Digital Factory: 2 Investments to Help Get Your Staff On Board

Most manufacturers have an overarching business goal of driving project quality and company revenues. Companies like Autodesk and Forbes have related that the future of manufacturing is digital. In the digital manufacturing process:

• modeling can be directly connected to performance;
• maintenance can be predicted;
• simulations can help visualize and evaluate products.

Whether you’re looking for reduced risk, smarter decisions or faster time to production, you’ll want to give your company the best chance for success. Once you make the decision to transition to a digitalized factory, part of that success will depend on getting your workforce behind the transition and supporting it going forward.

With that in mind, here are 2 investments to help get your staff on board when it’s time to digitalize your factory.

Technology

Selecting technology should always start with identifying a problem that needs to be solved, then finding the right tool to address it. Most companies recognize technology is a critical investment. So, remember to plan before you leap.

Instead of choosing a tool and telling your team to implement it, first look at your current processes and determine the inefficiencies. Discuss the challenges of a process or workflow with your workers as a group. Then discuss the ways a new technology could help address those challenges.

You can also develop and implement standards to address those inefficiencies. Not only will this improve your workflows and productivity, it will make your workers part of the process of choosing the best technology for the job. Further, it creates an incentive for them to help it succeed.

Each worker has a way they prefer to do their job, and adding new technology is a change that disrupts that routine. It is key to adoption that your team understands the ways this technology can improve their effectiveness on the job. If they’ve been through the discovery and vetting process with you, they’ll recognize the benefits that can come with implementation.

Invest in your team’s success by choosing training with Graitec Group. Help team members develop skills while building trust and loyalty in your company.

Training

Training is an investment that is just as important as the technology tool you are implementing. Gone are the days when you could hand the inhouse “tech guru” a software disk and tell them to learn it so they could show the rest of the team how to use it. Today’s digital tools are specialized, sophisticated and multifaceted. Learning by trial and error gets farther out of reach every day, making training a must-have part of your implementation.

Training to use digital tools should be an applied experience. Team members should be able to practice the skills they are learning on a real project. Only when workers can use the technology/tool in real world scenarios can they truly hone their skills. Fine-tuning those abilities will follow.

Just as partnering with an experienced solutions provider can help you identify the problems you want to solve with technology, an industry partner can help you develop a training plan that fits your company’s specific needs for building your team’s skills and knowledge.

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