Appendix A of the book · Readiness Assessment

Is your plant ready for a first IRIS pilot?

An honest ten-minute self-assessment to find out whether your plant is ready for a first IRIS pilot, and where it makes sense for you to start. It is not an exam and there is no passing grade: it is a map. A low score doesn't rule you out; it tells you where to come in.

How to use it

The six dimensions

1 Capture of reality chapters 2 and 6

I know where my plant's critical information lives and I can get to it, even if today it sits in a hand-kept Excel, on the panel of an old machine, or in a veteran's head.

2 A clear Pareto chapter 10

I know which SKUs, lines, or product families concentrate the bulk of my production and my cost: my 20% that moves the 80%.

3 The owner with the right incentive chapter 11

There is a person in the plant whose success depends on the operation genuinely improving, and who would lead the pilot without fear of what the system might bring to light.

4 The baseline chapters 10 and 11

I measure — or can measure — how things stand today (OEE, scrap, cycle times, defects) at the exact point where I want to improve. I know where I'm starting from.

5 The machine network, out of harm's way chapter 7

My OT network is isolated from the outside, and I have someone to talk to about security when needed, without that becoming a blanket blocker on progress.

6 A healthy expectation chapters 10 and 11

I'm looking to solve one concrete, bounded pain — not to transform the whole factory at once, or to build a demo to impress a boardroom.

Your score

— out of 30

Answer all six statements to see your level.

How to read your result

6–11

Starting point

The ground isn't prepared yet, and that's fine: almost everyone starts here. Don't build a big project. Pick the most concrete pain you can think of and start with a pilot that closes itself inside one box — a self-contained Edge, like the paint line in chapter 9. That kind of pilot doesn't need half the factory integrated to deliver a result everyone can see.

12–17

Under way

You have a foundation. What's usually missing is choosing well where to strike: nail down your Pareto (dimension 2) and assemble the mixed team of plant people plus AI experts described in chapter 10. Measure the "before" before touching anything.

18–23

Ready

You're ready for a pilot with a brain: not just an Edge that sees and acts, but Connect capturing what nobody was crossing and agents reasoning over it. This is where the return really starts to show.

24–28

Mature

You have what it takes to scale from the gravel road to the highway: standardize what worked and roll it out to more lines, ideally with your own people already trained. Watch out for antipattern 6: don't smother the system in validations that add nothing.

29–30

Benchmark

Your plant can be one of the ones that set the sector's standard. The challenge is no longer starting — it's not letting up: keep drilling into jidokas and raise the bar before the competitor across the road does.

Three warnings before you start

  1. A low score on dimension 1 is not a problem — it's the opportunity. The more of your information lives on islands, the more IRIS has to work with. What kills a pilot isn't having Excels: it's not knowing you have them.
  2. Dimension 3 is the one that sinks the most projects. Without an owner with the right incentive, the best pilot gets buried. If that box is a 1 or a 2, fix it before anything else.
  3. This map measures your plant, not your ambition. The right pilot fits where you are today, not where you'd like to be.

Got it.

We'll send you your detailed assessment within 48 hours, with the pilot that best fits your starting position.

See the 6 real examples

Get your result and the recommended first pilot

We'll send you your score by dimension, the level you land on, and which pilot has the best return for your starting position.

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IRIS hardcover, English edition

This is Appendix A of IRIS

The full assessment, the five levels and the path of a pilot — immersion, first value, demonstration, expansion — are in IRIS, by Sebastian J. Brau, with a foreword by Jay Lee (University of Maryland).

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