The pandemic and the Great Resignation have left behind a massive void of job vacancies in every industry. The manufacturing sector is grappling to fill its vacancies. Manufacturers seek innovative ways to attract a fresh workforce and retain existing employees. According to Quality Magazine, 90% of manufacturers plan to maintain, attract, and grow their workforce by adopting technology that supports human workers. One such empowering technology is Digital Work Instructions (DWI). It streamlines the work instructions from static documentation to personalized and advanced digital work instructions. DWI empowers the workforce to optimize productivity. Digitizing work instructions also attracts new talent and helps retain the existing ones. This digital transformation gives manufacturers the much-needed competitive edge needed to stay ahead.
What and why: Digital Work Instructions
Work instructions are the fundamental documents that standardize and explain work operations to the operators. Traditional paper-based ones can slow down the pace of your manufacturing unit. How? Simply because they are lengthy, can be strenuous to access, become outdated soon, and are cumbersome for frontline workers to comply with. In the age of personalization and collaboration, why will work instructions be left behind?
Digital Work Instructions make the process seamless with visual demonstrations, how-to videos, and important resources at your fingertips. Instead of lengthy text-based manuals and SOPs, DWI synchronizes real-time information and gives easy-to-understand visual aids and contextual information. Having it enables frontline workers to conduct industrial tasks efficiently and much faster. When managed and delivered via a connected worker solution, it can double up as a compliance and quality assurance tool as well. The frontline workforce also gets better control over their tasks with access to enterprise data and automated insights. So, while 65% of manufacturers grapple with filling job vacancies, empowering the workers with the right technology, such as digital work instructions, can benefit all.
The top benefits of having Digital Work Instructions
As discussed, DWI can improve employee engagement and attract the workforce to the manufacturing sector struggling with labor shortage issues. Let us find out the top benefits DWI brings to the sector.
- Standardizes work
With paper-based work instructions, maintaining a standardized way of work in a manufacturing unit can be challenging. Whenever it comes to making a change or updating the documentation, it has to be done factory-wide- requiring printing and distributing many stacks of paper. But then, guaranteeing that the outdated documents are not in use is also tricky. This situation becomes critical if the update is important for safety and compliance.
You can update Digital Work Instructions without any hassles and implement them factory-wide instantaneously. The system tracks the changes and triggers the approval flow channels, ensuring proper compliance. The operators get a notification implying the change and follow the new instructions to work.
- Retains tribal knowledge
Tribal knowledge is juicy, non-documented knowledge within a company typically shared among the members by word-of-mouth. It is the secret sauce that is held by the frontline workers and the operators in their heads.
Again, a significant challenge in the sector is the industry’s aging workforce and the rapid retirement of baby boomers. It is vital to capture their invaluable expertise and insightful knowledge and not let it go in vain. While capturing that is challenging, Digital Work Instructions can help retain this tribal knowledge easily. A user-friendly application can enable frontline workers to give their input and preserve this ‘tribal’ knowledge easily without any hassles.
- Smoother training and onboarding
There can be a large variety of machinery found in a manufacturing plant, such as welding arcs, electronic lathes, assembling tools, and more. Traditional text-based instructions and manuals make the training very cumbersome. Instead, organizations can opt for Digital Work Instructions with images and videos for each machine to train the operators. From assembly to each machine operation step, DWI can demonstrate each step with enhanced clarity.
Especially in training, having step-by-step visual guidance enables trainees to understand the procedures involved easily. Moreover, accessibility is easy and quick. They can reach out for it whenever they have a doubt. That makes DWI efficient, facilitating smooth and faster training. For the trainees, DWI also eliminates the need for shadowing an experienced machine operator as a well-designed visual and video work instruction explains it all, allowing the new operator to perform autonomously.
- Agility
Machines, manufacturing plants, and their IT systems constantly change and become complicated. There are unpredictable supply chain disruptions, higher demand for customizations in production, and more shifts in the entire manufacturing chain. Enterprises need to be agile to thrive in this competition. DWI enables enterprises to be agile. The machine operators and frontline workers, whether experienced or new, can learn to operate and do unfamiliar procedures quickly, sometimes even without training. Digital Work Instructions are, in fact, easy to follow and practice. As a result, DWI makes the front liners agile and, correspondingly, makes the manufacturer agile – enabling them to adapt to the changing trends faster.
- Capturing data
The machine operators can record data easily with DWI. They can do that directly from their smartphone or tablet. With traditional work instructions, manually recording data was challenging and error-prone. DWI software, such as the Proceso App, is powered by AI and features data analytics. The operators can check the timing, quality issues, and other aspects based on the data input. The data insights can help in further streamlining and improving the processes.
- Continuous improvement
Digital Work Instructions are a good data source for targeting continuous team improvement. When you integrate DWI with the Connected Worker Platform, the managers can monitor the duration of an entire work instruction execution and its component steps. This allows the supervisors and managers to have a bird’s eye view of the production process and the ability to zoom in and identify the inefficiencies of a work instruction or a process. The results are reduced or minimal downtime and the ability to improve the processes continuously.
How can the Proceso App help you?
As a manufacturer, you need to choose a DWI solution that aligns with your enterprise’s needs. The Proceso App is a unified solution to meet the needs of your manufacturing workforce. It streamlines the entire floor’s operations with digital and guided work instructions, access to real-time data, safety checklists, audits, and compliance. Additionally, from the frontline workforce to managers, supervisors, and business executives, it caters to all the personas in a manufacturing enterprise. Moreover, it is a tried and tested app that manufacturers have embraced worldwide, transforming their work instructions and overall efficiencies.
Being AI-powered and a no-code solution, Proceso App is the go-to app for your manufacturing business.
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