This article hits on a key problem in American manufacturing, but I think the proposed solution only feeds the problem. 

The main problem is that ownership is uninterested in what they own, and management is uninterested in what they manage. Ownership just wants the value of the business to grow, and the value of a business is a lot easier to pump up with paper games and shenanigans than actually doing some useful thing extremely well (this is an unfortunate consequence of the banking sector inflating the money supply). Management just wants the business to run well, so they concern themselves with buying solutions that promise to eliminate the headaches that are part and parcel of simply managing something. The result is that management is occupied with chasing modern solutions and forcing compliance while ownership is concerned with playing paper games; both groups are more concerned with how things appear to other, uninformed groups of people, and neither group is especially concerned with their expertise in the things that the business actually does. 

Now, let's add an AI robot whose job it is to eavesdrop on the manufacturing floor and spy on everybody. "Not to replace human workers with AI." Okay, but it is clearly to replace experienced employees with less experienced ones and to increase the ease with which experienced employees can be replaced. This will put downward pressure on wages, which will only exacerbate the problem, because the owners who don't care about ownership and the managers who don't care about management are very keen to find excuses not to pay experienced employees what is necessary to retain them. They would rather retain themselves; who can blame them? 

This retention problem continues to reverberate through the economy, as piles of paper that get bought, repackaged, and sold with one understanding of their value start to show their cracks. I buy specialty chemicals from a great many companies, and I can't tell you how many chemists I've met who developed full product lines for Company A and now work at Company B, and it's not lost on me that Company A is now suspiciously less able to supply quality material reliably.

One US manufacturer of aeroplanes spun off their airframe manufacturing into a different company—paper games—and then were surprised to find out that the whole pile of paper was not magically worth more with less quality oversight and accountability. It reached such a ridiculous fever pitch that, rather than step into the gemba and work out the issues, top management seems to have hired hitmen to assassinate those quality personnel most bothered by the situation (allegedly, according to some people who are definitely nutjobs, and not me). Murdering your whistleblowers shows the wrong kind of attitude towards the American worker, and I think that the proposed solution here does as well. 

This author correctly identifies that the keys to running an operation are inside the minds and the hands of the people who do it, rather than the pieces of paper that document procedures and how they fit together. The author then proposes that the solution is to implement, essentially, a digital East Germany on the factory floor to capture those things that management still fails to understand. 

That's certainly a modern idea, but I would suggest instead paying better wages and passionately managing the things you're supposed to manage, in partnership with the expert operators who are trading their time on this Earth to actually make it happen. If you need extra help, hire a process engineer who will listen to the floor and capture this knowledge. You'll need that guy too, because now this knowledge exists in his relationships with the people on the floor, and I guess—tragically—that type of asset is harder to package up and sell. 

The present belongs to people who are eager to outsource their thinking and the hard work that comes with responsible ownership and responsible management; I strongly suspect that the future does not. 

interesting