Integrating the complete workforce on a connected platform is the right way forward to build competitive advantage in a digital future by making transformational gains in productivity, safety and quality in the Industry 4.0 revolution.
Today’s manufacturing industry is making an inevitable transition from traditional automation to a fully connected and agile future by applying new digital industrial technologies such as AI/ML, digitalization, IoT, robotic automation. Industry 4.0 is a transformative change from computerized operations to a state where all systems, human and machine, are connected, driving better decisions at operational and strategic levels leading to the next leap in productivity, safety, and quality of industrial operations.
A big and often ignored part of this transformation is the need of integrating the entire industrial workforce that comprises 80% of deskless workers who perform their daily tasks on shop floors. As enterprises move towards a high degree of adoption of new technologies to drive business excellence, this workforce will perform more knowledge-based work as compared to skill-based work.
The current state of the deskless workforce in manufacturing
Today, a roughly 500-million strong deskless workforce globally delivers value to their businesses on-field. This constitutes 80% of the overall workforce in manufacturing which is disconnected from the deskbound workforce that uses the best of technology and enterprise software such as APM, MES, IIoT, advanced simulation, and engineering suites.
These workers are the ones who execute work on the shop floors and are the least digitally empowered within the ecosystem. A typical day in the life of a deskless worker is associated with field visits, paper-based forms & documents, long unproductive in-person meetings and waiting on decisions or resources. Despite the developments in mobile technology and user experience, they trail a desk-bound worker by a huge margin in terms of workplace collaboration for real-time access to information and problem-solving. This has contributed to a saturated wrench time (on-the-job time) of 25%-35% in the industry in the past decade.
There is an absence of an effective system that drives standardization of the work at the last mile leading to high variability in the outcomes in manufacturing processes. About 72% of manufacturing tasks are performed by humans that contribute to 68% of the defects in manufacturing outcomes.
Another big shift that the industry is seeing is the changing demography of this deskless workforce. There is an aging workforce that has worked in the same organizations for decades and gained a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge. This knowledge had been shared with younger technicians in an apprenticeship model that took a long time and worked well till now as they stayed with the organizations for a long time.
The millennial generation that is going to be the majority of the workforce in a decade, is expected to have higher job mobility and parameters for job satisfaction. This problem is even more pertinent in mature economies that are facing a major shortage of trained manufacturing workers which is further amplified by the pandemic. This would require augmenting and redesigning frontline manufacturing jobs with the help of technology so that it does not take years of training for a worker to be fully productive.
Big opportunities for a connected workforce in Industry 4.0
Standardization: Work standardisation means to ensure repeatability and reproducibility of tasks performed on the shop floor and across multiple manufacturing sites. From the status quo of handing out SOPs to frontline workers who once trained on the process are rarely assessed for actual on-the-job skill is the key reason why this is difficult to achieve standardisation. Digital work instructions can transform this to a measurable and SOP driven execution paradigm. Digital Work Instructions are not just a medium for visual consumption but can be made interactive and incorporate the complex process logic to guide last-mile workers based on the conditions observed during execution.
The core technical challenges in solving this has been the sheer scale of SOPs and processes to be digitised and creating a user experience that works for the deskless worker. The current technologies can address these challenges and reduce variability in shop floor operations.
Collaboration and communication: The massive gap in how deskless industrial workers collaborate as compared to a deskbound professional demands for a major overhauling of technologies used in an industrial workplace where assets and teams are often spread over multiple locations. This can significantly improve the speed and quality of resolving issues and unplanned tasks and move the needle on metrics such as mean time to repair and first time right ratio. The new developments in industrial mobile devices and cloud have led to emergence of connected worker solutions that leverage no-code tech, AR/VR, video and document collaboration to enable real-time communication and problem solving on field.
On-the-job Training: The current model of training for industrial workers relies on certifications for technical skills such as welding and contract workmen are expected to go through a short training program for them to understand on-site safety instructions. Both the limitations of this model i.e., lack of continuous learning and missing measurement system to ascertain the skills and productivity of a worker can be addressed using continuous training and assessment for a connected workforce where job data is captured along with enabling guided execution through on-demand material at site.
Availability of this performance data including ratings, car speeds, and acceleration is the very reason companies such as Uber are able to optimise the customer experience by using ML to intelligently assess the performance of their partners.
This ecosystem is changing fast with micro-learning modules integrated in a connected worker platform that can continuously enrich the knowledge of frontline workers and improve their skill in the same way the current EdTech revolution is doing for the broader workforce. This also is aligned to the macro trend of the changing demographic of the industrial workforce and what will motivate them in a knowledge driven world.
Agility to adopt new Industry 4.0 technologies: The influx of all the new technologies in the Industry 4.0 framework requires the workforce to be empowered with tools that can help them adapt to the changing tech landscape. This can only be done with solutions that can be dynamically updated with the evolving last-mile workflows. Integrating the complete workforce on a connected platform is the right way forward to build competitive advantage in a digital future by making transformational gains in productivity, safety and quality in the Industry 4.0 revolution.
https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/next-gen-technologies/building-a-connected-workforce-for-industry-4-0/84627423
