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Digitalisation, downtime and increasing consumer demand are forcing businesses to think differently and find new ways of meeting both employee and business expectations for the year ahead. One sector that will see huge disruption is manufacturing. For example, the aerospace industry alone is predicted to build approximately 37,000 new aircraft over the next twenty years, and recent research from IHS Markit stated that global manufacturing PMI had hit a nine-month high. This coupled with the target to save costs year-on-year, is placing a lot of pressure on businesses.
One main outgoing cost that is rarely accounted for is unplanned IT failure. In the manufacturing sector alone, these failures are costing over £38 billion every single year, according to Deloitte. This figure is huge and will have long-lasting damage on a business if they don’t have the strategy in place to cope with it.
One key way to tackle this problem? Augmented Reality (AR). By using AR, manufacturers and other businesses can react quickly to downtime issues and fix problems remotely, and more crucially, in real time.
Create a strong AR workforce
One of the major contributors to manufacturers prolonging machine downtime is the growing shortage of skilled IT experts. Staff on the ground have to wait for specialist technicians to manage problems. With AR, they can easily receive help from experts in remote locations, no matter where they may be, and in real time. Democratising technology can help give people access to solutions which solve day-to-day issues quickly — and AR plays a big part in this in the manufacturing sector.
Critically, AR aids valuable knowledge sharing and mitigates language barriers, as workers can use display screens and 3D annotations to explain and communicate with each other visually. Employees can contact experts in other countries — which is especially useful if the developer settings are in another language. In addition, it enables employees to see live demonstrations of how to run complex maintenance checks and identify less-obvious problems in the system. This has three main benefits: upskill the existing workforce, boost productivity, and drastically decrease the longitude of machine downtime.
Stick to Plan A(R)
AR can also help in more recent developments, such as the proactive maintenance process. Thanks to advanced analytics, manufacturers are able to identify potential errors in the supply chain and use remote experts to guide on-the-ground workers to fix problems. Small maintenance errors are often neglected. Which shouldn’t be the case, because neglected risks becoming a major threat to the manufacturing line in the long run.
Identifying issues as early as possible is key to preventing supply chain disruption and prolonging machine life spans which both assist in reducing costs. Using AR remote access tools to take a proactive approach to machine failure enables manufacturers to keep on track with performance and remain efficient. Ultimately, reducing the chance of having to fall to plan B in the instance of a major downtime incident.
Fundamentally, AR is a crucial tool for efficiency in sectors such as manufacturing. It accelerates user collaboration and facilitates shorter communication chains. If companies want to drive growth by managing consumer demand and cutting down on costs, they can no longer afford to dismiss the importance of democratising technologies such as AR. It’s the future!
