Agentic AI in Operations Management – from insight to intervention | Ep. 26

Every shift on a modern factory floor throws off more signal than any team could ever read.
Machines, quality checks, maintenance logs, operator comments, all of it lands in systems of record, and almost all of it goes unread.

Managers make do with a handful of dashboards while the answers to their most expensive problems sit in the data, waiting for someone with the time to go looking. Most of the time, nobody does.

In this S&OP Masterclass from Roima, host Søren Hammer Pedersen sits down with Rafael Amaral to look at what changes when agentic AI is pointed at that data.

Rafael has spent around 20 years in manufacturing technology, split between supply chain planning and manufacturing execution systems. He is CTO and co-founder at TilliT, now part of Roima, where he leads the engineering team behind the TilliT stack, a cloud native MES application.

The conversation moves from planning, the subject of the previous episode, onto the shop floor, where the data is densest and the losses are most expensive. Rafael explains Aura, an agentic AI toolset that reads factory data, forms its own hypotheses, writes its own queries, and returns findings a manager can act on. Think of it as a small team of data scientists that never sleeps, correlating things a human would rarely think to compare.

You will come away understanding how the analyst bottleneck really works, why the most valuable factory insights are the ones nobody has time to find, and what it looks like to walk in on a Monday morning to a board of evidence-backed recommendations rather than a fresh round of firefighting.


In this episode

• The "data is gold, so where is my shovel" problem with systems of record like MES and ERP
• How Aura forms its own hypotheses, writes its own queries, and refines its analysis with no human in the loop
• The agent swarm explained as a mini factory, a plant manager agent directing maintenance, quality and operations specialists
• The CFO agent that adds your labour and utility costs so findings arrive with the financials already worked out
• Why the second wave of AI in supply chain is one professionals cannot afford to sit out

Chapters03:18 What agentic AI and Aura are
04:40 The problem of siloed factory data
06:41 A team of data scientists on demand
12:43 Correlating machines with operator processes
14:38 The agent swarm as a mini factory
19:08 What you get on Monday morning
20:22 Concrete findings from the floor
24:15 The CFO agent and the financials
27:32 The second wave of AI in supply chain

About Rafael Amaral
Rafael Amaral is CTO and co-founder at TilliT, now part of Roima, where he heads the engineering team behind the TilliT stack, a cloud native MES application. He has worked in manufacturing technology for around 20 years, with the first half of his career in supply chain planning and the second half in manufacturing execution systems. He has spent that time close to the shop floor, from his first TilliT customer's plant manager to the breweries and wineries he happily admits a soft spot for. His current focus is Aura, the agentic AI toolset that he describes as changing the game for how much value teams can pull out of their own manufacturing data.

Contact and follow
Questions, topic ideas, or guest suggestions: podcast@roimaint.com
Find more episodes and get in touch through the Roima website.



Production
This podcast is brought to you by Roima.
This podcast is produced by Montanus.