Yazaki North America to deploy DeepHow Time and Motion AI across production lines, creating a foundation for operational analysis improvement, workforce productivity, and continuous operational intelligence
ROYAL OAK, Mich. — DeepHow today announced an agreement with Yazaki North America, one of the world's largest automotive parts manufacturers, to deploy DeepHow Time and Motion AI across its production lines.
While traditional time and motion studies historically relied on manual observations with stopwatches and clipboards, modern studies are shifting toward automated, digital, and AI-powered alternatives, which dramatically reduce the time to perform the studies and eliminate the "Hawthorne effect", or a phenomenon where workers change their behavior because they know they are being watched.
Running on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 servers and NVIDIA Metropolis Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), DeepHow’s solution makes operators’ work visible as it’s naturally performed. Powered by advanced vision-language models, the system automatically captures cycle times and classifies operator actions across production cycles, including value-added, non-value-added, and waste. Next, DeepHow is launching automatic report generation and Factory Flow Intelligence powered by NVIDIA Cosmos.
DeepHow’s Time and Motion AI supports Operational Analysis Improvement, operator and station comparisons, and standard-work analysis, turning manual time studies that once took engineers weeks into insights that can be generated in minutes.
Beginning with operations in Mexico, Yazaki North America expects to reduce line-analysis time substantially, cutting its current process from weeks to days and unlocking millions of dollars in annual savings. When scaled globally, the same efficiency gains could represent tens of millions in annual value.
For Yazaki North America, the impact extends beyond faster analysis. Instead of relying on prescheduled studies a couple of times per year, teams can analyze any line on demand, identify bottlenecks sooner, and rebalance work before inefficiencies become embedded in the operation. By using AI to surface lost capacity earlier, Yazaki North America expects to improve throughput through better line balancing, reduced waste, and faster continuous improvement cycles.
The larger opportunity is the dataset this creates. Factories generate enormous amounts of machine data, but almost none about the work people perform: the sequences, motions, variations, and decision points at which most quality and throughput outcomes are determined. By capturing that work in a structured format, Yazaki North America begins to build a continuous record of how its products are made. Combined with engineering expertise and vision-language models, that record can be analyzed to improve methods, increase capacity, and identify optimization opportunities across the network.
"Operational Analysis Improvement is the starting point, not the destination," said Joseph McCorry, Head of Commercial & VP YNCA Business Units at Yazaki North America. "Combining video, vision-language models, DeepHow’s AI platform, and the ingenuity of our manufacturing teams opens the possibility of designing new production environments, lines, and factory concepts that are safer and more productive than anything in operation today."
About Yazaki North America, Inc.
A corporation in step with the world. A corporation needed by society. As part of Global Yazaki Corporation, Yazaki North America, Inc. is a leading automotive solutions supplier. The company designs and manufactures electrical distribution systems, components, electronics, and instrumentation solutions that power and connect vehicles, worldwide. Committed to moving society forward through customer-focused innovation, Yazaki delivers premium-quality, collaborative solutions, on time.
CONTACT: Daniel Curren, Corporate Communications Sr. Manager, Yazaki North America, Inc.
Daniel.Curren@us.yazaki.com
About DeepHow
DeepHow is a physical AI company for operational excellence, enabling manufacturers to capture knowledge, verify work, and optimize frontline execution at scale. Used by more than 100 customers across 1,500 locations in 28 countries, DeepHow serves manufacturers across industrial manufacturing, electronics, pharma, utilities, and food and beverage. Learn more at deephow.com.