Most discussions about industrial automation and analytics concern operations with hundreds of employees. This episode of Manufacturing Matters explores a less traveled quarter: Small shops with maybe a dozen people on the floor, a founder who has run the place for decades, and a spring sales bump nobody has ever been able to explain.

Our guest, Kyle Haworth, built his career building large-scale enterprise data systems before co-founding GuildHall to bring that same discipline to manufacturers under 30 employees and under $10 million in revenue. He notes that small shops often buy advanced technology before their processes are ready to absorb it, which is how some of them end up using a tenth of the ERP system they paid for.

In this episode, TECH B2B Marketing’s Dan McCarthy and Aaron Hand also talk with Haworth about the readiness of small shops to handle artificial intelligence. Asking what AI enables is more productive than asking what AI replaces, Haworth argues. He shares a working example of using AI to connect siloed accounting, ERP, inventory, and quality systems to let owners ask plain-English questions and get a dashboard on the fly.

Haworth’s closing advice for owners who assume they can’t afford outside help: Understand the problem and its inputs first. The tooling is now the cheap part of the solution, but it won’t do much good until owners first understand their processes.

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