Although a remote workforce has become an increasingly popular reality, many jobs require their employees to be physically present. Manufacturing and service organizations around the globe rely pretty heavily on front-line workers and technicians to be within reach – typically on the factory floor.
Acquiring the level of knowledge and experience to become an expert employee is tough. It can take years to learn the ins and outs of a company. This is why it’s critical that this valuable information can be accessible to stakeholders and future employees.
With augmented reality providing the underlying technology, today’s remote assistance solutions are seriously helping industrial organizations. Applications like Vuforia Chalk allow remote employees to see exactly what front-line workers, service technicians, and even customers are seeing through a shared video feed. Chalk even supplies the ability to make real-time sticky annotations on top of the live video – as if you were standing right there.
As existing subject matter experts increasingly consider retirement and the concept of remote work becomes more of a reality, remote assistance solutions will gain even more traction. Let’s take a look at some ways AR remote assistance can improve employee experience:
Increasingly flexible, safe work arrangements
The visual nature of AR remote assistance makes it immensely safer and easier for procedural experts to provide their knowledge to a global audience – without being physically present. With the outbreak of Coronavirus currently disrupting operations and production, and other economies potentially at risk, collaborative remote working solutions are revealing their value in entirely new ways. Enabling more flexible work arrangements can help industrial companies lessen the economic impact of global crises and keep employees who travel frequently out of harm’s way.
In service situations, AR lets a technician be present without having to travel on-site. This opens the door to self-service opportunities for customers that require advanced, guided troubleshooting.
Providing better on-the-job support and training
On the flipside, there are the front-line workers and service technicians who are still gaining first-hand experience in the field. This segment of employees require hands-on support from experienced colleagues. However, they may not always have access to an expert who can physically guide them through a procedure or task. Instead, they must wait until the person is present or resort to printed service information or work instructions, which oftentimes are difficult to interpret, inaccurate, outdated, etc.
AR remote assistance eases learning by making accessibility to on-demand experts widely available. Vuforia Chalk is also helping industrial companies improve overall metrics like first-time-fix-rates and mean-time-to-repair. The learning-by-doing approach that AR-powered training engages multiple learning systems in the brain, while contextualized microlearning opportunities help speed time-to-expertise. This means that remote assistance can also drastically improve knowledge retention.
Lastly, future frontline employees will become digital natives that are used to new hands-on learning experiences. Companies that anticipate this shift between employee demographics will be able to differentiate themselves and attract more talent in a time when skills are in high demand.