How Industrial Organizations Can Thrive in Today’s Turbulent Economy

Summary

Economists warn it may be decades until the global supply chain returns to “normal” conditions. From chip shortages to record-high prices on consumer goods, many industrial businesses have been forced to shift several aspects of their business to stay competitive.
 
While we come to accept the reality that time may not heal all economic wounds onset by the pandemic, we can focus on ways to turn these challenges into opportunities. In many cases, this calls for increased efficiencies in areas like resource planning, product innovation, analytics reporting and so on. This particular article will focus on optimizing elements of workforce productivity to help maximize the effectiveness of an enterprise’s people resources. By pushing for more significant, widespread digital change within people-centric areas of a business, the enterprise can maximize efficiencies despite persisting external instability.
 

A call for workforce optimization

Frontline workforce issues continue to be one of the top strategic priorities in industrial operations, specifically addressing a severe talent shortage—which could cost the U.S. economy as much as $1 trillion by 2030 if left unabated. Skilled workers are retiring and taking years of knowledge with them, and as a result, plant-level operators are unable to easily and quickly access information needed to make good decisions. To combat these challenges, industrial organizations must leverage digital technologies to maximize the power, safety and efficiency of their existing workforce. Optimizing digital workforce capabilities is already enabling global enterprises to create flexible and scalable facilities of the future, focused on rapid response to market demands, streamlined production technologies and adaptable manufacturing environments.
 
Digital workforce optimization can help organizations refine worker training and performance by improving visibility on data and analytics. This can help businesses better understand what went wrong, how to fix it and ways to improve in the future. Tactically, workforce optimization helps organizations streamline maintenance and training in remarkable ways.
 

Maintenance

An organization’s workforce is key to keeping a plant safe, productive and efficient. Organizations can empower all types of workers—from entry-level to seasoned—to speed changeovers and repairs and improve ramp-up time with effective knowledge transfer capabilities. Workforce optimization software equips workers with analytics-powered, role-based tools to help them perform better.
 
Seasoned workers are valuable, but when there is an issue, they are expected to drop everything to help maintenance. With digital workforce optimization tools, these seasoned workers can guide maintenance workers through steps remotely and in real-time, even allowing for maintenance teams to save videos for future visual reference.
 
Augmented reality (AR) is another useful tool that is helping improve maintenance efficiencies. With AR-based tools, maintenance can lay digital parts over actual parts and review before-and-after stats to help improve maintenance procedures in the future. Optimizing maintenance workflows leads to faster problem resolution, minimal downtime, increased worker safety and lower manufacturing costs.
 

Training

Digital workforce optimization tools can help industrial businesses achieve greater productivity, lower costs, increase flexibility and agility and improve safety and compliance by providing comprehensive training solutions. Many new employees are still relying on paper manuals and static training videos to learn key components of their job. This can lead to errors and slow onboarding. Role-based tools and diagnostic information can help empower workers to perform tasks more efficiently. Digital workforce software presents unified operator screens to visually guide frontline workers through proper assembly and task completion.
 
This same type of technology can help managers and line supervisors work more efficiently as well. Many industrial companies still use shift reports that must be pulled manually by logging into multiple systems, consuming valuable hours that should really be spent on the plant floor. Digital workforce software gives these supervisors consolidated production data from a tablet or monitor anywhere they need it. They can easily monitor production without waiting for a report and can make informed decisions based on real-time data without the need to step away from the plant floor.
 
On top of maintenance and training, workforce optimization tools can help spearhead efforts in areas like talent retention and product innovation due to its ability to present workers with the most accurate, real-time, role-based data and analytics needed to do their job at their very best.
 
While some companies struggle to navigate the changing dynamic of the modern supply chain, many organizations are staying ahead of the curve by optimizing the day-to-day. In today’s world, that means driving measurable workforce value by leveraging data and analytics to bring better insights throughout the operations lifecycle and having the right technology and expertise to allow for the safe and secure sharing of data across an enterprise.