What if the biggest efficiency problem in your factory isn’t your machines, it’s the dead time you waste before you even get to one.
Workers queuing at ADP and ERP terminals every morning. A wing rib scrapped at the cost of $18,000 because the wrong work instruction was on screen. A program gone forever when the machinist who maintained it quietly for a decade retired to Poland. David witnessed all of these problems within his manufacturing acquisitions despite them having advanced tech for the time period.
Chris sits down with David Caputo, Co-Founder of Harmoni, to get into how his intelligent factory orchestration system connects machines, people, and data for true control across the shop floor.
Harmoni fills the gap in the renowned ISA-95 stack that most manufacturers never knew they were missing, supplementing human-intensive operations that make up 99% of the market.
Harmoni operates within three buckets with the aim of ‘wasting less time and making less mistakes’. The system is designed to cover all bases without interfering with the essential human input needed to fulfil complex tasks. David talks to Chris about the labor automation, process control, and observability that Harmoni brings to the factory floor.
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3 Quick Things from this Episode
- David watched workers queue at shared ADP and ERP terminals at the start and end of every shift across hundreds of factories and realised nobody had stopped to question it. The time lost to admin, walking, and manual transactions before a worker even reaches their machine is costing manufacturers far more than most realise.
- Tribal knowledge walking out the door is one of your biggest operational risks. David’s shop lost the ability to make a part entirely when a long-serving machinist retired and left with the only working version of a critical programme on his thumb drive. This triggered nearly a year of re-engineering and requalification. If your processes, programmes and knowledge only exist in people’s heads or personal files, you have a serious problem.
- Effective shop floor AI needs two things: a delivery mechanism and context. First, you need a way to actually get AI to interact with the frontline worker at their machine. Second, and most importantly, you need context. Without it, the worker would have to spend huge amounts of time feeding in information before getting a useful answer.
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Tweetable Quotes
- “What Harmoni’s built is a new category of technology. We call this factory orchestration, and there’s a very simple goal: waste less time and make fewer mistakes.” – David Caputo
- “Simply having indicator lights to say whether a machine’s running is not telling you the full picture. A machine could be running but running very inefficiently. We’re giving you the information you need and allowing you to manage your factory in real time.” – David Caputo
- “Somehow you have to produce more with less, all in the face of autonomous competition and vertically integrated supply chains. Pretty tough position for the 300,000 manufacturers in this country.” – David Caputo
Please Scroll Down for Recommended Resources from this Episode
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What We Discuss with David Caputo
- What factory orchestration is and why David sees it as a distinct category from existing tools
- How David’s experience acquiring and running four aerospace and defense manufacturers drove the creation of Harmoni
- Why Harmoni’s three pillars (labor automation, process control, and observability) address the ISA-95 gap that leaves most human-intensive factories underserved
- How the no-titles, pods-based structure at Harmoni works and why David recommends it for companies under around 200 employees
- What the Harmoni AI Lieutenant (HAL) does on the shop floor versus in the office, and why shop floor AI requires both context and a delivery mechanism to be useful
- Where David sees the 297,000 US manufacturers under 500 employees needing to compete in a world of autonomous factories and vertically integrated supply chains
- Why David advises manufacturers to ask one question before any software investment: how will this tool change what happens on my shop floor
Recommended Resources
- Harmoni.io, bringing together data from operators, machines, and your shop floor software, all in real-time, to help managers make decisions and spot trends quickly
- Greenwich Street Tavern, a different tavern experience that takes a traditional American pub fare menu to the next level located in Tribeca in NYC
Connect with David and Harmoni
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