In a fiercely competitive market, quality is a key indicator for success now, and in the future. In an earlier blog post, there was considerable discussion about ways that manufacturing leadership can benefit when connected workers are made an integral part of the team. One of the biggest benefits is that connected workers become quality leaders themselves, driving all kinds of improvements. Manufacturing leadership should consider implementing connecting their workforce to improve quality, ensure process compliance, and empower workers.
Connected Workers Can Improve Quality
Every day, quality leaders have to face a million little challenges and details that can turn into quality gaffes that cost time, money and a competitive edge. The last thing that any quality leader wants is a product defect that leads to wasted product, wasted time, and wasted money. However, implementing connected worker solutions are the answer to preventing such quality challenges from even occurring. Here’s how:
1. Ensuring Process Compliance
Manufacturing leaders spend a considerable amount of time checking and double-checking that everyone sticks to critical process compliance so that quality issues can be minimized, if not completely eliminated. Before the advancements of Industry 4.0, much of this process compliance assurance happened on paper or in older file systems that could eat hours or days of time before finding the real problem. Connected worker solutions can guide workers through processes and checklists to ensure every product is up to standards.
2. Capturing Product Defects
Of course, ensuring process compliance is critical for capturing product defects before they make it out the door. At the very least, poor quality products will cause customers to look elsewhere or demand refunds. At the very worst, a defective product could hurt someone. So, the urgency to capture defects proactively is intense. Thankfully, connecting your workforce will ensure that product defects are identified and escalated at the earliest point possible. This means saving time and productivity, as critical data capture can intervene when issues occur.
3. Empowering Your Workforce
With those old paper quality processes clogging the system, it’s hard to know exactly how to stamp out inefficiencies, defects and other things that can drain resources and waste time and money. Instead of a vicious cycle of quality problems perpetuated by paper processes, the connected worker creates a virtuous cycle of sustained improvement, based on immediate data analysis and insight across departments, facilities, workers and supervisors. Everyone becomes a quality leader; everyone is more informed and more personally invested in the quality outcome.
A Call to Manufacturing Leadership
With these benefits in mind, what still holds so many in manufacturing leaders back? Why not adopt the important Industry 4.0 connected worker solutions that could save so much time, so much money and help them create a more dynamic, safer work environment while churning out a higher quality product? A recent Industrial Transformation study showed that less than half (46%) of manufacturing companies had deployed digital, wearable, mobile, sensor technologies in their operations. Another 21% are making plans to adopt digital transformation solutions within the next year, but that still leaves another third of manufacturing leaders who haven’t made their minds up one way or the other. To those in that category, remember these benefits:
- Earlier detection means faster improvement. Connected workers can identify quality defects in the moment and intervene and report before those defects make it out the door.
- Real-time data reports give supervisors more insight and control over remote supplier quality.
- Proactive process compliance assurance helps prevent defects before they occur, or to catch them at the earliest possible point, therefore reducing the overall cost of quality.
Connect Your Workforce and Improve Quality with Anvl
Many manufacturing leaders have already experienced the benefits of a connected workforce through Industry 4.0 solutions that make digital transformation possible. See how Anvl can help you boost quality, protect workers and improve operations today with a connected worker solution. Click Here to See Anvl in Action, and talk to one of Anvl’s experts for more details.
