Undertaking Digital Transformation (DX) is essential for industrial companies to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving industrial landscape. A Successful and advanced DX strategy enables the free flow of data throughout an organisation and creates a single digital thread which opens up a plethora of efficiency and maintenance improvements through the contextualisation of information. Enterprises that are well advanced on this journey can unlock the value from advanced technology capabilities, like artificial intelligence, simulation and emulation software, and digital twins. Those less advanced will find plenty of improvement and return on investment to support future investment from reduced downtime and improved energy efficiency.
Although digital transformation looks different for every company and there is no single box, one-size-fits-all solution, businesses that advance on this journey (even those at the start of the process) have a clear advantage over those who lag behind. So, with DX often seen as the answer to all problems felt by industrial leaders, how can it impact the long-term decline in skills availability that is a challenge both in the UK and around the world?
The skills gap has been a topic of concern in industry for many years now. It spans all sectors and affects businesses of all sizes. Simply put, there isn’t enough new talent entering the workforce to offset the number of workers reaching retirement age. When they leave the business, retirees take with them their hardearned on-the-job knowledge that is a culmination of years of experience. With each departing worker, businesses are faced with the prospect of a less productive and efficient workforce and must dedicate more resources than ever to identifying and training workers to plug gaps.
Digital transformation for the ‘most’ valuable asset
When considering an industrial company’s assets, it’s easy to think in terms of hardware and software. In fact, the most important asset for most companies is the staff, and it can be helpful to think of the human element of an organisation as a focus for DX as much as any physical system.
In a digitally transformed organisation, data is returned from physical assets and overlaid with contextual data to drive insights. Comparisons can then be made between the performance of similar pumps, motors, or even whole lines and factories, to identify best practices, predict failures and much more besides. With the right software, for example, operators who previously couldn’t observe any different running conditions can now drill down into the data and see that something as small as a bearing needs to be replaced. When considering the human resources of a company in the same way, it’s easy to see just how important experience is. Someone new to the workforce can be trained and up to date with the latest operating systems, they can be fully briefed on how to complete their job role effectively, and in the DX era can be given an array of new tools to improve their ability to focus on adding value. What they often won’t have is access to the integral in-situ experience of the ageing workforce. If an issue arises, the new employee will follow all the protocols they have been told, but if they had the opportunity to ask an experienced employee, they may be able to solve an issue quickly with in-situ knowledge.
Skills repository
As with the digital transformation of assets in the traditional sense, business owners need to view employee skills as a valuable commodity. Skills don’t have to be lost when the employee leaves a business, quite the opposite. Much of their experience ‘data’ can be digitalised and recorded and then deployed to improve overall efficiency. As with most digital transformation projects, this all comes down to software choice. Business owners want to see overall improvement, but the information on how the operators reached that improvement often goes un-recorded. By making it company policy to digitise best practices, businesses can capture those skills in the right format to welcome the next generation of industrial operators.
Not only does a digital skills repository aid in the onboarding of new employees, it can act as a benchmark for new facilities in a scaling business. Operators are no longer struggling to replicate the success of other facilities; they can very easily see the steps being taken to achieve that success and implement them within their own operations.
A digital skills repository also seeks to solve a much more recent industry challenge, remote working. Accelerated by COVID, it seems that flexible working is here to stay with Gartner predicting that by 2024, half of all factory work will be carried out remotely. Now not only are skills leaving the workplace, but those that stay might be geographically spread, meaning that reaching the experienced operator with in-situ knowledge can still be a challenge
It is here that other aspects of DX technology can come to the fore. Secure remote access to site can help experienced staff work closely with less experienced staff on site to work through issues in real time. Add to this the advancing usability of xR technologies, such as virtual reality headsets and handheld devices with cameras and overlaid data, and the same engineer can potentially help resolve issues in multiple locations around the world on the same day, with expert over the shoulder support available at every turn.
The business implications of such capabilities are also likely to see changing relationships between vendors and end users too. A digitally advanced end user can take advantage of skills outside their company through servitised contracts with remote machine builders or technology partners. Thus, the most efficient ways of owning and running technologies may soon only be available to companies that have reached a certain level of digital transformation. It’s easy to imagine that in a relatively short period of time, those companies looking to buy and own in a traditional way will be at a sizeable competitive disadvantage – not only because of the skills gap, but also because they need to retain more specialised staff to service their assets.
The next industrial revolution
The human operator will always remain the most important asset of an industrial enterprise, no matter how technologically advanced a company is. Across industry, business leaders are seeing the value that can be found in the abundance of data produced by IoT devices and are deploying software to digitally transform their organisations and put that data to work driving better decision making. Importantly, those better decisions, and the ability to analyse and implement them remain firmly in the purview of the human operator. Moreover, through DX, the value and productivity of each human operator is enhanced through the removal of repetitive taskbased work, freeing them up to use their human insight to drive value.
Operator skills should be viewed in the same way as physical assets and using technology to digitise, save and safeguard the valuable skills and experience of the ageing workforce is good business sense. Organisations enacting a plan to digitise skills and use technology to improve training, remote servicing and job satisfaction will benefit from better staff retention, better productivity, and will be better placed to benefit from future trends that rely on a data-fluent approach to production.
*Andy Graham is Solutions Manager, SolutionsPT
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