In this segment Michael Ungar discusses the strategic choice of deploying an IoT or video‑analytics system across an entire manufacturing plant versus limiting it to critical assets or problem areas. While a partial rollout reduces upfront cost, he warns that it can undermine efforts to change employee behavior, standardize work, and embed consistent problem‑solving and continuous‑improvement practices. Without uniform data availability, organizations risk fragmented processes and a lack of integrated root‑cause analysis. Ungar advises decision‑makers to consider these behavioral and organizational ramifications before finalizing a rollout plan, emphasizing the need for consistent, plant‑wide implementation to support a common approach to daily work and continuous improvement.
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One of the things that you have to decide now is, I'm putting an IoT system or a video analytics or whatever different system that you're talking about. If I'm putting that in place across my plant, do I put that everywhere or do I just put it on my critical assets? Or, you know, how do I do that? And it's obviously going to cost more if you put it everywhere. So there's a tendency to say, I'm just going to put this in the areas where I have problems or where I have critical processes that I need to make sure run effectively. And while I definitely understand that mindset, what that sets you up for is if you're trying to change the behaviors of the people in the organization, if you're trying to establish a consistent way doing problem solving, root cause analysis, et cetera, within your organization, if you have information available in some places and you don't have it available in other places, you run the risk of that not really being integrated into the way that people do that problem solving and process improvement within your organization. And so for me, the don't here is don't ignore the ramifications of those decisions as you're deciding how you're going to roll this out. You have to keep in mind, if I'm trying to change the behaviors of my people, if I'm trying to change how we do continuous improvement, If I want to have something that enforces standard work throughout my organization, I want to have something that changes the way that we do problem solving and so forth, then I have to have that consistency in approach or consistency of approach throughout manufacturing process. And so one of the don'ts that I would coach against is don't put different things in different places and expect people to have a common approach to how they go about their jobs on a daily basis.
