The Connected Worker Explained

Connected worker platforms are increasingly being used by industrial companies to connect and engage their workforces, and improve worker safety, quality, and productivity. In fact, according to LNS Research, connected workforce programs represent the top initiative within their corporate digital transformation strategy.

Companies across a range of industries, including food and beverage, consumer goods, oil and gas, construction, energy, utilities, and industrial equipment manufacturing are adopting these digital tools to help address some of the biggest challenges in the industry today:

• The widening skills gap
• The loss of tribal knowledge due to the rapidly retiring workforce
• Hiring and retention challenges
• An increasingly hybrid and distributed workforce

Connected worker solutions are empowering workers to perform at their best and are helping operations managers to deliver superior results even as the skills variability of their workforce increases.

Furthermore, connecting workers directly into the digital fabric of the business, allows leaders to improve the business processes that surround the company’s workers. Some of these processes include manufacturing execution, quality assurance, product engineering, job estimating, and many more.

Connected worker platforms are commonly used by industrial companies to connect, support, and optimize frontline processes for a wide range of use cases. These may include:

• Safety
  • Including permit to work and safe work permit solutions
• Quality
  • Including layered process audits
• Maintenance
  • Including autonomous maintenance and preventive maintenance
• Operations
• Training and workforce development
• Employee engagement
• Continuous Improvement

As workers become more digitally connected, companies have access to a new rich source of activity and job execution data. With proper Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, operations leaders can gain insights into areas where the largest improvement opportunities exist.

While capturing this fine-grained human activity data is beneficial, it only solves part of the challenge of helping to improve the productivity and efficiency of frontline workers and driving continuous improvement.

This is where Artificial Intelligence comes in.

The reason artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is a necessary requirement is due to the nature of human activity data. When humans do things, they generate a relatively noisy set of data, and that is exactly what AI and Machine Learning are well-suited to handle.

AI lays a data-driven foundation for continuous improvement in the areas of productivity, quality, and workforce development. It also sets the stage for addressing the needs of a constantly changing workforce.

With the foundational elements of augmented, guided work instructions in place, manufacturing companies can guide their frontline workers with contextual information that will help them perform jobs at peak efficiency and solve problems faster.

Connected worker platforms also help organizations capture valuable data not just on the work that is being performed, but also on the activities and interactions that are contributing to the success or performance of certain jobs.

While connected worker platforms provide a framework to help improve the performance of frontline workers, connected worker solutions provide a suite of pre-built digital software products that help digitize and optimize those processes to fit the needs of a company. Connected worker solutions play a key role in more comprehensive manufacturing operations management systems.

Connected worker solutions help companies accelerate time-to-value and offer a comprehensive way to continually improve the performance of their frontline teams.

Today’s frontline workers represent a large portion of the global workforce, and for the first time, these workers are becoming an integral part of the digital transformation in the industrial sector.

Connected worker solutions that utilize artificial intelligence not only provide intelligent guidance and remote support capabilities for manufacturing and service teams, but also deliver workforce development insights and continuous improvement ideas.

This technology provides a much-needed solution to the new normal in the industrial sector, resulting in productivity, safety, and quality gains.