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Train Your Employees in Digital Tools: 3 Best Practices

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Train Your Employees in Digital Tools: 3 Best Practices

Mastering flow management solutions, interacting with autonomous mobile robots, running a warehouse remotely during periods of confinement: the digitalization of the supply chain requires logistics professionals to develop their digital skills. Here are the 3 best practices to make your digital transformation a reality and optimize it.

In a sector that is constantly evolving and undergoing digital transformation, the effectiveness of training for logistics operators and managers is both a competitive lever and a competitive advantage.

-How can you transfer new skills and reflexes to employees in an agile and sustainable way?

-How can you encourage the adoption of digital tools in the face of potential resistance to change?

Our advice for optimizing the commitment of employees in the crucial process of ‘digital upskilling’:


 

1. Make digital meaningful again, with training in context or on the job

According to McKinsey, 90 million European workers will have to significantly renew their skills in the coming decade, as more than 20% of their current tasks will be taken over by technology. This is considerable, and it is likely that this figure will be even higher in the supply chain sector, where robotization and process automation are already prevalent. If these transformations can raise legitimate concerns in warehouses and logistics platforms, professional training is the ideal place to demystify technology by providing evidence of its usefulness and interest for employees. However, this is only possible if it provides concrete and realistic answers to everyday problems.

For your training courses, avoid focusing on generic e-learning modules or only on theoretical training courses, which are too disconnected from the reality of the field. When it comes to digital technology, employees need to project themselves. By organizing sessions directly in the workplace, through real-life applications, employees will be able to appropriate digital tools and perceive their impact. And thus, judge for themselves their potential benefits. This includes: the reduction of work drudgery, more space for initiative, quality control, and communication.

The rate employees are trained in digital technology and the completion rate of training courses are indicators that HR/training departments monitor closely. Especially in an industrial context, where access to online training is more complicated to organize. Some companies, such as Continental, have decided to install “learning boxes”, a kind of bubble equipped with screens and digital tools, in the heart of production areas, to encourage employees to take self-service training through technical tutorials or serious games.

2. Encourage reverse mentoring

In the jargon of human resources, we speak of ‘reverse mentoring’. The principle is to create a bilateral learning system between a young ‘digital native’ employee and a senior employee, less familiar with digital and technological uses. This approach can be part of an official mentoring program run by the company’s training department, with predefined training content, an action plan, and objectives. Or it can be more informal and spontaneous, with exchanges and collaborative workshops. In all cases, this practice not only promotes the transfer of digital skills, but also stimulates intergenerational links within companies, while encouraging employee commitment and retention.

3. Leverage virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) devices

Used for training purposes, virtual reality offers the advantage of immersing employees in a work environment similar to their own, without risk to their safety and without interrupting the production line. In the case of augmented reality, they can even be immersed in the real ‘setting’ of their company. Equipped with a helmet, a joystick and a screen, learners can thus familiarize themselves with new gestures and undergo various business scenarios in a fun way. For example, they can drive a remote-controlled forklift truck while avoiding obstacles or try to find the fastest way to a product reference. They can even simulate inventory management in a virtual warehouse. This type of immersive experience allows the employee to be an actor in his training and to learn from his mistakes. Customized to the company’s needs or available off-the-shelf from training program publishers, these devices can integrate collective simulation experiences, aimed at training multidisciplinary teams.

This VR-based approach is still relevant in the post-Covid era, where more and more tasks are destined to be performed remotely.

Thanks to virtual reality, Danone and Generix Group have developed, in Russia, a methodology allowing the production of remote warehouse management systems (WMS) in several sites in a synchronous way. Discover our dedicated content.

-Data Science: new jobs in the Supply Chain

-Warehouse storage: when algorithms facilitate optimization

-Digitalization of the supply chain: what impact on the skills required?

Generix Group North America provides a series of solutions within our Supply Chain Hub product suite to create efficiencies across an entire supply chain. From Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and more, software platforms can deliver a wide range of benefits that ultimately flow to the warehouse operator’s bottom line. Our solutions are in use around the world and our experience is second-to-none. We invite you to contact us to learn more.

machine manufacturers

Want to Make Progress on Digital Transformation? Start With Machine Maintenance.

