3M, a global industrial manufacturer with a diverse portfolio of high-volume production lines, sought to modernize how its teams conducted time studies, ergonomics assessments, and continuous improvement (CI) initiatives. Traditional time studies and ergonomics assessments relied heavily on manual observations, spreadsheets, and pen-and-paper scoring, slowing down decision-making and limiting visibility across sites.
Continuous improvement efforts required engineers to spend hours capturing videos, tagging steps, crunching data in Excel, and manually evaluating ergonomics risks. This created three major obstacles:
3M needed a platform that was simple to deploy, easy to learn, and capable of producing objective, fast, and repeatable insights — all without major IT integration.
3M piloted Kaizen Copilot and Ergo Copilot in one facility to start, supported by on-site experts from Retrocausal who assisted with training and initial configuration.
From the start, deployment was notably smooth:
Within the pilot, the team completed a full line rebalance in under one week, going from zero familiarity with the process to a redesigned layout with measurable efficiency gains.
The ergonomics solution gained immediate traction with EHS teams. It replaced manual, pen-and-paper ergonomics assessments with automated posture scoring, risk detection, and improvement recommendations, all from a single smartphone video. The team found it extremely simple to implement, faster and more consistent results than manual methods, and it quickly became a major accelerator for identifying and resolving ergonomic risks.
Success from the initial pilot led 3M to expand Kaizen Copilot to 15 additional sites. Key outcomes included:
As 3M continues to adopt Kaizen Copilot across additional sites, the organization expects even greater gains in operational performance, worker safety, and the speed of continuous improvement.
3M is a global leader in industrial manufacturing with a vast portfolio of high-volume production lines across multiple continents. Known for its strong focus on innovation and operational excellence, 3M sought to modernize key functions including time studies, ergonomics assessments, and continuous improvement. With teams spread across dozens of facilities, the organization needed a scalable, objective, and easy-to-deploy solution that could deliver consistent insights across all sites.
Industrial Manufacturing
Improve the speed, consistency, and quality of time studies and ergonomic assessments, while accelerating continuous improvement (CI) initiatives across multiple manufacturing sites.
Brandin and his team help our customers with setting up the Pathfinder platform and getting up-to-speed on all the features and functionalities, in addition to assisting them with standardizing their processes where needed.
Brandin is a seasoned manufacturing leader, who has spent more than a decade designing and setting up assembly lines in both the US and China, optimizing them, and working with human operators to maximize productivity and quality.
Jesse works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.
Jesse has two decades of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering technology startups.
Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.
Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.
Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.
Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.
Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.
Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.
