The deskless workforce has unique challenges at the last mile; Leaders must be empathetic towards their problems to drive digital transformation projects effectively.
Deskless workforce performs around 70-80% of manufacturing tasks and the most significant source of variability. Organizations are trying to embrace digital technologies for their workforce to drive safety, quality, and productivity at the workplace. However, companies often struggle to get beyond conducting pilots and fail to realize the true potential of creating a connected workforce.
The focus should be on digital operational excellence and frontline workers’ empowerment. Moving away from a traditional paper, spreadsheet, and tribal knowledge to a paperless and connected world will unlock massive new growth opportunities in the company’s value chain.
The evolving dynamics of the deskless workforce
The labor market is fundamentally changing. Most jobs, mainly which are knowledge-driven, will not require traditional training and skills to be developed. With the new millennial workforce joining the workforce, companies need to invest in new ways to onboard and make their workforce productive and skilled.
We are witnessing a democratization of knowledge and a move towards training on-demand along with the rise of a collaborative workforce environment. Technology can help bridge this gap to find effective means of knowledge sharing among their employees or contractors. Companies need to ensure they can easily define process workflows and deliver them to the person effectively, thereby reducing months of expensive training time. Early investment into these digital procedures will help companies leverage the evolving labor markets and build a competitive edge amongst their peers.
Why this needs a human-centric approach
To become operationally efficient, the organization needs more than just systems of records; Existing ERP and MES systems are suitable for a system for records that are more transactional. However, these do not capture the workforce experience holistically.
By bringing human-centric experiences to the forefront, we can drive data-driven operational efficiency. This would help us build systems that can be smarter and context-rich to answer what, when, and how about the job requirements.
Delivering a simple, friendly, digital work experience to optimize the job execution by the frontline workforce is very critical. This is why we are seeing massive demand for Connected Worker Platforms. The world is becoming more collaborative, and we need to design our systems, keeping the needs of our workforce in perspective.
With the advancement of technology, particularly the disruption we see with no-code technology, it no longer requires complex IT configurations and setup; it can be implemented easily with no technical knowledge. Business users can design interactive work procedures, configure locally and deploy the solution rapidly, keeping in mind the requirements of the workforce.
The rise of Connected Worker Platforms
Connected worker platforms are vital for an organization looking to drive continuous improvement to achieve standardizations across their sites and workforce and improve the visibility into last-mile execution. They are essential in generating operational insights to help drive productivity, safety, and quality.
Connected worker platforms enable a modern, digital collaborative experience to optimize daily work for your employees. Through seamless authoring of rich interactive SOPs and work instructions, they allow quick and easy sharing of process workflows across your organization. Moreover, they provide daily insights regarding the adherence of these to drive process improvement. They also help identify employees who require training and help employers take proactive steps. Organizations deploying these systems improve process flexibility with quick onboarding and training of workers.
Operational teams should be able to configure workflows & procedure documents according to their job requirements through a no-code authoring framework. A no-code authoring platform provides powerful and easy building blocks which can be used to create powerful applications using drag and drop functionality. Changes required to existing processes and procedures can be made when needed to support process improvement. We no longer need monthly projects driven by IT to make changes.
Standardizing procedures and visibility into last-mile execution data are keys to driving operational efficiency for these organizations. This will help companies become more agnostic about who is executing the job, and technology will help them make better and smarter decisions. Intelligent assignment of the right technician for a job with a predefined skill required will unlock massing ROI and can be built using ML.
The benefits to the organization are highly dependent on the use cases deployed due to the heterogeneous nature of work. The success criteria for any connected worker deployment should require quantified improvements to safety, quality, and time savings. Leaders must be mindful when investing in digital transformation for their deskless workforce and must understand their needs and subtleties. This will help them drive a successful transformation and make organizations sustainable, giving them a significant competitive advantage.
Source: Business World
