Implement design or process improvements
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 14 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| 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 14 occupations that perform it.
- Make decisions that balance the perspectives of private citizens, public officials, and party leaders.
- Optimize operational costs and productivity consistent with safety and environmental rules and regulations.
- Develop new visual design concepts and modify concepts based on stakeholder feedback.
- Develop or implement engineering solutions to clean up industrial accidents or other contaminated sites.
- Implement methods and procedures for disposition of discrepant material and defective or damaged parts, and assess cost and responsibility.
- Identify opportunities or implement changes to improve manufacturing processes or products or to reduce costs, using knowledge of fabrication processes, tooling and production equipment, assembly methods, quality control standards, or product design, materials and parts.
- Specify system components or direct modification of products to ensure conformance with engineering design, performance specifications, or environmental regulations.
- Plan or implement fuel cell cost reduction or product improvement projects in collaboration with other engineers, suppliers, support personnel, or customers.
- Develop or implement operating methods or procedures.
- Implement or test design solutions.
- Assist engineers to implement electromechanical designs in industrial or other settings.
- Develop or implement programs to address problems related to production, materials, safety, or quality.
- Implement new or enhanced methods or processes for the processing, testing, or manufacture of nanotechnology materials or products.
- Plan and modify product configurations to meet customer needs.
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 judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
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.
Generalist agents
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
14 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Automotive Engineers
- Civil Engineers
- Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians
- Fuel Cell Engineers
- Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Industrial Engineers
- Industrial Production Managers
- Legislators
- Manufacturing Engineers
- Mechanical Engineers
- Mechatronics Engineers
- Nanotechnology Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Sales Engineers
- Web and Digital Interface Designers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Implement procedures or processes”. 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.