As a small or mid-sized manufacturer, it can often feel like you’re operating in a bind: to survive, succeed, and grow, you need to advance your digital transformation and embrace new technology. Yet you’re working with more limits on your time, resources, and budget than larger manufacturers, while still needing to compete with them.
You also need to ensure your employees are ready and on board. As manufacturing continues to evolve and digitize, their jobs will change. A crucial part of your success in adopting new technology, and driving results from it, is empowering your employees’ growth from “semi-skilled manufacturing labor to highly skilled connected knowledge workers.”
These workers are known as “the connected workers” in Industry 4.0, and they’re a crucial piece to digital transformation, especially for SMEs. By integrating your employees and their work with digital, connected tools, you can quickly advance your digital transformation and accelerate key benefits, including:
- Empowering better and more effective communication
- Enabling data-driven decision making
- Improving safety and reducing errors
- Supporting a more flexible, and agile workforce
- Increasing productivity and efficiency
What is a connected worker?
In manufacturing, the connected worker–also referred to as “the augmented worker”–is immersed in the shop floor environment, relying on a suite of digital tools to both carryout tasks and communicate with their team.
These tools empower connected workers with seamless access to real-time data, efficient tracking capabilities, robust communication features, and streamlined knowledge transfer. Key functionalities include:
- Mobile Devices and Apps: Mobile devices are an important tool enabling remote access to real-time data, communication with supervisors and team members, task management, and shared information–and a good place to start.
- Wearables and IoT Devices: Enabled with sensors to collect data, wearables make it possible for workers themselves to contribute to metrics–whether it’s safety information, including health data, location-based monitoring, or performance data.
- Digital Workflows: Paperless documentation such as digital forms help streamline operations.
- Collaboration and Communication Tools: Most often available through and on workers’ mobile devices, these include apps that power real-time messaging, video conferencing, and task management tools. It also gives workers access to real-time production data that can inform their decisions, as well as key documents, manuals, reports, etc.
One of the key pillars to success in adopting any new technology, however, is ensuring that technology is aligned with your organizational needs and challenges. So how can you align connected worker tools with your strategy? Let’s look at why empowering connected workers is important, and how enabling your teams with this tech benefits your business.
Why are connected workers important for modern manufacturers?
Effective shop floor communication is a critical factor for efficient, productive, and safe operation. Connected workers are better able to both share information and access information–which can vastly improve focus, efficiency, and teamwork, as well as lead to more engaged teams.
Messaging and other connected tools make it easy for managers to communicate priorities and instructions, and ensure workers start on the correct, high-priority task versus guessing and starting a lower-priority task, leading to delays.
Connecting workers also enables bottom-up communication, in addition to top-down communication. Workers can share updates and insights from the floor, along with feedback, ensuring management has the latest information, quickly. Teams are better able to communicate in real time and collaborate quickly to find solutions–even when managers are working remotely or off-site.
This and other types of knowledge transfer are far easier and more effective with connected digital tools. These tools enable employees with the ability to:
- Make Real-Time, Informed Decisions: Gain immediate access to live production data, alerts, and insights for faster response to issues.
- Achieve Higher Productivity & Efficiency: Digital workflows reduce paperwork and manual tasks, enabling workers to focus on value-added activities.
- Reduce Downtime & Resolve Issues Faster: Workers receive instant alerts on machine failures, bottlenecks, or quality issues, allowing for quicker corrective actions.
- Collaborate and Share Knowledge Better: Seamless communication across shifts and teams via digital tools, mobile apps, and remote expert support.
- Enhance Quality Control & Compliance: Workers can capture real-time data on defects, track compliance, and ensure consistent product quality.
- Create Safer Work Environments: Wearables, AR assistance, and digital safety protocols help prevent accidents and ergonomic strain.
- Enable Faster Training & Onboarding: Digital work instructions, AR/VR training, and on-demand guidance shorten learning curves for new employees.
- Achieve Greater Workforce Flexibility: Remote monitoring and mobile access allow workers and supervisors to oversee operations from anywhere.
- Continuously Improve Through Data: Connected workers contribute real-time shop floor insights that drive ongoing process optimization.
Enabling connected workers in your manufacturing business is also becoming more important for recruitment and retention. The next generation has high digital expectations. To attract and retain top talent, manufacturers must modernize their technology and equip workers with advanced digital tools.
However, even after recognizing the benefits of enabling connected workers, the challenge remains: successfully implementing these tools and driving employee adoption.
How can you achieve connected worker maturity?
No matter where you are in your digital transformation or what the technology is, it can feel daunting to execute a change like connecting workers. It helps to start by assessing your current state and outlining a vision for what you’d like to achieve by connecting workers. Wherever you are, focus on leveling up one step at a time–versus trying to overhaul your entire business all at once.
Seek out adaptable approaches and tools that can be tailored to your business's size and needs, making the transformation more practical and achievable. As mentioned earlier, it’s crucial to align any new technology with your strategy, priorities, and operational needs before implementation. Each tool should have at least one clearly defined use case.
If you haven’t already, digitizing filing, reports, manuals, and other documents is a good place to start. Create a digital reservoir for employees to be able to create, access, edit, and collaborate on these types of shared documents.
One of the priorities your manufacturing business should have is implementing an employee communications app, whether it is Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or another. These apps enable:
- Two-way communication through both personal and group messaging
- Searchable messaging and update streams that allow employees to view conversation histories and read non-critical communications during non-focus task time
- Instant notifications on mobile devices for critical messages and safety alerts
- Remote and mobile access and use
- Record keeping and documentation
When paired with digitized file-sharing systems, employees can also easily access and share instructions, manuals, SOPs, etc. from their location on the shop floor–making them more efficient and productive. Through platform integrations with messaging tools, they can also access production monitoring insights and even receive alerts, ensuring they have access to real-time data when it’s most critical.
Before you introduce these apps to employees, take the time to outline goals and a roll-out plan with priorities. Create a plan for data security, including access management–where you control who can access specific resources in an organization, such as applications, data, or systems. It ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive or critical information while preventing unauthorized access. This can include creating user roles and permissions, where you assign different levels of access based on that user’s role within your organization.
Emphasize employee training and allow time for older, less digitally savvy workers to gain familiarity. With these employees especially, it helps to communicate the benefits–to the business, and their jobs.
Key takeaways
Connected workers are elevated workers, empowered through more effective communication, better access to knowledge and real-time production data, and information sharing to increase efficiency, productivity, and safety. When paired with the right training and security measures, these digitized communication tools enable your team members to make informed, data-driven decisions that lead to real business results. For small and mid-sized manufacturers, this transformation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By aligning connected worker tools with specific business needs and progressing one step at a time, digital transformation becomes practical and achievable.