Machines are at the heart of manufacturing. They affect every aspect of production — efficiency, output, quality, consistency — and form the basis of manufacturing performance. So it comes as no surprise that many use cases for digital transformation in manufacturing focus on machinery. It’s where the transformation manifests itself.

How it manifests itself is more complicated than it seems, however. Some may think that the primary goal of digital transformation in manufacturing is to make machines better at their intended purposes — by using digital technology to help them run faster, longer, or with greater precision. This is one goal, but digital transformation is also about much more than that. Another crucial component is giving machines new capabilities and greater purpose.

Here’s an example: When machines are equipped with internet-connected sensors that can collect machine health data and send it to a centralized platform, then each machine becomes an indicator of the overall health of the production line. Studying the parts reveals the condition of the whole, whether that’s a single production line, an entire factory, or a global supply chain.

This wasn’t possible prior to the new technologies of industry 4.0 because manufacturers had no way to monitor machine health remotely and comprehensively. But it’s possible now, and it’s changing expectations around digital transformation in manufacturing.

Driving Digital Transformation of Machine Maintenance

With additional machine capabilities should also come a rethinking of the role of maintenance technicians. They’re not just the on-site problem-solvers anymore — they’re the ones who move digital transformation forward as they keep machines up, running, and evolving. Technicians may not be the architects of digital transformation in manufacturing, but they are the drivers of it.

In that context, it’s time to consider upgrading the roles of the technicians closest to the machines. The maintenance of the past isn’t appropriate for the factories of the future. Technicians need new skills, tools, and processes to leverage the advanced capabilities being added to machines. They also need a new mindset, mission, and role within the factory. To put it differently, maintenance technicians need to transform as much as the machines they work on. Here’s how manufacturing leaders can help:

1. Change Your Mindset From Maintenance to Risk Avoidance

In the past, when technicians serviced machines because of a breakdown or because of a service schedule, the entire focus was on minimizing machine downtime. Fewer failures and faster fixes meant the maintenance department was doing its job.

Instead of focusing on solving problems after they occur, however, maintenance teams should focus on preventing them. When maintenance sees its primary purpose as risk avoidance, it puts everything technicians do into a new perspective. The team is focused on intervening early and effectively so that minor issues don’t develop into downtime.

Risk avoidance (rather than minimization) is possible when maintenance teams shift from reactive and preventive maintenance, which lag behind problems, to predictive and prescriptive maintenance, which lead ahead of them. Machine health monitoring sensors make that possible while also showing the maintenance team where, when, why, and how their agile efforts helped to prevent disasters.

2. Think About Digitizing Maintenance as a Skill Set Upgrade, Not Just Another Tool

Digital transformation in manufacturing is about more than just adding a bunch of new digital tools to your technicians’ tool belts. If you just give them better ways to do what they were already doing, you won’t see dramatic improvements from digital transformation efforts.

Instead, think of digitization as more than a bonus tool. Think of it holistically as a whole skill set upgrade for your team. Digital tools will allow maintenance technicians to spend less time on menial, repeatable tasks and transition that energy instead to higher-value knowledge work like prescriptive maintenance that can keep machines running better for longer.

3. Improve Your Collaboration Capabilities

Digital transformation in manufacturing maintenance is largely about improving collaboration capabilities. Maintenance teams are using technology to help them spread their resources around as quickly, widely, and effectively as possible. All three of those depend on maintenance teams working collaboratively.

In practice, that means each technician, team, and site has access to the same data and alerts. Everyone works from a single source of truth so that wires don’t get crossed, warnings never get ignored, and resources move everywhere efficiently. However digital transformation affects maintenance, increased collaboration should be the goal.

Every day, digital transformation in manufacturing becomes a bigger priority. Many manufacturers will discover that in their race to digitize, they forgot to update maintenance at the same pace. Those that do the opposite will discover something as well: Digitizing maintenance propels the broader transformation effort forward because it allows machines to do more than they ever have.

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Artem Kroupenev is VP of Strategy at Augury, where he oversees product, market, innovation, and ecosystem strategy. He has over a decade of experience driving the adoption of disruptive technologies and has previously co-founded companies in the United States, Israel, and West Africa.