Today, one can effortlessly configure a product with the click of a button and have it delivered promptly. But have you ever wondered what this customised form of fabrication means for industrial production in general, and ultimately for the people who do the work? Allow me to share some thoughts on how industry’s future needs can be addressed with a people-centric approach to production.
To remain competitive and keep pace with rapidly changing market expectations, manufacturers have to incorporate maximum flexibility, sustainability, and speed into their production systems. This creates unforeseen challenges for the workforce. To meet future expectations, people need to be empowered with innovative, cutting-edge technologies and solutions like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, cloud and edge computing. In my experience, many companies have already realised this and are driving implementation with much more effort today than they used to a few years ago.
However, while companies try to keep up with technological advances, it is often overlooked how this impacts the people working in production. Often, the workforce is unsure about how their role will fit into the future of production. To me, it is important to emphasise that people are our most valuable asset. People will continue to be essential contributors to production systems, alongside technological advancements.
In the context of digitalisation efforts, it is important to place people even more in the center focusing on supporting employees to thrive in industrial environments. In the light of demographic change and the shortage of talent, we need to create jobs that offer both a value added to the organisation and attractive working conditions for the individual. Skilled workers are experts in their fields: they won’t stay around or accept a job unless as a company we can offer them long-term incentives, empowering them with technology and include them in important decision-making processes.
That, of course, is always easier said than done. Yet, Siemens is already heading in this direction. At our Electronics Works Fürth site, we have embarked on a journey toward people-centric production. First, we needed to understand the underlying principle: What does “people-centric” mean for us at this site, and what are practical approaches to “people-centric production”? Where might we already be on the right track in our operations, perhaps without knowing it? And what crucial steps do we still need to take for the future? To answer these questions, in 2022 we sought support from researchers at University of Cambridge, whose “Augmented Workforce Canvas” method (pictured above) provided the initial execution framework for guiding our efforts.
Once we had answered the defining questions, we explored the current digitalisation and process improvement projects at the Fürth site. Here, we noticed that the level of people-centric approaches on shop floors was already considered quite advanced. For example, maintenance technicians have deployed a notification manager, which is a standard SIMATIC product, on their smartwatches to allow employees in production to communicate with each other and with machines.
In our specific case, the equipment maintenance technicians needed to have real-time information on machine errors or unplanned stops on the shop floor. Assuming they’re sitting in a control center they have that overview, but the machines themselves might be far away. And if they’re down on the shop floor, they don’t see the big picture. In this case, the employees themselves came up with the idea of using wearables that can display machine status and error reports while the wearer is out on the floor.
This use case was also featured in the World Economic Forum’s White Paper on Workforce Augmentation (source: Moencks, M., Roth, E., Bohné, T., Basso, M., & Betti, F. (2022). Augmented Workforce: Empowering People, Transforming Manufacturing, World Economic Forum).
However, we didn’t just want to have a look at the people-centric applications we’re already using – we also wanted to find out where we’re heading. That is, once we had adopted an approach and the criteria for people-centric production at our own facility, we assessed the status, and generated two pilot applications in Electronics Works Fürth. The first pilot dealt with technology-mediated learning: training people on the job on their slack time and considering their individual learning pace. The second pilot dealt with worker assistance in processes: guiding technicians during the identification of errors during a repair process. As a result, the pilots showed that technology can both empower the people on the shop floor and increase business excellence. For example, our pilot on learning has been followed up on and has developed into an initiative focusing on a solution for learning on the shopfloor across multiple factories.
Since we aim to put the findings to work at other Siemens plants or for our customers, we are currently concentrating on a framework on how to approach people-centric production in factories. As a cornerstone of this framework, in 2023 we continued efforts in our factory in Fürth in three categories: 1) work, with focus on jobs and processes, 2) learning, dedicated to lifelong learning, 3) culture, creating an environment for our people to thrive.
I’ve found that many employees are still sceptical about new technologies – often in part because the immense advantages those technologies can offer to their specific work are not transparent enough upfront. To date, some employees view them more as competition than support. Taking the people-centric approach, our colleagues in Fürth focused on the value added for the workers, rather than the technology itself. Instead of defining a technology and then identifying a use case that can be addressed with the respective solution, they asked employees where they could use support or assistance and co-developed the solution with cross-hierarchical input – and then looked for the right technology for the situation. “I never thought about it like that,” or “Nobody ever asked me that” were just a couple of responses from employees when we asked for their opinions about technological support for their jobs. In fact, the project leaders were amazed by the positive uptake and feedback received during the project.
Ultimately, the transition to people-centric production involves three key factors:
- Empowering people with technology, thus realising benefits in every job. For example, direct communication via Notifier and wearables enables focus on resolving the issue, rather than checking system status updates. Also, jobs involving heavy cognitive stress can be made easier with laser guidance and artificial intelligence, for instance.
- Emphasising the importance of learning and the constant development of skills through specifically designed solutions. Such as creating a framework for people on the factory floor to learn relevant contents and improve their skills in their own pace in a way that matches the reality of their daily routines.
- Placing the focus on creating attractive jobs in operations and include shop floor personnel in digitalisation efforts – this will improve employee satisfaction in the process. In the long run, supporting peoples’ abilities with new technologies will get the most from a production facility and hopefully keep skilled workers from seeking greener pastures.
Our vision of a future factory is by no means a people-free factory – instead, forward-looking technologies need to be used to liberate employees from repetitive tasks and support them in production. An easy integration of smart devices in production could increase efficiency significantly and bring more flexibility for the employees.
Imagine the Notifier alerts an operator because of an error message at a machine and supports him to find the cause. The operator is automatically logged in to the machine via face recognition of his smart device. Derived from the operator’s tasks and skills the user interface and the operating environment is automatically and autonomously adapted to the operator. This support allows the operators to shift their focus to tasks that call for creativity and flexibility.
Human expertise and intuition will always be a part of industrial production, even in a lean digital factory. Wherever technologies hit their limits, people will be needed to make critical decisions. And all benefit when employees in the factory get the freedom to contribute their ideas to further improve the shop floors.