Creating the Next-Gen Manufacturing Workforce
The manufacturing sector has been constantly changing due to volatility in global, economic, and policy decisions. There have been many transformations in the recent years. These have multiplied further due to COVID-19 and the sudden shift to working from home.
To manage these volatilities and industry changes, it has become imperative for manufacturing organizations to implement a next-gen workplace strategy. They have to adopt to new tools and systems to improve collaboration, update their technology architectures, and increase mobile device/application usage. By intelligently combining the technologies, the next-gen workplace breaks down the communication barriers and transforms employee experience.
A key concept in this journey is digitalizing this experience and productivity. The exact experiences customize information and tools to an employee’s role, location, task and efficiently connect them with relevant information.
INCREASING COMPETITION IN THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY PUTS PRESSURE ON ORGANIZATIONS TO REDUCE COSTS, IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND INCREASE PROFITABILITY. ORGANIZATIONS ARMED WITH DIGITAL FORCES ARE DISRUPTING BUSINESS MODELS WITH NEW VALUE PROPOSITIONS. THIS DISRUPTION CAUSES A CHALLENGE FOR MANUFACTURING ORGANIZATIONS BUT IS ALSO A CHANCE TO ADOPT DIGITAL THEMSELVES1.
Ideas for building the Next-Gen Workplace of the future for the manufacturing:
How can the manufacturing sector embrace and implement next-gen digital technologies to support the changing workplace? Coforge has a Reference Model for Next-Generation Workplace that combines technology and processes, focusing on user empowerment & business outcomes resulting in improved end-user productivity, business agility, and reducing IT costs.
Coforge Next-Gen Workplace Reference Model depicts the changes in the architecture:
- Move to a user-centric approach from a device-centric approach, with unified enduser experience across different devices, applications, and data
- End-user empowerment through increased Self-Service with Service Anywhere capability
- “Automation Everywhere” to enhance experience and productivity. Shifting the support paradigm from reactive to proactive model by using hyper automation and end-point analytics
- Get digital workplace tools, like executive dashboards, dynamic reporting, mobile apps
- Optimize employee interactions with customer insight to deliver better personalization
- Use analytics to help automation in compliance, outage support, and trading
- Unified management of devices and apps for devices and apps integrations with other management tools
- Shift from tool & technology-oriented model to service-oriented model
- Business aligned IT to meet current and future demands
Here are a few ideas around the effective alliance of people, processes, and technology to move away from traditional next-gen manufacturing industry:
| End-User Experience Management |
Monitoring actual user experience and determining if users are being served quickly, accurately, and which business processes are failing. |
| Desktop Automation & Shift Left Framework |
Solution to provide one- click auto healing, and preventive maintenance |
| AR Based Virtual In-Person Support |
Leverage the power of augmented reality to deliver 24x7 virtual support, saving costs, reducing travel time, fall in employee downtime, and eliminate the need to dispatch a technician |
| Experience Management Office |
Driving end-user experience by setting up a dedicated experience management office to measure, drive and enhance the end-user experience |
| Follow me IT |
Free up end-users from waiting in the calling queue and letting the service desk call you back at a convenient time |
| Digital Channel for End-Users |
Mobile app to access IT support from anywhere and deliver digital experience to users |
| Business Aligned Experience Led SLAs |
Shift from traditional IT down performance measurement indicators to more objective and business-aligned experience level indicators (XLAs) |
Further details on some of the above-mentioned points are as below:
- Cognitive Virtual Assistant – The new allies for digital transformation
- AI-powered Cognitive Virtual Assistants can make digital services easier for IT organizations to deploy and simpler for employees to consume. Chatbots allow IT to deflect calls away from the service desk by providing an automated, easy-to-use channel to search for the information and services
- End-Point Automation – Ticketless Experience
- The best support is the support you don’t need, and every employee wants a “ticketless experience. Consider that employees working from the remote warehouse are struck by the most common machine issue – slowing down of the system. This has a direct impact on end-users’ deliverables and businesses are adversely impacted. A proactive end-point automation tool will autonomously initiate a disk clean-up, memory clean-up, disk defragmentation, and in turn, speed up the system instantaneously.
- EUX Management – Quantify user experience to support productive workplaces
- Delivering productive digital experience across the distributed workforce in a heterogeneous environment remain one of the most difficult IT tasks. EUX management solutions like Coforge InsightX monitors all the factors that impact end-user experience directly and then analyses that data to provide IT organization with an accurate view of the current state of the end-user computing environment. The solution intelligently calculates an end-user experience score and provides with the data to build and support productive next-gen workplaces.
- Augmented Reality – Bridge the digital and physical worlds
- We are not living in the traditional world, the COVID-19 pandemic has made organizations move their workforce to working from home. This has irreversibly changed the way IT Services are provided. While IT support functions are trying their best to enable the work-from-home culture, certain apparent challenges need to be addressed. Manufacturers have a large base of employees who are widely distributed while working from home and come from different age groups. These employees are not as tech-savvy and need IT assistance for every small matter.
The situation is further accentuated by the pressing ask to reduce the operational cost. The IT support services must be timely, fast, and efficient.
- PMO to EMO – Shifting focus to experience
The philosophy of the next-gen workplace revolves around end-users and the effort to provide an exemplary experience to business consumers. They must ensure that the users get high-quality experience-led services. Keeping this view in mind, the focus should shift from running the project to measuring performance and perception of IT services and driving improvement.
- Experience Level Agreement (XLA) - XLAs are the new SLAs
- Manufacturing organizations understand the significance of a highperforming next-gen workplace for achieving business transformation. For the manufactures to beat their competitors, and thrive in an increasingly demanding world, IT teams must switch from legacy uptime SLAs to experience level agreements (XLAs). By swinging the focus, they can easily discover how employees find the experience of utilizing technology. It shifts the focus from service reviews and penalties to continuous service and improvement. It uses employee feedback and hard data to drive the ongoing improvement and boost overall satisfaction.
