Claire is a Content Marketing Manager on PTC's Commercial Marketing team. She creates content in support of PTC products and solutions.
In the latest episode of Analyst Insights, “The State of Industrial Augmented Reality,” industry experts discuss current trends and look to the future of augmented reality (AR). The conversation features PTC’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vuforia, JJ Lechleiter, and guest speaker, Forrester Research’s Vice President and Principal Analyst, Paul Miller. Throughout their conversation, they share their insights on industrial AR and the economy, AR use cases, and AR deployment in the age of enterprise SaaS and the digital thread.
How is AR valuable to the workplace?
- Augmented reality in the workplace is helping companies do more with their investment, empower their workforce, and control costs.
- Organizations that focus their AR use cases on areas with the biggest opportunities for scale and value realize enterprise-wide benefits.
- AR can be combined with other solutions and systems to create a digital thread of data for deeper understanding of service.
- Opting for a SaaS AR solution can simplify deployment and software management—ensuring your capabilities are up-to-date and secure so your workforce can focus on their jobs
Going beyond trends and improving workforce efficiency with AR
Lechleiter and Miller’s conversation raises important considerations about AR implementation. Success requires the right approach (and a knowledgeable partner with domain expertise) to keep pace with digital transformation—and your competition. It starts by identifying valuable use cases that focus on empowering your workforce and unlocking innovation.
While manufacturers face pressure to control costs, the worker shortage and a growing skills gap underline the need to invest in your workforce. When it comes to justifying that investment, finding a solution that addresses multiple use cases is critical.
“The current economic situation is complicated and challenging. Manufacturers around the world are really struggling to cope with the environment they find themselves in. Energy prices are scary. Particularly here in Europe, we struggle to find enough workers to fill the roles we want filled, and it’s getting harder and harder to raise money when you want to invest heavily. However, augmented reality is one of those areas where we’re seeing some interesting investments.”
—Paul Miller, The State of Industrial Augmented Reality
AR technology provides the functionality and flexibility to help manufacturing and service organizations:
- Improve remote support for service technicians and customers.
- Provide real-time information to field service employees, when and where they need it.
- Digitize work instructions for improved efficiency and scalability.
- Connect to other systems—such as service, manufacturing, and management systems—for streamlined insights.
- Create a digital thread of data for easily accessible, on-demand 3D content.
Empower your workforce with tools and insights
An empowered workforce is the key to more efficient training, service, and inspection. Augmented reality in the workplace provides the detail, clarity, context, and scale that paper-based manuals and 2D instructions lack. While traditional instructions are cumbersome, overcomplicated, and quickly outdated, AR training experiences and work instructions engage employees, accelerate learning, and improve on-the-job safety.
Empowered employees create additional business benefits across service and maintenance, quality inspections, operations, and even the customer experience.
“We’re seeing augmented reality being used to fill gaps in the workforce, to accelerate training, and to really give those field service workers superpowers. It allows them to do more with available time and available effort."
—Paul Miller, The State of Industrial Augmented Reality
Deploy AR with an eye toward innovation
Finally, keeping up with the competition requires an innovative approach to AR deployment. More and more manufacturers are recognizing the value of SaaS for out-of-the-box functionality, faster implementation, and improved scalability. According to the experts at PTC and Forrester, finding a partner in SaaS AR gets you all these benefits with even simpler implementation. With an AR partner, your workforce can focus on their jobs—instead of complicated software updates and patches.
“Where we do see the adoption of SaaS today is where you start to see those benefits, where those benefits of SaaS are highly valued. Having always up-to-date information; new functionality the customers need as we’re interfacing with them shows up and can be provided immediately; where device flexibility is important; providing that good user experience across tablets, or PCs, or even digital eyewear in our case.”
—JJ Lechleiter
3 ways AR is transforming the workplace
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Skills Training
AR enables any employee to learn new equipment and develop skills more easily and efficiently—whether they’re a new hire or an expert—by eliminating the need for cumbersome and overcomplicated paper-based learning materials. AR training also frees up time your subject matter experts would’ve normally spent helping new hires.
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Interactive and Remote Instructions
AR transforms 2D work instructions into interactive, 3D instructions that can be accessed on the user’s tablet or mobile device. These instructions can be shared across the organization and updated at any time—without the hassles and costs that are normally associated with the distribution of paper-based materials.
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Visualization of Information
AR empowers frontline workers to learn equipment and procedures through clear, detailed content in the context of the physical environment. This format is particularly useful for visual learners.
Learn more about the future of augmented reality from industry experts
Implementing augmented reality in the workplace today comes with many considerations, from investing in the technology to rolling out real-life use cases. Watch Lechleiter and Miller’s full conversation and hear their perspectives on how leading manufacturers are getting the most out of their AR investments.
Watch the Full Conversation
Get more key insights from Lechleiter and Miller.
Watch the Video