What Are Digital Work Instructions?

What are digital work instructions?

Digital work instructions are virtual versions of traditionally paper-based instructions and manuals that are available electronic devices. Unlike the physical alternative, digital instructions are more sustainable with the elimination of paper and the improvement in worker accuracy. They also offer much more visual context and can leverage IoT data, CAD models, and even augmented reality.

Why are digital work instructions important?

Rise of Industry 4.0

As more industrial organizations embrace digital transformation and a connected workforce, it becomes the standard. Failing to take the steps needed to digitize your business and better enable your workforce leaves you in a position to be left behind.

Digitize Your Business

Employee engagement

We have access to all the information we want on our mobile devices—and employees expect that same experience at work. Digital work instructions improve employee engagement and productivity by enabling them with tools that connect them to information faster.

Engage Your Employees

Skilled labor shortage

Experts are retiring and taking their experience with them, machines and processes are more complex, and the smaller pool of new workers don’t have the skills required to do the job. Digital work instructions can bridge that gap by capturing and scaling knowledge across your organization.

Bridge the Skills Gap

Benefits of digital work instructions in the workforce

Digital work instructions can transform the way your workforce operates—from training and upskilling to on-the-job support. Building a connected workforce ensures your employees have access to all the critical information they need to do their jobs productively and efficiently.

Improve workforce productivity

Whether in the field or on the factory floor, digital work instructions connect your workers to the information they need, when and where they need it. Clear in-context guidance and 3D models improve worker productivity.

Increase quality

Exceptional product quality is imperative for both customer satisfaction and safety. Digital work instructions ensure your employees have accurate information to increase quality and reduce scrap and rework, improving sustainability.

Accelerate training

A smaller pool of new hires and a growing skills gap means that companies must transform the way they train their workers. Digital work instructions can offer additional context, data, and 3D models to reduce training time and improve retention.

Get started with AR work instructions

AR work instructions scale expert knowledge and offer visual, in-context guidance overlaid on the physical world.

Discover How

Key use cases of digital work instructions

There are many ways digital and augmented reality work instructions can transform your workforce and add value to your business.

Training

With a retiring workforce and a growing skills gap, getting new employees into production faster is more critical than ever. Traditional training methods can lack engagement or require experts to support with mentorships, taking their time away from more productive work. Digital and AR work instructions offer visual, 3D guidance that improves knowledge retention and reduces training times.

Explore AR Training

Manufacturing

Increasing throughput and reducing downtime are critical for successful manufacturing organizations—and much of this success depends on the performance of your frontline workforce. Enabling your employees with digital and AR work instructions ensures they have the tools they need to be productive and efficient.

Explore AR in Manufacturing

Quality inspection

Customer expectations for quality and safety have always been high. It’s critical that your workforce can handle the growing demand for increased production, while still offering superior quality. Digital and AR work instructions, especially when combined with artificial intelligence, can give your employees the extra guidance they need to catch errors before they become a problem.

Explore AR and AI

Field service

Improved first-time fix rates and customer satisfaction are keys to a successful service organization. Empower your field service technicians with digital instructions and AR remote support tools to offer clear guidance—ensuring they’re able to resolve problems faster, the first time.

Explore AR for Service

Case studies

Improve service efficiency

Peterbilt implemented AR to empower its technicians to navigate complex schematics and improve service quality.

Peterbilt’s Story

Increase quality

Nascote Industries leverages AR work instructions to improve quality inspections and worker training.

Read Nascote’s Story

Improve SOP compliance

STERIS embraces AR to improve customer SOP compliance on their washers with 3D loading configurations.

Read the STERIS Story

Optimize safety

Volvo harnesses AR to increase the safety of their first responders with clear X-ray views of critical components.

Read the Volvo Story

Vuforia Studio is an easy-to-use AR authoring solution that can efficiently create AR experiences by leveraging existing product data.

Vuforia Expert Capture is a SaaS AR solution that improves your workers’ efficiency with in-context procedures and AI-enhanced inspections.

Vuforia Chalk brings your workforce together for problem-solving in real time with clear AR annotations that stick to the physical world.

Top trends for AR Instructions

Read this e-book to learn about the top trends and use cases currently driving AR adoption in industrial settings based on Forrester research.

E-book

Read this e-book to learn about the top trends and use cases currently driving AR adoption in industrial settings based on Forrester research.

The Digital Mentor advantage

AR as a Digital Mentor can be used across the entire employee lifecycle for onboarding and upskilling and as an on-the-job aid.

E-book

AR as a Digital Mentor can be used across the entire employee lifecycle for onboarding and upskilling and as an on-the-job aid.

Connected Work Cell

ThingWorx Connected Work Cell (CWC) streamlines delivery of information to workers by accumulating siloed data into a simplified visual application.

Web

ThingWorx Connected Work Cell (CWC) streamlines delivery of information to workers by accumulating siloed data into a simplified visual application.

Digital work instructions FAQ

What are the characteristics of quality digital work instructions?

Easy to use: Digital work instructions should be easy to both create and use. The solution should be intuitive for frontline workers to follow along without the need for a steep learning curve.
Scalable: The ability to scale digital work instructions out across your organization is critical. This ensures all your employees have the same standard of training and instructions that meet industry best practices.
Visual aids: The main benefit of digital work instructions is the ability to add additional visual content for more context. This could be videos, schematics, or 3D models.
Secure: A secure digital work instruction solution is essential. It needs to be able to protect your company’s IP and have enterprise-level version control.
Accessible: Digital work instructions should be available on a wide range of different devices, including mobile and tablet. Additionally, digital work instructions can include audio and translations to make them more accessible to a diverse workforce.

How do you create digital work instructions?

Digital work instructions can be created from existing materials or by capturing new content from your expert workers. Existing written documentation, images, and schematics can be pulled into an authoring system to create digital versions, and newly captured content can be woven in. Many times, this captured content from experts has never been written down and can offer much more guidance than what currently exists.

Once the instructions have been authored, it’s simple to distribute and scale them out across the organization. They can be accessed on mobile devices like phones and tablets—making the information your workforce needs available to them when and where they need it.

Digital Work Instructions