Articles

[Manufacturing] - How to actualize remote work in production

September 21, 2021
  • The pure nature of the manufacturing industry as the transition to telework has become a challenge.
  • Only 46% of manufacturing workloads have remote monitoring processes enabled.

  • Here are some obstacles to overcome and suggestions for how to successfully implement remote work in the manufacturing sector.

When it comes to separating manufacturing industries from one another, COVID-19 has encountered a significant problem. During the pandemic, the majority of employees switched to working from home, and many manufacturing operations had to shut down or operate with little staff on the factory.

After the pandemic, more and more businesses are turning to remote working as a long-term solution because it offers advantages in terms of productivity and can help recruit top talent. The transition from working in an office to working remotely is largely seamless because communication and performance management technologies are readily available in the majority of industries.

In contrast, the pure nature of manufacturing to industries that began as digital, makes the shift from face-to-face to remote work difficult. In order to be able to work remotely while maintaining and enhancing production efficiency, industry must adopt remote connectivity solutions.

Remote working status

Remote work was becoming more popular even before the COVID-19 outbreak as businesses realized that having employees work from home was frequently less expensive and happier. However, due to quarantine measures, the world has accepted remote work in a way that was probably inevitable and will likely continue to be for a very long time. More than 60% of people are reportedly working remotely all or part of the time as of today (56%), according to survey data from Gallup from April 2021.

Alternatively, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 41% of manufacturing employees were able to work remotely in April 2020. Besides, only 46% of the industry has implemented remote monitoring processes to ensure visibility of production activity off-site.

When we take into account that the majority of workers are looking for remote work and that the manufacturing sector has trouble finding skilled workers, this issue becomes even more concerning. While there is a growing need for workers, the manufacturing industry's skills gap could result in 2.4 million job openings aren't filled between 2018 and 2028, with a potential economic impact of 2.5 trillion dollars. The issue with this is that as more people join the workforce, they are less likely to be encouraged to work in a field that discourages telecommuting.

Image: Gallup

How manufacturers can enable remote work

The good news is that manufacturers are actively trying to find a measure to this issue. Manufacturing business leaders are prepared to investigate many solutions that are being developed and implemented to address this challenge.

Manufacturing business leaders must deal with a number of unique challenges as they remove their workforces from the office and the factory floor.

Firstly, they must keep an eye on the production situation. It gives you confidence to walk through the factory and observe all the machines in use being operated by knowledgeable personnel who guarantee quality and make sure that quality standards are met.

The issue is that you would have little to no knowledge of the production situation if the manager were removed from the factory floor. Reports are not only manually shared, inaccurate, and delayed, but they also require production leaders to spend more time on-site observing and analyzing what is going forward rather than making a choice.

 So as to make the switch to remote production monitoring machine and operator data must be gathered and contextualized in real-time so managers can gain insights into their operations wherever they are.

Image: Machine Metrics

Next, they must assess the device's health. Although the adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is still used occasionally, it is not a good tactic, at least not for the world-class maintenance team.

Instead, allowing your device providers and service teams to have data on machine health, helping to remotely diagnose and resolve machine problems faster, before they happen. With real-time machine data, manufacturers gain insight into the health and condition of their devices for early warning signs of latent equipment failures and high-risk areas leading to downtime.

Third, they must collaborate in real time and provide autonomy to on-site employees. Giving tools & information to a small number of on-site workers to make decisions is far more effective than having an entire workforce offline just for the sake of communicating information.

 

Remote monitoring highlights the importance of real-time, automated communication & notifications to ensure the right information reaches the right people at the right time.

This means that for manufacturers, real-time production data will be used to drive automated notifications. This can be as basic as letting the operator know when a machine is in trouble or as advanced as alerting the maintenance supervisor to an impending machine failure and automatically creating a work order in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

While manufacturers advance to data completion, they enable to show compatibility with remote working, turn off light's automation in factory floor, save the highest value tasks for production personnel on-site.

 

 

Image: Machine Metrics

 

The promising future of manufacturing

The period of time we are currently in will soon come to an end, but the trend of working remotely will persist. There are solutions that manufacturers just need to adopt the right culture and technological infrastructure to support the shift to a largely remote workforce.

The following are some lessons learned for manufacturing business executives who are just beginning to investigate the path toward teleworking for their organizations:

Skills: identify the skills of those moving to remote work for the best scaling. Employing digital is more advantageous if you have certain skills.

Leaders must ask themselves: Who must work in the factory? Who, on the other hand, ought to work remotely and who can? These questions have complicated and ambiguous answers. To expand the number of people with coverage, many manufacturers are upskilling the on-site teams. Concentrating on the workers on the factory floor can handle a range of tasks in the right direction and contribute to the resolution of more issues.

By contrast, they ought to try to utilize experts in remote support. Whether they are subject matter experts in engineering, reliability, quality, or another field, their specialized focus on their work improves digital execution. Having these experts outsourced also allows them to remotely service multiple plants and deploy horizontally across the enterprise.

Data: If the infrastructure for tools for data collection, analysis, and remote collaboration is standard, virtual mobility will only function.

Training: The success of remote collaboration depends on ongoing training and method sharing.

Produced goods will still be in physical form, having said that, the nature of production will continue to be aided by digital techniques, such as teleworking, allowing people to concentrate only on the highest-value tasks while automating low-value manufacturing operations.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/the-future-of-remote-work-for-manufacturing/