I recently had the honor of speaking at IndustryWeek’s Manufacturing & Technology Conference, where nearly 1,600 attendees gathered in the manufacturing hub of Pittsburgh. The first question I asked the audience was, “Does everyone believe in humans?” Not surprisingly, there were a lot of nods and hands in the air.

(Watch the video of my talk.)

There are certainly both noise and opportunities around automation and robotics, but at Parsable, we fundamentally believe that the single biggest efficiency gain for industrial companies is enabling their human workforce to better execute, measure and improve their work – freeing them up to focus on higher-order tasks that can’t be automated at scale anytime soon, like reasoning, decision-making and applying insight.

For many companies, that may seem like a tall order. But Nalco Champion was able to accomplish this with Parsable in less than six months.

Chris Lancaster, Nalco’s global director of manufacturing technology, joined me on stage at the conference to share how Nalco successfully deployed Parsable’s Connected Worker Platform. Nalco is a division of Ecolab, a 49,000-employee company, and provides safe, sustainable chemistry programs and services to the upstream and midstream oil and gas industry, primarily refineries and petrochemical operations.

The company needed a way to better communicate and collaborate with their operators in the field, as well as better consistency in work performance and quality.

“Once the operator leaves the control room to go out into the field to perform a task, you’ve lost visibility of what they’re doing,” Chris said to the audience. “With Parsable, through the tracking and capability of the software and knowing what they’re doing and what time they did the task, you’re providing that accountability to their job. … We [then] take the analytics from the information and use that to drive improvement with supervisors and the engineers in the plant.”

Improving safety was another key goal. “We were looking to make a step change in safety, and I’m proud to say we’ve achieved best-in-class levels with Parsable,” said Chris.

“I think the digital world that we’re in now – and Parsable plays in this world – is our next major leap in manufacturing that really is going to change productivity for the American worker that we haven’t seen in probably 40 years.” – Chris Lancaster, global director of manufacturing technology, Nalco

I couldn’t agree with Chris more. It’s an incredibly exciting time for manufacturing, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

Watch the full presentation below, and check out our events page to see where Parsable will be next.