Digital transformation is shifting the way manufacturers operate and empower their employees at every level of their processes. As leaders in the manufacturing industry seek to find novel ways to create new business value, empower and upskill their workforce, optimize their operations and innovate for a sustainable future, they are facing an aging workforce & significant skills gap.
The generation entering the workforce now isn't pursuing careers in manufacturing industry as the generations before them, and even the most skilled manufacturing employees need new tech skills to remain competitive in the job market.
Embracing videos enable workforce transformation by closing the skills gap, advancing modern roles, reskilling, and empowering the first-line workers. These matters are a top priority for every leader in the manufacturing industry.
It's easy to understand why — manufacturers today are in a state of constant movement, and now more than ever, they're being challenged to meet exacting standards without slowing down for even a moment. It is an environment that relies on eyesight and expertise — and that's where video has become a welcome ally.
Videos help modern manufacturing facilities or the factory of the future view their operations in an objective way that can spotlight opportunities and offer a more visual, engaging way to connect management and workforce.
Attract Younger Employees Through Technology
According to research by MIT, a vast majority of employees across age groups from 22 to 60 want to work for digitally-enabled organizations. In order to attract new young workers to jobs in manufacturing, a technologically-advanced workplace is critical.
A generation that grew up with technology, modern devices, and video proliferation is naturally most effective when enabled by these tools. Their familiarity with video means they not only prefer visual learning but can also deliver more efficiently using a medium they are already using outside of work. Younger employees are eager to embrace & watch videos. Beyond the "cool factor," videos enable inexperienced workers to learn more quickly by simulating on-the-job experiences.
By leveraging AWS's products, VIDIZMO an enterprise video platform, can help employees record, create, store, search, and share live & on-demand content from any device, anytime, anywhere. Moreover, live-streamed corporate messaging, training, and innovative activities and initiatives such as employee-generated content or live product demos also add significantly to employee interest, creativity, and engagement levels.
The rewards for organizations are clear: those that take these steps embracing a digital transformation will generate almost an average of $100 million more operating income each year than those who fall behind, as per a new Keystone Strategy study.
Advancing Modern Roles By Retaining The Knowledge of Experts
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the number of industrial robots has risen from 1.8 million in 2016 to 2.6 million in 2019, impacting several industries significantly. Robots are now capable of more physically demanding work, as they are also likely to take over complicated, repetitive, & sensitive tasks.
On the other hand, new technology and levels of automation may help with the talent gap problem by allowing organizations to leverage the experience of their existing workforce through video.
As more and more companies turn to videos to capture the insights of their best employees, ensuring digital content will be searchable and shareable within the organization even after the team member has moved on. Such videos help organizations maintain a competitive edge — and are often the most useful method of training the next employee to follow in your subject matter expert's footsteps.
Videos on how specific processes work, quick tips for on-site repairs, the tolerances of specific units, and dozens of other facts that only experience can teach — form the backbone of any organization's knowledge base.
Using VIDIZMO's solutions, organizations can create a library documenting the intelligence, knowledge, expertise of experienced workers, which can be made available to anyone around the global enterprise.
Furthermore, VIDIZMO leverages AWS's Artificial Intelligence technology to enhance the discoverability of videos & other digital content by automatically extracting advanced metadata such as spoken words, written text, faces, and emotions allowing platform-wide & inside video search capability.
This means videos and other digital content can be easily searched within the platform, and employees can make shorter videos facilitating microlearning. This enables workers to learn & perform complicated tasks, such as maintenance on aircraft engines, in a reliable and compliant way by merely referring to videos on a particular subject from the video library.
Empowering Firstline Workers Through Training
Firstline Workers encompass more than two billion people in roles & positions that makes them the first point of contact between an organization and the world they serve. These workers are often the first to engage a customer, the first to represent a company's brand and the first to see a product and service in action.
