Calculate specific material, equipment, or labor requirements for production
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
Software can pull the data, run the comparison and write up what it found. The accuracy depends almost entirely on whether it is wired into the real system of record rather than a stale copy, which is the problem the tools and auth layer exists to solve.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Analysis and evaluation work |
| Jobs that do it | 12 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Builders, Tools and auth |
| O*NET activity | Making Decisions and Solving Problems (4.A.2.b.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 12 occupations that perform it.
- Determine packaging requirements.
- Calculate labor and equipment requirements and production specifications, using standard formulas.
- Calculate draft space and roll speed for each mill stand to plan rolling sequences and specified dimensions and tempers.
- Draw smelted metal samples from furnaces or kettles for analysis, and calculate types and amounts of materials needed to ensure that materials meet specifications.
- Compute and record settings for new work, applying knowledge of metal properties, principles of welding, and shop mathematics.
- Compute numbers, widths, and angles of cutting tools, micrometers, scales, and gauges, and adjust tools to produce specified cuts.
- Calculate load estimates or equipment requirements to determine required control settings.
- Calculate, measure, load, or mix biomass feedstock for power generation.
- Calculate, measure, load, or mix refined feedstock used in biofuels production.
- Calculate amounts of materials to be loaded into furnaces, adjusting amounts as necessary for specific conditions.
- Calculate etching time based on thickness of material to be removed from wafers or crystals.
- Calculate machine speed and feed ratios and the size and position of cuts.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for analysis and evaluation work, and what it costs.
Start in the assistant with an export of the real data, because the accuracy problem here is a stale copy rather than a weak model. Make, at $9 a month, is the cheapest way to put the pull on a schedule once the analysis is worth repeating.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
12 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Biofuels Processing Technicians
- Biomass Plant Technicians
- Computer Numerically Controlled Tool Operators
- First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers
- Furnace, Kiln, Oven, Drier, and Kettle Operators and Tenders
- Logistics Analysts
- Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders
- Power Distributors and Dispatchers
- Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic
- Semiconductor Processing Technicians
- Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners
- Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Determine resource needs of projects or operations”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.