Today’s industrial businesses are facing a large and varied number of challenges: global supply chain disruptions, increasingly stringent health and safety regulations, stealth competition, rising costs, and, last but certainly not least, a lack of skilled labor. Fortunately, there are steps companies can take to not only mitigate these risks, but turn them into opportunities for cultivating employee engagement, boosting customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.
This was one of the topics of conversation when I recently sat down with the Future of Work magazine to discuss the trends that will shape the global industrial sector in the years to come.
Engaging the Next Generation of Industrial Workers
According to our 2023 Trends Report, the aging workforce is the number one issue affecting organizations in the industrial sector. Additionally, attracting and retaining skilled workers is in the top three future concerns among business surveyed.
Although the situation for businesses in manufacturing, healthcare and logistics, for example, may seem dire, the newest generation of enterprise asset management (EAM) technology has the capability to engage the younger and tech-savvy generations while still retaining the older staff, whose experience and knowledge is the lifeblood of many organizations.
In a maintenance setting, for example, mobile technologies such as wearables are useful for visualizing and confirming recommended steps in a way that is appealing and familiar to generation-now workers. Maintenance teams enjoy ‘hands-free’ working, assisted error detection and a reduction in overall inspection time. Wearables can also help disseminate silent knowledge of more experienced staff by facilitating a ‘hub and spoke’ system for remote and automated diagnostics. In this scenario, frontline workers can access years of technical data and know-how remotely, so that fewer skills are required in the field.
Mobile technologies lead to improved work efficiency and worker satisfaction. After all, a worker who is happy with the tools provided will do a better job than a frustrated one.
Bring your Team Together with Fit-for-Purpose EAM
Research indicates that unhappy employees can cost businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity on a yearly basis. This means that the provision of both digital and physical that guarantee a smooth and hassle-free workday is not just a “nice-to-have”, it is a business imperative. One of the best and most effective ways to streamline and declutter any person’s work environment is to make sure their team is collaborating and communicating effectively and efficiently.
In the case of an asset-intensive industry such as manufacturing, the EAM system are paramount to the success and safety of any team. Assuming the EAM system is fully and seamlessly integrated with the organization’s technological ecosystem, teams from different departments within the organization will benefit from access to a single source of truth platform, into which reliability engineers, for example, feed information about the company’s assets that maintenance planners can review and act on.
A case in point is provided by our customer, The Bristol Port Company, who chose to replace its siloed maintenance system, 50-odd databases and countless spreadsheets with IFS Ultimo’s leading EAM solution. By running a centralized EAM solution, the Port—the workplace of some 12,000+ people—is in full control of all its assets and data, allowing it to make data-driven business decisions.
The Secret Ingredient
For companies wanting to remain competitive in the industrial sector, it is transparency that they should strive for. Transparency between business processes such as maintenance, safety, and operations can and will offer a significant competitive advantage for industrial organizations.
Connecting industrial employees seamlessly to the data their assets provide will empower them to work smarter, stay safer, and deliver better business results. Businesses that realize this and take steps to ensure their staff are able to manage their assets through sensible and uncomplicated processes will be well-positioned to navigate any challenge the future may hold.
Frequently Asked Questions
IFS Ultimo offers you direct insight into every step in the asset lifecycle. From acquisition through decomission, the software brings continuous insight that helps you shape your long-term asset management strategy with confidence.
Ultimo excels at managing manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, infrastructure and utility-related assets. The scope of the system is also perfectly suited to combine two or more industry solutions, to make sure all assets within your organization benefit from our best-of-breed EAM product. We even optimize asset management for the BEAT Cycling team in the Netherlands and the AJ Foyt Indy 500 racing team in the United States.
Our carefully developed mobile solution, Ultimo GO, is available to all users at no extra cost by simply navigating to your Ultimo environment on a mobile device. Our app, Ultimo Go+ is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Other blogs written by Berend Booms
