December 12, 2022 | Author: Christin Senftleben | Reading time: approx. 5 minutes
Increase availability, reduce employee workload
The bad news first: The shortage of skilled workers in production will continue to worsen. The good news is that there are digital worker guidance systems for technical and manual tasks in assembly, as well as in commissioning or maintenance, which companies can use to increase their personnel availability and reduce the work pressure on the existing workforce.
The support provided by digital worker guidance opens up greater room for maneuver in personnel deployment. Companies benefit from this twice as much.
Advantage #1 – Inexperienced/unskilled workers are ready for work faster
Practical experience shows that inexperienced as well as unskilled workers are able to perform tasks independently and correctly much faster if they are supported by a worker guidance system.
From the first day of work, the employee is confronted with a great deal of information. In every company, there are different work processes and terminology. In addition, the employee must learn and understand the work steps that are new to him. The faster the employee learns the tasks to be performed and the less support he needs from experienced colleagues, the lower the productivity losses for the company.
A worker guidance system provides support by providing detailed step-by-step instructions and clear representations in text and images. The assistant is available at all times and offers the employee varying degrees of assistance, depending on his progress in the familiarization process. This gives the employee security, builds trust and relieves the more experienced staff.
The positive effect for companies: Unskilled personnel can be deployed in greater numbers with the support of a worker guidance system, and personnel bottlenecks can be compensated for more easily.
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Advantage #2 - employees can be deployed more flexibly
It is not only inexperienced workers who are challenged when performing unfamiliar tasks. Experienced skilled workers also need support and training time when they have to perform new activities.
Let's take a closer look at a sample customer from the control cabinet manufacturing industry: Here, products are custom-made from several thousand assemblies with more than 20,000 individual parts. The assembly process consists of up to one hundred work steps, each of which corresponds to the desired individual product specification.
With the help of the digital guidance, the assembler can complete his work steps quickly and in accordance with the specifications. The worker guidance system walks him step by step through the assembly plan, provides information on the parts list and CAD drawings, and informs him about what needs to be done in detail. Stored checkpoints ensure that the work steps are completed in a process-safe manner.
With the worker guidance system, the assembler is immediately able to carry out even unfamiliar work steps error-free and efficiently. This, in turn, gives the company the opportunity to deploy its employees flexibly and without a long training period at different workplaces, both in the event of increased order volumes and staff shortages (e.g. as a result of illness).
Conclusion
Digitalization in production is pushing the manufacturing of customized products in small batch sizes, often with high variations. This places increasing demands on the flexibility and cognitive performance of employees. Work processes change more frequently, challenging both new employees and experienced colleagues.
Digital worker guidance offers help for every experience level through step-by-step instructions and significantly shortens training time. This way, companies can increase staff availability and secure their productivity and competitiveness even in times of a shortage of skilled workers.
weasl – the system that optimally supports your employees
Whether you want to train new employees or provide experienced colleagues with precise work instructions for new processes - weasl is a powerful tool that supports and relieves your employees.
You are invited to attend our webinar on worker assistance
Learn how to master typical challenges in manual production with a worker guidance system. Using practical examples, we will show you what modern systems can achieve and how you can directly benefit from them.