In the manufacturing sector, firstline workers, as per one I.T. leader, are "the deskless people." This group includes the salespeople who deal directly with the customer, the employees operating machinery & keep the processes continuously running on the factory floor, and technicians in the field servicing the manufacturer's equipment at the customer site.
In a survey about Firstline Workers conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, Respondents said that the primary drivers for firstline workers are to increase productivity and efficiency (named by 67%), increase customer engagement & satisfaction (62%), improve product and service quality (59%).
But as processes are becoming more intricate, and roles more complicated, regular, detailed, and accessible training is essential for most smart manufacturing organizations. It is simply no longer enough to leave a manual at an employee's workstation or to hold occasional in-person classes on a selected few topics. To succeed, employees need access to a deep library of the documented production process.
However, documenting a complete production process at most manufacturing facilities today is almost impossible. The detail required often generates instruction manuals similar to textbooks — that go out of date every time a step is altered, new machinery is purchased, or production standards revised.
Videos offer a better alternative, by helping businesses manufacturing virtually anything to easily record with cameras and observe production processes completely, requiring the same time that they actually take to happen. Such type of video documentation need not be expensive either — with VIDIZMO, you can record any process anywhere with any recording device — even a smartphone — and instantly upload it to a central library where it can be shared and searched and played on any playback device by anyone in the organization with the right level of authorization.
VIDIZMO allows these training content to be stored in any of AWS's regions, preserving data residency, and offering comprehensive compliance and resilience options to customers.
Artificial Intelligence for Digital Transformation in Factory of The Future
McKinsey estimates that 50 percent of companies that embrace A.I. over the next 5–7 years may double their cash flow.
Empowering manufacturing leaders hinges on supporting firstline workers through training & learning, and one way VIDIZMO enables this is through leveraging AWS's pre-trained AI Services.
Developed by AWS, AI capabilities such as Enterprise Search enables videos in VIDIZMO to be easily accessible & searchable both within the platform and inside video.
A video which prepares manufacturing engineers, to cite one example, around the topic of "identifying the most cost-effective material handling & facility layout alternative." These specific topics would enable learners coming from many diverse backgrounds to learn as much as possible since they would be viewing content about a particular topic and at their own pace. AWS's Image and video analysis features such as topic inference would allow inference of the main topics from the transcripts of the video lecture, making lectures easily accessible because this would enable engineers to find videos based on topics they would like to see. Organizations can also transcribe, translate, and digitize all their content to make it accessible to employees.
Continuous Improvement for Factory of The Future
In today's competitive environment, a company now more than ever needs to continuously improve to gain the kind of competitive advantage that it is seeking in its marketplace. Most manufacturers are on the constant lookout for opportunities to fix, optimize, modify, or otherwise make their processes efficient, better, & faster.
Yet as every production cycle remains a step-by-step process moving from person to person, building to building, and often from one country to another, it's almost impossible for a single viewer to get a complete look at how everything works and where opportunities to improve may lie.
Improving visibility to support a proactive response across the business and the ability to make targeted improvements to business processes saves time, money, and resources; and provides a business new insights to spot trends and opportunities to advance the business.
Again, VIDIZMO's platform provides a solution to this challenge. Manufacturers who document processes may find that internal Six Sigma, LEAN, or Kaizen teams will be able to identify opportunities by viewing videos of each process.
Other organizations may also find opportunities, not in single video content, but in the volume of recordings produced & stored in a central library. For example, a how-to video for working with a particular machine becomes popular, or several engineers take to recording demonstrations of the best practices for particular processes, that alone is a sign that there is an opportunity to improve.
Organizations can access training content on-demand saving time spent on traveling & the cost associated with planning & hosting a venue; through VIDIZMO's adaptive bitrate streaming to ensure bandwidth-optimized content delivery to all user devices at any geographical locations. Furthermore, organizations can make videos more interactive – quickly adding quizzes & attaching handouts. Trainers can create quizzes with a variety of question types and use customized branching to route learners down different learning paths.
To know how VIDIZMO can help you digitally transform your factory of the future
