Improve the quality of your product by improving your inspections

Nothing is more important than creating a high-quality product. If you fall short of the uniform quality your customers have come to expect, your brand’s reputation can suffer. The most significant factor behind unplanned downtime and defective products is no longer machine error but operator error.

Research shows that up to 85% of production errors, recalls, and machine downtime in manufacturing are caused by human mistakes on the factory floor. In this article, we will explore how you can improve the quality of your product by improving the quality of your inspections.

Reducing human error means giving your front-line operators the advanced instructions they need to simplify complicated machine maintenance, ensure equipment stays up and running, and produce high-quality products. Before we look at methods to reduce operator error, let’s examine the major trends that threaten the efficiency of your workforce.

Facing A Skilled Worker Crisis

Manufacturing is currently in a unique crisis caused by several factors working in tandem. More than half of senior workers in skilled worker categories are retiring. The machines your teams maintain have become more complicated, and manufacturers are creating more varied products on the same production line that all need to be built to meet a demanding standard. Even for the most experienced operators, it’s impossible to keep all the details in their heads or in three-ring binders.

On top of that, manufacturers have to deal with increasing supply chain disruptions, rising commodity prices, sustainability concerns and an intensely competitive marketplace, which all puts more pressure on your workforce to perform their best. The new generation of inexperienced workers must somehow become more efficient than the more experienced workers they are replacing.

These market pressures will only intensify in the future. The only solution is to provide complex work instructions to make operating the machines so simple and intuitive that years of experience are no longer necessary to meet your company’s demanding standards. This increased efficiency is impossible with immature static paper-based processes that most companies use to train workers and control standardized work execution. Let’s look at the problem with paper-based processes for training and work execution.

The Problem With Paper-Based Processes

Paper-based processes:

• Use training methods that rely on written instructions that are difficult to understand
• Offer inexperienced workers very little support to work unsupervised
• Demand low verification of task completion, which endangers your equipment
• Offer poor quality standardization tools, which creates deviations from standard and defective products
• Gives management low-quality operational visibility

This is where Connected Worker or Front Line Worker Platforms come in to raise the quality of machine maintenance and protect the quality of your product by giving your workers the advanced instructions they need to do their best work. Mass adoption of Connected Worker Platforms allows the sector to grow at a CAGR of 19% yearly. But what is a Front Line Worker Platform anyway?

The Rise Of Front Line Worker Platforms

A Connected or Front Line Worker platform is a digital suite of tools that integrate human workers into their environments using the devices they naturally use in the flow of work (laptops, tablets, mobile phones and Smart Glasses.)

Front-line workers are connected to visual, highly contextual training, easy-to-use standardized work instructions and instant access to remote assistance from subject matter experts when the unforeseen occurs.

This means your workers are connected to the right instructions, tools, and people for the job at hand, increasing the quality of human touch points at each stage of job execution.

How Atheer can help you meet the challenges of Complex Work Environments

In this section, we are going to look at the ways Atheer’s AR-powered Front Line Worker Platform can ensure the quality of your product through:

1. Improving machine uptime by raising the quality of machine inspection
2. Elevate standardized work execution with visual, easy-to-understand instructions
3. Increase verification for quality audits with photographic and video evidence
4. Offer Extended Enterprise solutions to track and eliminate defects across your supply chain
5. Improve operational visibility through real-time reporting

Book a demo to discover all Atheer can do for your business!

1. Increased Quality of Inspection Leads To More Machine Uptime

Paper-based inspection relies on what a human operator can see and then translate into words. Atheer offers its partners the ability to build highly standardized digital workflows for inspections where evidence like photographs or videos is demanded for step completion.

This type of data capture is crucial for determining the health of complicated equipment as it degrades over time. With paper-based processes, it’s black and white; either the machine is working or not. A Front Line Worker platform can capture the severity of issues in a way that can’t be conveyed with words alone. This allows operators to describe the problems to management accurately.

Using Atheer’s advanced photo editing feature, operators can even highlight problem areas on images they capture in the field and rapidly escalate them for immediate resolution.

When problems are discovered that can’t be easily explained, your operators can be instantly connected to a remote expert. The increased quality of inspection helps keep your machines up and running, reduces unplanned downtime, and keeps your production line producing high-quality products.

2. Enhanced Standardization Creates Uniform High-Quality Products

Workers are provided with intuitive, highly visual instructions that are simple to understand, no matter your operator’s experience or education level. These step-by-step instructions can contain videos, pictures, and diagrams showing exactly how to complete the job for each step to take the guesswork out of job execution. Work execution is standardized so that steps can’t be skipped and important details won’t be missed.

Even the most inexperienced worker can complete the steps on time and to spec. Supervisors can check the work before it’s closed or after it becomes an automatically generated report when the job is completed. This enhanced standardization and visibility allows management to capture deviations at the source. It also allows management to offer support to workers lagging behind and struggling to meet company standards, as all actions performed in Atheer are captured and time-stamped.

3. Improved Verification For Quality Audits

Workers are assigned digital workflows with all the steps for quality audits to ensure products are constructed to meet your standards and don’t contain defects. Photographic or video evidence can be collected to verify that each audit step has been properly completed. When the jobs are completed, they are immediately available for review to get an extra set of eyes on them. This way you can be sure no defects escape notice before your product leaves the factory.

4. Extended Enterprise Quality Audits

Atheer plays well with extended enterprise systems, so the same audit workflows in your factories, mining sites or refineries can be extended across your entire supply chain.

This means that you can discover defects when they occur across your supply chain and eliminate them before they reach the marketplace and cause damage to your brand.

5. Schedule And Easily Track All Recurring Jobs

Recurring maintenance jobs can be automated and assigned to the right workers with the proper instructions. Atheer makes it easy to track all preventive maintenance jobs and ensure they’ve been completed to eliminate skipped PM.

6. Harness Expertise for Remote Audits

AR-powered audits in remote locations can be aided by subject matter experts from anywhere in the world to eliminate travel time and reduce problem resolution time when experts aren’t available on the ground. Atheer’s remote assist saves time and money and makes your organization’s expertise scalable.

7. Increased Operational Visibility For Preventive Maintenance

Atheer provides management with real-time data and complete visibility of machine maintenance activities. The wealth of structured, real-time job data can be integrated into ERP, MES or BI systems for immediate analysis with a generic, low-maintenance API-based integration and eliminate thousands of hours of dual data entry per process. This gives management the data they need to continuously improve their front-line processes and ensure the quality of your product.

Conclusion

Atheer offers your front-line teams the mature processes and advanced instructions they need to confidently face the escalating challenges of the future marketplace.

Our low-code/no-code platform is easy to implement. In the hour it takes to digitize the process permanently, you can permanently eliminate thousands of hours of dual data entry.

Our system is device-agnostic and simple to use, and our team of qualified experts is here to support you every step of the way.

Book a demo today and discover how we can make your digital transformation seamless.