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Developing a central knowledge base for workers to easily find information relevant to their jobs can be difficult for manufacturers, even for a large company like Georgia-Pacific. As more experienced workers continue to exit the manufacturing industry, the need for a centralized knowledge base is even greater as companies must quickly get new workers up to speed. Georgia-Pacific has adopted industrial AI to develop what it calls "ChatGP," a chatbot that can respond to operator and worker questions. With the help of AWS, Georgia-Pacific has essentially created a chatbot that can answer questions specific to the process domains of workers, regardless of where they work in the manufacturing enterprise. You can read the full text of the AWS blog here. Previously, you had to search through inches-thick binders or try to contact other experts to get questions answered. Now workers can do this instantly. Here are some quotes from the blog:
"The lack of a centralized, readily accessible knowledge base often leads to reduced machine productivity, prolonged machine downtime, and higher troubleshooting and repair costs. As experienced employees who have spent decades running the production line either retired or moved on, Georgia-Pacific risked losing valuable knowledge. The company looked for a solution that could consolidate this disparate information, make it available to machine operators, and help preserve the expertise of the most knowledgeable employees for future generations.”
“The longstanding issue of knowledge loss affects the entire manufacturing sector,” says Carter Smith, Generative AI Product Leader at Georgia-Pacific. “Generative AI is helping us take proactive steps to solve it. As senior staff retire, implementing a reliable tool that has perfect memory empowers personnel and helps us gain and maintain our competitive advantage.”
“A traditional approach to knowledge management would not suffice in a fast-paced, data-driven manufacturing environment. Making phone calls to experts and searching through binders, manuals, and maintenance records takes time and increases the risk of downtime. Georgia-Pacific chose to harness generative AI using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies."
This effort did not happen overnight, but rather is the result of close collaboration with AWS Professional Services to determine desired business outcomes. The two companies worked together to develop a solution that would address the requirements of operators and maintenance technicians. Like many manufacturers, Georgia-Pacific has equipment that in some cases is 50 years old. Most of the documentation and knowledge about these older assets did not exist on paper anymore, but did exist in the minds of experienced employees. The ChatGP project was able to capture this knowledge and digitize it. As the blog post notes, much of this knowledge was captured through simple conversations with these experienced workers (many of them already retired), and the audio of these conversations was captured by the large language model, which summarized the discussion. Although the project has just started, Georgia-Pacific estimates millions in potential savings across all its manufacturing locations annually.
Georgia-Pacific Optimizes Operator Efficiency Using Generative AI on AWS