Top 5 Ways a Connected Frontline Workforce Helps Manufacturing Plants

The promise of smart manufacturing includes seamless data flows between machines, sensors, systems and workers to rapidly orchestrate responses dealing with unpredictability. Yet, while automation investments have delivered significant process upgrades, the frontline workforce often remains disconnected.

Today, manufacturers can make a big impact on their shop-floor with a small effort by integrating a digital platform that empowers their production teams to work smarter in real-time.

Here are 5 key benefits that a connected frontline digitalization solution can bring your plant:

Connect Shop Floor to Top Floor

The MATICS real-time digitalization platform bridges the IT/OT gap by connecting people, devices, and machines into a unified, user-friendly dashboard. By digitalizing processes and data flows, MATICS breaks down information silos, enabling a holistic view of the entire operation so the whole organization can work together to achieve operational excellence goals. Managers can easily update KPIs and gain valuable, real-time insights to drive continuous improvement, while the empowered frontline has the tools and visibility they need to proactively identify issues and opportunities. The result is an empowered manufacturing operations team, whose success is acknowledged instantly and who has the tools to identify potential critical events before they take place.

Capture Tribal Knowledge

When 50-year veterans retire, their tricks to coaxing legacy equipment to peak OEE go with them. The MATICS digital platform digitizes best practices to guide new operators while allowing experienced staff to annotate improvements. Automating processes based on best practices input by key stakeholders and capturing communication regarding critical events and how they were solved captures knowledge and ensures future employees can access it with ease. Alert notifications also retain troubleshooting inputs to continuously improve. The result is a connected frontline that is in-tune with one another and able to leverage the experience of the most skilled stakeholders.

Improve Quality Control & Predictive Capabilities

Automating testing protocols and processes increases compliance rigor while connected inputs feed advanced analytics. Shop floor digitalization solutions track control limits on critical variables, swiftly detecting outlying shifts indicative of issues needing intervention before they even impact operations. With continuous data aggregation and analysis, adjustments are no longer reactive but data-driven and managed in a proactive way. This drives up quality while connecting the frontline workforce to the results in a more efficient manner.

Automate Work Processes Through Triggers & Alerts

Job-based process automation software continually aggregates all shop floor data to provide an accurate overview of the production floor and enable stakeholders to identify critical events easily. When key indicators breach defined thresholds, conditional logic instantly triggers real-time triggers and alerts, and assigns corrective tasks to relevant staff. Automatically documenting critical events such as machine downtime and stop-events ensures relevant personnel have access to all of the necessary information down the line. This amplifies resource coordination and accountability by systematizing expertise contextually to events as they occur, making it easier to meet goals and acknowledge employee success.

Drive Higher Productivity, Efficiency & Profitability

With a fully transparent connected workforce, organizations gain enhanced visibility into optimal shift scheduling based on demand forecasts, staffing competencies, and equipment capabilities. This allows the orchestration of employee skills to production needs while targeting predictive capabilities to priority use cases – multiplying productivity ROI. By instrumenting open connectivity between systems, machines, and cross-functional workforces, manufacturers can achieve improved responsiveness in the face of volatility while futureproofing innovations.

Changing the way people work in factories

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The MATICS digital platform continually aggregates data from the shop-floor, delivering contextually relevant triggers and alerts to key stakeholders based on real-time data. By acting as a digitalization solution that connects the frontline to the data, MATICS helps organizations realize the possibilities of a truly Connected Frontline Workforce. By converging OT, IT, and other data sources and then applying real-time intelligence with role-based insights, MATICS enables plants to boost productivity, quality, and agility through enhanced workforce empowerment.

Want to explore further how tapping into unified data visibility, digitizing tribal knowledge, automating more effective protocols, and driving efficiencies can transform your operations?

The future of intelligent operations starts now!