ERJ’s Outside Track Report covers news, views and developments from a wide range of process and manufacturing industries around the world.
Amid rapid changes in industrial technology, andy graham, solution manager, Solution PTexplores changes in a company’s most important assets. – Human labor:
It’s easy to separate human workers from technology, but this is counterintuitive. Digital transformation is about best serving human operators, ensuring they have the tools they need to do their jobs, and freeing up more time for value-added activities. . Only by properly implementing technology can the industry close the skills gap and create a welcoming environment for the next generation.
Trend 1 – Digitization of skills
When it comes to the skills gap, this leads to the first trend: recognizing skills as a commodity. This is important not only because high-value employees are valuable, but also because their skills are captured and digitized in the same way as machine performance data.
The skills of the aging workforce are the aggregation of all on-the-job knowledge and go far beyond traditional education to provide a clear understanding of how a facility operates. Because this knowledge has been accumulated over an entire career, it cannot be easily transferred during the very short training period given to new employees in the industry.
Business leaders must take a proactive approach to skill acquisition to ensure that on-the-job knowledge is not permanently lost to employees. It also needs to be collected and presented in a way that reflects how we, as digital natives, interact with technology in our personal lives and meets the needs of a new generation.
By viewing skills as a valuable commodity and choosing the right software, companies can create a skills repository. This changes the conversation from “Let’s improve that process because it’s being done in another facility” to “Let’s look at the best practices that have been applied and replicate them here.”
This approach also streamlines the onboarding process, with new employees having much less time to train up to standard, and using a digital approach, the skills repository is always available alongside new hires for experienced employees. It will be like being there.
A digital skills approach not only helps you train new employees, but also creates a benchmark for expanding your business, such as adding new products, processes, or even entirely new facilities. Owners have everything they need to implement the best practices of their longest-serving employees, including those who have left the company.
Trend 2 – Remote management
The topic of remote work has become a huge trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. As industrial companies found themselves having to reduce their workforces to continue operating, the coronavirus served as a lightning rod to enable remote operations.
So why is this still a trend in 2024?
Flexible working has become a permanent fixture for today’s industrial workers, with much of the factory work being done remotely. This is consistent with an aging skilled workforce that is looking to reduce their working hours and ease into retirement.
Similarly, the next generation of the post-pandemic workforce expects flexibility in their job search. This puts the onus of enabling remote operations on employers themselves, who without remote operations could lose out on valuable talent joining the workforce.
As much of the next generation workforce has completed their learning and is accustomed to functioning in a hybrid environment, it is up to industry to meet these needs head-on.
Trend 3 – Artificial Intelligence
Industry news, and even mainstream news, is full of articles about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do, but how does this technology relate to workforce management in industry?
Modern AI-powered workforce applications have the ability to assess and predict employee performance. Furthermore, by looking at past performance, AI can create personalized training programs that target specific employees. AI can also generate report templates that prompt employees to provide specific details about what’s going well and where they need to improve.
This improves the lives of managers looking to streamline productivity on the factory floor by allowing them to highlight and reward the performance of key employees. Information gleaned by AI from this performance data can also be used to create optimal profiles when attracting new talent, showing them exactly what is required to perform a specific job. .
These capabilities themselves prove that AI is playing a role in industrial workforce management and will undoubtedly improve the lives of employees and managers alike. Combining the power of AI with the existing trends of digitizing skills, we can create systems that automatically maximize employee performance, not AI, and turn it into a step-by-step guide for new members. You will have to create it. The content is generated, but the information is recorded by the most skilled employees themselves.
I’m looking forward to
Three trends indicate that the future of industrial workforce management is highly technology-focused. Like all elements of modern industrial automation, this digital transformation journey is a must-do.
If companies fail to adapt to these new ways of managing their human workforce, they will quickly fall behind the competition and fail to achieve the same levels of efficiency. There are also concerns that a failure to meet the next generation’s digital needs will make businesses less attractive to new talent, widening the skills gap and exacerbating industry-wide problems.
