Eight questions about your own floor, then a ranked shortlist of AI use cases ordered for the foundation you actually have. Built for the person who signs off on the spend, not the person who has to make the demo work.
Read this first · What this is for
Most AI pitches into a plant are sold in the wrong order. A vendor leads with the use case that demos best, not the one your floor can support today. Buy on that basis and you pay for a tool that has no data to stand on, and the pilot quietly dies. This tool inverts the pitch: it starts from what your plant already has and tells you which use cases can actually go first.
There are no invented numbers on this page. The ranking is built entirely from your own answers. The only external figure is a public rule with a link. We are not going to quote you an industry average, because an average across other people's plants tells you nothing about the order to spend your own capital in.
The decision you are actually making
The question in front of an owner or a CEO is rarely which AI is best in the abstract. It is where the first dollar goes, and in what order the rest follow, so that spend one funds spend two instead of stranding it. Get the sequence right and each phase pays for the next. Get it wrong and you own a pilot that impresses in a conference room and touches nothing on the floor.
The variable that decides the order is not the model. It is your data foundation. An AI use case can only run on data a system can read, and on most high-production floors a large share of the week still starts as handwriting at a station, on batch sheets, quality checks, and downtime logs that no software sees until someone re-keys them. A use case that depends on data you do not yet capture cannot go first, however badly you want the outcome. So the ranking below weighs two things together: the cost line you most want to move, and whether the foundation to move it already exists.
How the shortlist is built
Answer the eight questions honestly about a normal production week, not a good one. The tool scores six use cases, AI scheduling, predictive maintenance, quality and scrap detection, AI search, back-office automation, and traceability, against your answers, and returns them ranked. The full ranking, the reason for the order, and what each use case needs from your data foundation first go to your work email and open here on the page.
0 of 8 answered
Question 01 · Industry
What kind of plant is this?
Question 02 · Paper
How much of the week still starts on paper?
Question 03 · Machines
Do your machines share their data?
Question 04 · Cost
Which cost line would you most want to move this year?
Question 05 · Scheduling
How is the production schedule built today?
Question 06 · Trace
What is your traceability pressure?
Question 07 · Knowledge
When someone needs an answer, where does it live?
Question 08 · Office
Where does the office team's time go?
Answer all eight to unlock your ranking
Your shortlist is ready
For your plant, the use case to run first is your top pick.
That is the top of a shortlist of six, ranked for the foundation you described. Enter your work email below and the full ranking opens here: why they fall in this order, and exactly what each one needs from your data foundation before it can run.
The full ranking
Open your ranked shortlist.
You have seen your top pick. Enter your work email and the full ordered list of all six use cases opens right here, with the reasoning and the foundation each one needs, and a copy goes to your inbox.
All six use cases ranked in order for your plant, not a generic list
Why they fall in that order, tied to your own answers
What each one needs from the data foundation before it can run
Work email only. We use it to send your ranking and nothing else you did not ask for. Unsubscribe anytime.
Unlocked. Your full ranked shortlist is open below, and a copy is on its way to your inbox. If you checked the box, a Harmony engineer will reach out to walk it with you.
Your ranking, in order.
Traceability timing is set by public rule: 21 CFR 1.1455, FDA Food Traceability Rule.
Why order beats appetite: the three phases
Whatever your shortlist says, it maps onto the same three phases every plant moves through. The point of the ranking is not to skip the foundation. It is to spend on the foundation in the order that unlocks the use case you actually want, so the money compounds instead of stranding.
Phase 1
Lay the Data Foundation · Digitization
Every pen-and-paper record digitized at the station, every software system connected, and all of the data unified into one live layer. The digital transformation starts here.
Phase 2
Production & Operations Scale
Factory operations turn proactive: live sensors and machine data, the AI scheduling board, predictive maintenance before failure.
Phase 3
AI-Native Operations
Agents across the floor and the back office act on the live layer: quality signals, reports, copilots. Humans approve.
Want to see where your foundation stands before you sequence the spend? The AI Readiness Checklist is the plain yes-or-no version, and the AI Readiness Assessment returns a score and your next three actions. For a dollar figure on what the gaps cost, the ROI Calculators & Tools price it on your own inputs.
Want this ranking pressure-tested on your floor?
A Harmony pilot starts by walking your plant with forward-deployed engineers and sequencing exactly this, Phase 1 first, because that is the order it has to happen in. Working software by the end of the pilot, a fixed one-time cost of $15,000 to $20,000, in four to six weeks. See what the live layer looks like.
