Digitally Transforming the Frontline with 3D Guided Procedures

Immersive workspaces are a significant focus for organizations digitally transforming to respond to changing market conditions. In this article, we explore the benefits of a 3D Guided Procedure app for frontline workforce optimization.

Never before has the importance of frontline workers been more apparent. As businesses worldwide look for safer and faster ways to train new employees and upskill existing resources, digital transformation accelerates. Omni-device apps, desktop virtualization, and the growth of 5G are just a few of the resources already helping remote and frontline workers be more productive from anywhere. However, when it comes to specialized skill sets required for hands-on maintenance and repair or crucial customer-facing roles with high turnover, training costs and training time are significant hurdles.

Training Solved with an Immersive Solution

Valorem’s Immersive Team decided to tackle this problem and find faster and more efficient ways to train employees in the field. Vesper is a 3D instructional application that replaces conventional 2D paper or PDF instructions and costly in-person training with an interactive, customizable guided experience. This exciting new app allows for global reach and time savings to create, manage, and deliver work instructions by utilizing cloud-based storage.

Using an application like Vesper helps employees be more agile in training and performing maintenance-oriented tasks. It also creates an entirely paperless process for more secure and fast knowledge sharing anywhere, anytime, on any device. Understanding instructions in a 2D format for tasks in a 3D space can be time-consuming and challenging. With Vesper, companies can create a 3D Digital Twin of the training process that improves and evolves instructions and opens a broader pool of resources to alleviate problems on the front line.

Upskilling and Optimizing Resources

Employees are not always subject matter experts (SMEs) in the processes or machinery they’re handling each day. Interactive training through Vesper allows those lacking specific skillsets to access up-to-date instructions when they need them in a simplified format that reduces errors. Companies can enable front-line workers with the tools and resources they need to perform work processes like routine maintenance and repair, freeing up other costly resources to focus on more advanced or specialized equipment that requires an expert touch.

Vesper provides higher fidelity instructions to employees, lessens the reliance on niche skillsets, enhances a resources capabilities and productivity, and optimizes overall resource allocation. Industries like automotive, healthcare, education, and agriculture are examples where having an application like Vesper will help employees gain new knowledge faster and retain it better. This, in turn, creates a better employee experience to reduce training costs, employee turnover, and burnout.

Centralized and Globally Accessible

One of Vesper’s key advantages is that it helps standardize analog processes, allowing valuable tribal knowledge to be equally and easily accessible to everyone. This system can also help better document and distribute essential and pertinent information about any particular process with centralized storage and updates.

Analytics are a huge part of any company’s success. Vesper gather’s a wide range of data like time spent per step, the average number of steps completed, the number of total procedure completions, and many more. Paring these analytics with Power BI reveals trends and pain points that can then be utilized or fixed to streamline the process further.

Productivity & Quality

For fast-paced industries with production lines that are always in motion, employees and engineers need to keep up with the schedules and maintenance. Having instructions available on hand on any device reduces the amount of time an employee needs to spend on learning a procedure – thereby increasing productivity and, more importantly, the quality of their work. Also, having access to interactive, digital twins of the equipment or tooling they are working on as they are working on it reduces time to resolution and the chance of error. Cost savings, productivity enhancement, error proofing, real-time change control, operator feedback, and traceability can all have a direct impact on your bottom line and the quality of your product.

User-Experience Design

Vesper as a solution is designed for a customizable, user-friendly experience that allows you to create new processes or leverage existing ones easily. Authoring or editing new procedures can be done as fast as 5 minutes with support for PC, tablets, Android, and iPhone. Following easy-to-use prompts, users enter a title and description then import a 3D model to get started. New or edited instructions are uploaded directly to the cloud for secure, real-time backup.

Users can view and manipulate the 3D model with or without corresponding text instructions from different angles for a true-to-life visual while simultaneously viewing procedural steps if they choose. They can scroll through the entire process at their own pace, as fast or slow as needed for a one-to-one training experience. In addition, Vesper can become an AR experience if required with the appropriate device, and the application can easily adjust between devices for adding flexibility user to user.

Conclusion

An easily maintainable and digital system can help improve process flexibility and efficiency while making the workforce more adaptable and confident on various tasks. A paperless system can provide relevant information in any situation and a more easily digestible format. Ultimately, a process that prioritizes the workforce makes for a more fulfilling employee experience and positively impacts the production line while ensuring operators have the information they need and can manage their time better.

If you would like to discuss transformation and optimization opportunities for your frontline workforce, reach out to us at marketing@valorem.com to schedule a consultation with one of our immersive workspace experts.