What is digitization in manufacturing and why is it important?
Digitization in manufacturing is the act of transforming paper-based and manual systems into digital formats by leveraging a variety of connected technologies. For many companies, it’s the first step in their digital transformation strategies.
With the pressures of a retiring workforce, increased demand, and ever-growing quality standards, manufacturers need to adopt new digital strategies to compete—or risk falling behind.
What are the challenges of digitization in manufacturing?
Upfront costs
When compared to written documents and manual data collections, digital solutions come with a higher upfront investment. However, the inefficiency and productivity loss that result from traditional methods impact your bottom line—costing your business more each year than the price of adopting digital alternatives.
Workforce resistance
There’s no denying that change can be difficult, even when necessary. But the transition isn’t as disruptive as it appears. Our world is turning to more digital solutions every day from online ordering to virtual doctor visits. Your workforce is already making these adoptions, and many new hires are now expecting these technologies at work. Involving your workforce in your digitization strategy can help ensure you’re choosing the right technologies for your business.
Time investment
Transitioning from paper-based methods to digital solutions can be time-consuming. However, there are many solutions like augmented reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), and product lifecycle management (PLM), which can connect to each other and to your existing systems to easily create digital dashboards and work instructions. This can significantly cut down on the implementation time and get you to value faster.
How can augmented reality help with digitizing manufacturing?
Transitioning to digital work instructions
The prospect of changing over your company’s paper-based work instructions to digital alternatives can be daunting. Fortunately, there are augmented reality (AR) solutions that make it easier—and offer simple ways to enhance those instructions with 3D elements. Using an AR headset, expert technicians can create work instructions from a first-person view as they do their job. Videos, images, and audio can all be captured and easily edited to create AR work instructions.
AR remote support
When you have a technician out in the field, or your maintenance team is trying to repair a machine on the factory floor, time is critical. Instead of flipping through pages of instructions a technician can simply call an expert on a mobile device and share their screen. The expert can annotate instructions on the screen that attach to the physical environment, making complicated instructions easy to follow.
In-context training
The ever-growing complexity of machines paired with the retirement of expert employees leaves many companies in a difficult position. Training new workers is no easy task—but augmented reality makes it more effective by enabling learning through doing. AR solutions can help capture the knowledge of experts and scale it out across your organization, equipping your new hires with immersive, accurate training instructions they can continue to use on the job.
Knowledge capture and transfer
Augmented reality solutions can capture the knowledge of your expert employees from a first-person perspective. This captured expertise can be used to create work instructions and training experiences that can be easily scaled across your organization.
Moving to digital work instructions
Enable your frontline workers with accurate, contextual instructions that can leverage existing 3D data.