Home
>
Ashley Brinegar, Chief Data and Digital and Analytics Officer (CDAO), PCC Metals and Forgings

Ashley Brinegar, Chief Data and Digital and Analytics Officer (CDAO), PCC Metals and Forgings

Describe your career to date

My career to date has been the result of a series of questions and desire to connect the engineering of aerospace parts to the manufacturing to the data that describes it all. My degrees are in materials engineering and I was very interested in understanding how the manufacturing impacts the metal and how the supply chain works to delivery good parts.

Along the way, I fell in love with Lean Six Sigma to use data to see patterns and understand the people aspect of manufacturing. Then came data! Anyone in Six Sigma understands the need for data but the science of understanding how designing for data use/analytics and the supply chain required to move data from raw material to valuable products was eye opening. I have the pieces now to effectively transform business processes and outcomes.

How are you developing the data literacy of your organization, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?

Our focus as a team has been training and development, both on the technical side of data as well as the soft skills. We, as a team, need to understand the business and the problems we are solving with data; therefore, we attend staff meetings, participate in daily standup meetings and we build products iteratively for frequent feedback and adjustment loops.

I have had the team go through change management and presentation skill training so we can effectively communicate with our organization. I found data literacy works best for us if we use the language of the business and the shop floor and through fast iterations, so the teams have something to touch and see. As we are presenting workflows, analytics, and reports, we start teaching things like data quality and impact through those conversations. This has helped with adoption and speed to value.

What role do you play in building and delivering conventional artificial intelligence solutions, including machine learning models? Are you also involved in your organization’s adoption of generative AI?

We are in the early stages of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). For machine learning, this is directly under the team’s purview. We follow a Lean and Six Sigma methodology for project selection and to ensure we know the problem to solve. This provides clarity on the data we need, provides context to the dataset, and enables the data scientist to move faster in machine learning development and testing.

The organization launched a generative AI task force at the end of 2023. I sit on the executive committee and a member of my team is on the working team.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

A vision for data was the first thing I created upon taking the role. The vision for what I wanted to achieve started years prior in previous organizations; I was trying to achieve certain objectives with aircraft engine rotating parts, and I realized what I needed required the supply base to come along on the journey.

I joined PCC with the intent to build a robust digital twin of our melt and forgings practices so that PCC and our customers have more insight into the metallurgy for these products. Not only does that impact flight safety but it improves internal shop processes, driving millions of dollars in bottom line savings to the company. The vision was then broken down in phases and tactical actions, focused on speed to value.

Ashley Brinegar
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (USA)
100 Brands 2024 (USA)

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
Registered office: 6^th Floor Charlotte Building, 17 Gresse St. London, W1T 1QL

Ashley Brinegar, Chief Data and Digital and Analytics Officer (CDAO), PCC Metals and Forgings

Join our membership network of over 250 global senior data and AI leaders.

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.