand the specific terminology and specific needs of, say, the bio-pharma sector as distinct from the semiconductor sector.”

A key part of what DMI offers is specificity, or actual production environment experience from lots of different manufacturing sectors. While consultants can have a good grasp of high-level concepts in manufacturing, Cooney makes the point that often in the effort to be all things to all people, people can end up not having a deep understanding of the specifics of what a certain sector needs.

“It’s about having deep as well as wide knowledge. It’s not enough to know a little about a lot, you have to know a lot about a lot and, crucially, to have actual real world experience. Everyone here has worked in production environments and brings that specificity with them to each new engagement,” she said.

A further key aspect of DMI’s value proposition is its ‘bird’s eye’ view of what’s coming down the tracks in terms of technology and best business practice. According to Cooney, she regularly encounters customers who are victims of their own success and are so busy that they aren’t able to stay fully abreast of developments in their field. A recurring request is how best to position themselves for the medium to long term?

“It’s AI. That’s what everyone wants to know about. The use of AI in data analytics is unbelievable and is creating hugely exciting opportunities and what's already happening is incredible. A lot of companies can consider themselves well positioned to use AI, providing they have good data hygiene habits,” she said.

“Many of the software tools that are out there are steadily updating to incorporate aspects of AI and as long as companies are in a position where they have data available they'll be well positioned. But some companies are not even collecting data properly and run a serious risk of being left behind.”

Cooney describes not being prepared for the deployment of AI in data analytics as an existential threat, something that could easily spell the end of companies that don’t have good data habits established.

“Using data and AI allows manufacturing to operate more efficiently. There’s a big manufacturing base in Ireland, for example, but even leaving aside regulatory obstacles, a lot of that business could quite easily be transferred to the Far East. If you don’t instigate the collection of good clean data -- automated data collection, not manual – then you’re likely to be sunk by some other company that does,” she said.

From a data analytics point of view, Cooney points out that the scale of AI’s impact on industry can be seen in the casual way in which the technology is appearing in standard tools used all around the world. In particular, she highlighted the recent upgrades to Microsoft’s PowerBI product and Tableau from Salesforce.

“PowerBI has been around since 2016 but in the last year or so, Microsoft has spent a lot of money on AI and integrated it into that software and it’s taken off. It integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products but you’re able to do a lot more with it,” she said.

“The specifics of the software aren’t that important, what matters is that after a long period of lots of R&D work being done, we’re now seeing AI become relatively commonplace. It’s becoming democratised and you don’t need to spend a lot of money or have a lot of expertise to make use of it. That’s a sign of the way things are going, I feel.”