How innovative manufacturers can make use of AR in the age of smart manufacturing?
The world of manufacturing has seen large-scale digitisation in the last few years, manifesting itself in a variety of ways, from computing infrastructure to AI analytics.
This digitisation has broadly been called the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT. In the last couple of years, it’s been steadily rising in prominence. This graph from CB Insights points to that trend.
Wall Street Journal surveyed to find that industrial manufacturing companies are far above average in adopting IoT than other asset-heavy areas like automotive, energy and utilities. Our experience helping manufacturers implement IIoT corroborates this.
As manufacturers get comfortable with innovative tech, use cases also become easier to identify and solve for. In the last few months, one of the use cases we decided to explore (after repeated client requests) was Augmented Reality for manufacturing.
Why do you need AR in your factory floor?
Over 70% manufacturers have said that their workers’ primary purpose is to guide automated technology. Today, people on the plant floor are expected to be a lot more skilled than they were in the past. Augmented Reality can help workers understand machines better, aid productivity and cut down training time drastically.
How AR can help and how you can leverage AR.
To answer this, we need to look at a few of the most promising AR use cases that we’ve implemented for our clients.
Training
In addition to being a hands-free browser that can communicate KPIs, AR can analyse complicated machines and map out machine parts lucidly and visually – A live, 3D instructional. Between that and animated assembly tutorials (like IKEA is doing), trainees get a visual understanding of how machines work, improving retention drastically.
Machine Maintenance and Support
By using AR headsets like Leap Motion or using mobile and iPad cameras to highlight parts on the equipment, field agents can identify and fix problems instantly. If they need support, the headset can connect with experts in real time and the experts can interact with the agent’s AR display and guide them.
AR in pre-sales
Too often, manufacturers hit a sales roadblock because of a classic problem: Employee proficiency. The ones doing field sales don’t know enough to talk tech with business owners, and the ones that do know enough aren’t in sales. AR can help break this catch-22, by mapping out and labeling every part of the machine. This provides a quick reference guide for sales professionals, giving them talking points, and also enables business owners to better visualize what they’re buying, and make considered choices.
Here is Elon Musk interacting with his design using Leap Motion’s hand tracking technology.
We’re exploring all these AR use cases and more in our upcoming webinar “How to leverage AR for industry 4.0”. This will be a free webinar for manufacturers around the world, in collaboration with Leap Motion, a leading AR platform.
For those attending the webinar, we’ll be offering a 40-hour free consultation with our AR/IIoT experts and you can use this time to explore and find the right use cases for your factory.
Register for the webinar here!
Right from Enterprise Mobility Solutions to emerging technologies, digital transformation is critical to building and executing growth strategies for manufacturing.
IoT is the Next Big Thing
Manufacturers can strategically use the Internet of Things (IoT), which forms an intrinsic ecosystem of connected devices within an existing infrastructure.
Each industrial IoT ecosystem consists of:
Intelligent and smart assets that can depict, sense, communicate and store information about themselves.
This statistics represents the projected global Internet of Things (IoT) spending in 2020, with a breakdown by application.
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With the use of modern technology, not only will it be easier to reach out to more people with your products, but the sale process, in general, will be more efficient and streamlined through the use of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and the Internet of Things (IoT).
But as an IoT development company, we believe that it’s the Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT which has a much larger role in the progress of Industry 4.0.
In its essence, IoT can be simply considered as a technology which links all technologies together.
This entire network of devices is then easily controllable, and valuable information can be derived from such networks using Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning.
Our civilization will be using over 50 Billion IoT devices by the year 2020, and all of it will be worth $6.2 Trillion by 2025.
How to use IoT development for predictive maintenance
Before explaining how IoT helps in predictive maintenance, let’s first take a deeper dive and understand how an IoT development company creates an IoT ecosystem in the first place.
By leveraging the richness of 3D and IoT we can create compelling augmented reality experiences that help improve efficiencies, build better products and enable safer, more productive environment for workers and customers.
Advantages of Augmented Reality in manufacturing
Following are some of the obvious benefits on using AR in manufacturing sector.
Manufacturing requires putting together hundreds or thousands of components in a precise sequence as fast as possible.
For example – In aerospace manufacturing process, assembly assistance are using projectors to show the next part placement.
The augmented reality makes different today is mainly size, adaptability, and capability.
