Automation gets sold as the answer before anyone's asked the right questions. A vendor shows up with a robot arm demo, it looks impressive, and suddenly that's the plan. But the machines and robots on the floor don't care how good the demo looked. They care whether they match the actual process, the actual parts, and the actual environment they're being asked to work in.

That's why assessment has to come before automation, not after.

Walk onto a plant floor during a catastrophic failure and you'll see two reactions play out, often on the same team.

One looks like chaos: people moving fast, shouting over each other, grabbing tools they don't need. It looks like urgency. It isn't.