There are many tasks in a manufacturing environment that require manual data entry. Most of these tasks are repetitive, and could be automated with the right tools.

Building software automation used to be challenging, but with recent advances in AI and tools like v0 and Replit it has never been easier. In this article, we’ll explore how AI-powered tools lower the barrier of entry to comprehensive software automation from the front office to the factory floor.

Table of Contents

• AI Lowers the Barrier of Entry for Custom Manufacturing Software
• Example Applications for AI-Assisted Custom Software
• Connecting Custom Software to Your System of Record

AI Lowers the Barrier of Entry for Custom Manufacturing Software

Every manufacturer has business processes that are unique to them. One of the challenges of off-the-shelf (OTS) software is that it can never fully capture all of a company’s processes. As a result, manufacturers using OTS software typically do one of the following:

1. Change their processes to fit their software
2. Do some of their work manually outside of their software

However, a third option is to build custom software to address the gaps in functionality not covered by the OTS software.

AI-assisted Software Development

AI-powered software development tools allow users to build software applications and automation without needing to know how to code. Users simply supply a prompt in plain English, and the tool will generate the code to achieve the stated objective. Users can then test the software, and make revisions through subsequent prompts.

For example, you could give a prompt like: “Write a script that reads in a CSV with columns X, Y, and Z and generates a report showing the average of the three columns over time.”

This is just one example – as you can imagine, the possibilities of what you can do are essentially limitless. Let’s consider a few concrete examples that may come up in your factory.

Example Applications for AI-Assisted Custom Software

Handling Customer Data in a Unique Format

I’ve worked with dozens of manufacturers whose customers insist on sending and receiving data in a unique format. For example, an OEM may require that all quotes be submitted to them in a specific Excel-based format and uploaded to their portal.

It would be impossible for an OTS software vendor to handle all of the unique data formats specified by these companies out of the box, and manually transforming data into these formats is extremely time consuming. This is an ideal application for custom software.

To build this custom data handler, you could supply a template of the required Excel format to an AI chatbot and ask it to generate a script that transforms data in your standard format to the required format.

Custom Shop Floor App for Operators

Different manufacturing processes require different data. As such, it can be helpful to create custom shop floor apps that reflect the way that your specific operators perform their specific manufacturing processes at their specific work centers.

With tools like v0 you can use prompts to quickly prototype a user interface for these apps. And with tools like Replit you can build a fully functioning app by conversing with an AI agent.

Custom Analytics and Visualizations

Tech-forward manufacturers rely on data to make decisions, but their OTS software does not always make it easy to answer the questions that are most important in their business. Luckily, AI can help here too.

Simply point an AI chatbot at your data source and tell it what data you’d like it to present and how.

Connecting Custom Software to Your System of Record

Custom software tools like the ones described above can be helpful on their own, but they’re way more powerful if you can connect them to your system of record:

• An app that generates quotes in a custom Excel format is way more efficient if it can pull quote data directly from your ERP
• A custom shop floor app is way more capable if it can read and write directly to your MES

In order to build these kinds of apps, though, you need a system of record that is designed to work with AI-assisted software development tools.

CarbonOS was designed to work seamlessly with LLM-based AI agents. CarbonOS is:

• API-first, so everything you can do in the user interface can also be done via the API
• Equipped with a self-documenting API, meaning that the documentation the AI tools use as context will always be perfectly up-to-date with the system’s capabilities

Building extremely complex apps at the scale of CarbonOS is still well beyond what AI-assisted development tools are capable of (though we keep trying every day). However, these AI tools are extremely capable when it comes to custom applications with a smaller scope.

We provide several tools to help you get started with building custom applications on top of CarbonOS:

• CarbonOS is source-available, meaning that you have full access to the source code and can see how our team of expert developers approaches software design
• We provide a Software Development Kit (SDK) and sample app to make it super simple to build custom apps that connect seamlessly with CarbonOS

If you’re interested in learning more about how CarbonOS makes it easy to build custom software to dial in automation across your factory, reach out via our contact form and we’ll set up a call.