The Human Costs, Regulatory Compliance, and the Workforce Transformation Playbook (Part 3 of 4)
This is Part 3 of a four-part series. Part 1 covered the workforce crisis and market forces. Part 2 examined AI, digital twins, and OT cybersecurity. This part addresses the human costs of remote industrial operations,…
AI, Digital Twins, and Cybersecurity in Industrial Remote Operations (Part 2 of 4)
This is Part 2 of a four-part series. Part 1 covered the workforce crisis and market forces driving industrial remote work. Part 3 covers human costs, regulatory compliance, and recommendations. Part 4 covers critical perspectives, the conclusion,…
The Workforce and Market Forces Reshaping Industrial Remote Work (Part 1 of 4)
Executive SummaryRemote work in industrial IoT can be understood through a single analytical framework: The Three Convergences. Three forces that evolved independently over the past decade, workforce scarcity, AI maturity, and IIoT infrastructure, are now converging…
Who Owns the Risk When Factory AI Acts?
When an AI system recommends a quality action and the recommendation turns out to be wrong, the model does not carry the production loss, answer to the customer, sign the quality record, or explain the safety…
How PPG Built MES Blueprints for 140 Plants
At GE Vernova Accelerate 2026, Clark Rexrode, Colin Reilly, Chris Grega, and Ben Hoff from PPG presented how the company deploys Proficy MES across a manufacturing network of 140 to 150 facilities in more than 50…
AI Agents in MES: Beyond the Chatbot
At GE Vernova Accelerate 2026, Smita Bhat and Brian Johnson presented the Proficy AI roadmap spanning seven initiative themes across MES, Historian, and SCADA. The roadmap organizes AI capabilities into three tiers: chatbots that wait for…
How Do You Standardize a Unified Namespace Without a Universal Standard?
MQTT can connect the data. But scaling a Unified Namespace across plants requires shared structures, clear ownership and governance across IT and OT.There is no universal standard for the Unified Namespace. But without an internal standard,…
How Papa John’s Scaled Cloud MES to 11 Sites
Papa John’s Food Service (PJFS) ran 11 dough production facilities on paper. Quality checks, batch compliance, and raw material tracking all happened manually, with no real-time visibility across sites. During a presentation at GE Vernova Accelerate…
How Tribal Knowledge and Trust Drive AI Adoption in Manufacturing
Sensors, cloud infrastructure, and algorithms keep improving, but the hardest input to capture for any manufacturing AI system is the knowledge held by a maintenance engineer who has been watching, listening to, and repairing the same…
How to Scale AI in Manufacturing
Most manufacturers know they need to start with AI. The common advice, “start small” with a use case, prove value, and scale, is incomplete on its own. Starting small without first thinking big leads to a…