Visualization Technologies Help Create a Smarter and Safer Workforce

In the past, technologies such as virtual, augmented and mixed reality were something out of a science fiction movie – fantasy and futuristic.  Fast forward to today and all that has changed. These revolutionary visualization technologies are now being used by industrial companies to enable digital transformation, and provide the capability to become smarter, faster and leaner.

These new visualization technologies can address a number of common industry challenges. For example, many companies are experiencing a shortage of qualified workers; aging experts are retiring; turnover rates are high; recruiting is becoming increasingly difficult and products are becoming more complex.

Thankfully, new visualization technologies can help. Organizations that have already implemented visualization technologies are seeing measurable ROI in several areas of their business, including training, manufacturing, service, and sales and marketing.

Implementing these technologies requires proper planning, including identifying the technology that will best fit your needs, as well as how it will be adapted into existing process, workflows, and systems.

What you need to consider?

PTC has identified six critical steps to help customers drive efficiency and innovation in their industrial enterprise by overlapping digital information on the physical world:

Step One: Identify the Business Case
To better understand where augmented reality (AR) can provide the greatest value to your business, you first need to identify your biggest challenges. AR offers capabilities such as remote ‘over the shoulder’ guidance, virtual demonstrations that provide full scale product visualization, and step by step procedural guidance or instructions.

Step Two: Communicate and Collaborate to Maximise Success
Having a trusted team who understands your AR goals will help you to identify and overcome potential obstacles, while providing additional project support. Project owners should get input from across the organization including both end users and subject experts. They should educate key decision makers on the value of AR solutions.

Step Three: Start Small with Short-Term Wins
According to research from IDC, the number one reason that businesses use AR is to increase manufacturing efficiency by helping workers perform their jobs more effectively. To do that, AR experiences and hardware need to be simple, straightforward and helpful to the end user.

Step Four: Gather AR Knowledge
Successfully implementing industrial AR at the enterprise level requires a mix of hardware, software, and services. AR solution providers that have experience with enterprise transformation will know exactly where and how AR can reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve training and skill adoption for new and existing workers. Read their blogs, watch their videos, and talk to their experts to understand how their solutions align with your business needs.

Step Five: Prioritize the User Experience
The AR user experience should be intuitive, instructional and easily reproduceable. It will vary depending on the use case and who the target user is, but it is important to design experiences that reflect user intent, and to involve them early and often in the testing and development phases.

Step Six: Measure the Results
Now that you have done the legwork and completed the planning and development stages for your AR program, it is time to deploy it and start measuring results – as soon as possible. Gathering a pre-AR baseline with key metrics you’ve identified will help you connect your results to immediate business value and allow you to better track progress over time.

Game-changing technology

The market for AR technology is growing, with projections for 2023 valuing it at over 18 billion U.S. dollars. The FactoryTalk InnovationSuite portfolio, powered by PTC, brings edge-to-enterprise analytics, machine learning, industrial internet of things (IIoT) and AR to industrial operations.

The Vuforia AR Enterprise Suite allows you to quickly create and deliver AR content and deploy it to the cloud or on premises. Specifically, Vuforia Expert Capture provides the capability for your workforce to capture first-person, step by step video procedures as they are performed. It is the fastest, easiest way to create powerful step-by-step instructions that help frontline workers get their jobs done quickly, safely and accurately.

Vuforia Studio allows you to create game-changing AR experiences tailored to specific audiences and deploy them via desktop, mobile and wearable devices. It provides the fastest, most convenient way for enterprises to author and publish scalable AR experiences without writing any code.  While through Vuforia Chalk, experts and technicians can use their fingers on the screen to draw digital annotations that accurately anchor to physical objects.

Creating a smarter and safer workforce

Imagine the knowledge of your entire organization applied to a specific production problem. For example, a maintenance engineer can wear a mixed-reality device as he examines a machine stoppage on a high-volume line.

Hundreds of dollars are lost each second the equipment sits idle. Until now, the engineer would be forced to solve the problem alone – slowly.

But now equipment-manufacturer intelligence can be streamed directly to the engineer’s device, even as maintenance staff at other plants help with the diagnosis. Together, they examine the machine, gather additional information, identify the underlying cause of the problem and recommend a repair solution in minutes, not days.

Mixed reality devices can also help frontline employees to safety assemble complex products. Instead of flipping through work manuals, an employee uses the device to see real time production data and safe assembly instructions as required while performing the task at hand.

Similarly, virtual reality (VR) workers can practice production tasks in a digital environment, learning how to safely manage potential problems. Machine builders can proactively monitor installed bases of equipment anywhere around the globe via VR viewing a digital twin of the equipment or even the entire production process.

This allows them to mitigate downtime events and quickly resolve incidents. By analysing real time data from machinery, they can alert customers to maintenance requirements, warranty renewals, or parts/component replacement schedules – driving new service revenues and profits.

In return, their customers enjoy improved uptime, optimized performance and faster maintenance responses.

Visualization technologies and real time production information create competitive advantages for machine builders and customers alike. If your workforce is challenged by high turnover, expert worker scarcity or increased competition, now is the time to get started with visualization technologies.