We’re thrilled to share this recent feature article in TechTarget about Connected Worker® by Parsable, with commentary from Grupo Lala, one of our customers, and Peter Bussey, a lead analyst at LNS Research, on how connected work could change the game for industrial companies.
In the U.S. alone, more than 2.6 million Baby Boomers are expected to retire from manufacturing jobs by 2030. As Boomers will soon be phased out, they will take with them years of tacit knowledge – resulting in a brain drain. The arrival of digital-first Millennials are entering an industry demanding the same technology advancements they have in their personal lives. It’s clear that solutions are needed to bridge the skills gap and labor shortage. Manufacturers are pledging to upskill 1.2 million industrial workers, but that only addresses part of the problem.
Research firms like Gartner and LNS Research have begun to define connected work as a category that will help address the market of 2.7 billion deskless workers.
Connected work connects frontline workers with systems and machines and with each other. Connected Worker static, paper-based procedures into mobile and interactive work instructions, enabling workers to leverage multimedia formats and collaborate in real time. Operations are more consistent, transparent and leadership is able to collect and analyze frontline worker data – unlocking powerful human insights.
Connected Worker was developed to meet the needs of the changing manufacturing environment.
“ERP, MES, PLM [systems] were never really architected for people who do the actual work,” Parsable’s CEO, Lawrence Whittle said in the TechTarget article. “There’s an opportunity with the demographics shift, the ever-increasing drive for productivity, and this huge amount of work that’s going on around machines and operations that are not currently being automated in any systematic way.”
Connected Worker, Whittle said, enables manufacturers to replace the binders, walkie-talkies and printers that they currently use to manage the parts of the process that can’t be captured by ERP or other manufacturing systems. Those systems, for example, can tell workers what needs to be done and when, but they can’t tell them how to do the procedure.
Grupo Lala, a global dairy production company with plants across Mexico, the U.S., Brazil and Central America has seen much success with the adoption of Connected Worker.
Marvin Nahmias, Grupo Lala’s Chief Innovation and Information Technology Officer said, “The problem with these administration systems [like SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII)] is, you can have the MII system, but people still run around with binders as they do things and then they enter it on the system manually.” Nahmias said. “Even though you can give them a tablet to do it, this is the reality of what happens.”
With Parsable, “It actually took zero training, which is good because 80% of our workforce is millennials,” Nahmias said. “It was extremely fast for people to adopt this and [we let people] bring their own phone, so that works pretty well.”
To read the full article, click here.
