✕

David Ryeson, Kaushik Shubhank, and Dr. Jan Nöcker of the Boston Consulting Group have written for Quality about AI and Quality 4.0.

Michelle: To start off with, Dave, could you give us a little background--and each of you--can you tell us about yourself?

Dave: Sure. I'm Dave Ryeson. I'm a partner and director with BCG and our Detroit office and have been with BCG over 20 years, over 35 years of manufacturing and operations experience, and do a lot of work on quality transformations, together with Kaushik and Jan, and also lean transformations, and also very deep in our maintenance topic.

We led a study a few years back, Jan and I, on Quality 4.0. And so, it's interesting seeing some of the dynamics and changes and discussions with our clients. We'll talk about that a little bit today.

Jan: My name is Jan Nöcker, partner, with BCG 11 years now, working mainly in industrial goods, on things like all sorts of operations topics and quality as well.

And I'm looking forward to the discussion today.

Kaushik: I'm a part of the manufacturing and supply chain at BCG. Been with BCG for about 16 years now, overall, focused on lean manufacturing initiatives through and through and experience split across the industry and consulting.

Michelle: How has Industry and Quality 4.0 and manufacturing evolved over the last three to five years? And why do you think AI marks a true inflection point today?

Dave: We are face-to-face with our clients a lot and we're seeing a big push across industries to leverage digital capabilities to enable step changes in quality.

Performance and adoption is growing overall and companies are gaining traction. So, since the study that we did about five years ago, we're seeing adoption grow. We haven't done a refresh of the study officially. But, we are seeing that the discussions and particular application of sensors, vision systems, equipment data capture, so real time data capture, structuring that information and then applying AI and analytics to improve quality performance, are some of the key use cases that we're seeing companies engage in, that's really making a difference.