Industry is characterized by manual work. Be it the assembly of components or the maintenance of machines - people remain an integral part of the process. It is therefore essential to provide them with the best possible support in their daily work. This is the task of a digital worker assistance system.
A worker assistance system helps your workers to carry out their work efficiently and without errors. At its core, such a system consists of software that shows the worker all the information they need about their work steps. At the same time, the system documents the entire process.
Software-only solutions offer clear added value compared to hardware-based pick-by-light systems (or pick-by-voice, pick-by-scan or pick-by-vision). Pure software is more flexible and can be used independently of the workstation, but can be connected to the desired hardware via appropriate interfaces.
The tasks of a worker assistance system result in a basic set of functions that every system must provide.
An advanced system does not display the same information and instructions to every employee, but is based on the qualification profile. By displaying only the necessary information, the system does not overload your employees with information and therefore reduces their mental workload.
A good system can also provide overarching information such as health and safety instructions for retrieval in the corresponding work instructions.
In addition, advanced worker assistance systems have advanced feedback functions that enable sustainable process optimization. For example, messages can be sent to different departments directly from the system or reasons for faults can be recorded directly. Really good systems even go so far as to integrate the basic functionality of a PDA system: The worker can record productive times during processing and correct working times if necessary.
Flexibility starts with openness. Good worker assistance systems are so open that they can be optimally integrated into your existing IT infrastructure and company processes - both in SaaS and on-premises operation.
When it comes to creating work instructions, good worker assistance systems do more than just map linear sequences. A modern system opens up a wide range of process modeling options. Of course, this starts with simple checklists, but extends to complex processes with dependencies and branches.
Advanced systems even perform in-process quality checks as dynamically integrated test steps, thus enabling a particularly high level of quality assurance in sensitive processes.
A good worker assistance system not only has the worker in mind - but also the quality assurance engineer, the industrial foreman, the maintenance technician, etc. It can be used in a variety of ways in different areas of the company and therefore helps to eliminate isolated solutions.
As a result, the worker assistance system can establish itself as a standardized information platform for cross-departmental use. This in turn helps to democratize data in production-relevant areas of the company.
Pay particular attention to ensuring that the system can adapt to your processes and language and not the other way around. Good systems map the customer-specific specialist domain quickly and comprehensively with the help of process data.
As your company grows, your worker assistance system should not fall by the wayside. Good systems grow with you and allow you to get started with just a few licenses or without explicit integrations, for example. If the time is ripe for more consistency, you can simply scale the existing system according to your requirements.
Scalability automatically means that the system is future-proof, especially if the worker assistance system is based on a modern architecture and modular expandability.
Modern, multi-variant production presents workers with special challenges. They have to carry out a wide variety of processes safely and without errors. Each process requires different knowledge and requires the worker to change over constantly. The smaller the batch sizes, the more the human factor becomes a potential source of error. Worker assistance systems give you a clear competitive advantage here. Why? We have summarized four important reasons for you:
Before each order or even work step, the worker has to compile the required documents or correctly interpret printed CAD drawings and filter out the correct information for processing. This eats up time, impairs productivity and increases the risk of errors. With a worker assistance system, you can prevent all of this by always providing your workers with the information they need for each work step digitally.
A worker assistance system helps you to effectively avoid errors in assembly or other manufacturing processes by providing your employees with clear and unambiguous work instructions. It provides the required information for each work step, ensures the correct process sequence and integrates test steps into the process. This saves you time-consuming rework and additional costs for complaints.
In production, consistent documentation and, increasingly, verification obligations and the associated effort and costs are part of day-to-day business. Here, too, worker assistance systems provide support by automatically recording the activities of your workers digitally. Your employees enter test and measured values directly into the system and do not have to be laboriously transferred afterwards.
Regardless of whether you are training a new colleague or introducing a worker to a new process: The training phase costs time and also blocks the experienced employee who is doing the training. Support your workers with a worker assistance system and significantly reduce training times by providing detailed step-by-step instructions. This ensures a consistently high level of training and your workers are productive more quickly.
Beyond this, there are many other arguments in favor of using a worker assistance system in your manufacturing company:
A worker assistance system is predestined for assembly in production, as manual processes are part of the daily work here. A digital assistant provides your workers with clear work instructions and makes the required information available. Additional test steps at the work stage help to identify and avoid errors during assembly.
This is where flexible, workstation-independent worker assistance systems come into their own. The maintenance technician receives machine-specific work orders with all relevant information, e.g. on a tablet, and returns the collected data digitally. Paper-based processes are eliminated and errors in work preparation and data transfer are reduced. This saves you valuable time.
With a good worker assistance system, you can easily map commissioning processes. Provide your staff with a standardized procedure that can be fully customized depending on the machine type. During the workflow, the system documents all steps and ensures consistent digital verification.
A worker assistance system offers valuable approaches to quality assurance on several levels. The seamless integration of inspection steps within the work instruction enables immediate error detection and correction - the keyword here is worker self-inspection. The data recorded during processing provides detailed insights into input and measured values and, thanks to automatic documentation, a worker assistance system helps to fulfill verification obligations.
Thanks to step-by-step instructions, a worker assistance system is predestined for training employees - either for new hires or when training them in new processes. Good systems adapt to the user's qualifications so that, ideally, no support from experienced colleagues is required. Experienced employees, in turn, can use a worker assistance system for knowledge retention and knowledge transfer.
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For SCHOTT as a manufacturer of high-tech materials for specialty glass, the error-free execution of complex and demanding machining processes is essential to ensure consistently high product quality. This includes, among other things
With the introduction of our worker assistance system weasl, SCHOTT pursued the goal of eliminating Excel-based paper instructions and establishing direct feedback options for the workers. Thanks to the openness of the system and its high level of flexibility, SCHOTT has been able to leverage significant potential. These include
As with the introduction of any digitalization solution in your company, you should consider certain points that will lead you to the ideal worker assistance system. In this case, however, we would like to emphasize a second perspective that plays a special role in the acceptance of the system: Your workers. If you want to introduce a worker assistance system into your production, it's not just a question of finding a solution, but also of worker acceptance.