Interfaces play a big part in connecting machinery and the operators

Clothing materials that ping your location to heavy machinery at any given time. Smart warehouses that keep track of every object that is in their premises. Augmented reality arriving to industrial environments. How can companies make sure that they take the most out of the technology that’s going to surround them everywhere? And what are the main benefits in having an industrial internet in ports, in warehouses or in the corporate headquarters? It all begins in your pocket, writes Johannes Tarkiainen, Industrial Design Manager at Konecranes.

The good practices come from the consumer market

Apple buys Metaio, Microsoft launches Hololens. The headlines say it all: Big leaps toward a fully realized Industrial Internet are taken continuously, and the large enterprises in the know are already making their moves. At the same time smaller companies are passing milestones in the way data is produced and processed. The data itself is moved increasingly to the cloud while offering larger amounts of analytics, transforming collected data into information – and finally into knowledge. With the rapid-fire advancements also come boosts in efficiency and safety.

A great deal of people already have some experience with wearable technology, more precisely their smart phones. According to one prediction[i], by 2018, over two and a half billion people on the planet will have a smart phone, compared to the 1.75 billion in the end of 2014[ii].

For industrial companies, a lot can be learned from the consumer market applications. The operating systems and applications that are available for consumers are easily adaptable to fit the needs of the user. They also rely more and more on a highly visual way of representing the world helping the user to decipher information at a quick glance of a screen. The applications that make the biggest mark have a very intuitive and straight-forward user interface. The main idea is to, after all, help the user and simplify a task that might have been more complex if it wasn’t for the application fitting perfectly in that context. The same should be the goal for industrial applications.

That’s why the context matters the most when designing meaningful solutions for an industrial wearable application. A company must reflect the things that the user experience brings to the business in question. A solution that is designed for one environment might not fit the needs of another. The necessary toolkit for an end user operating in a port is different from the toolkit that is needed in steel industry, for example.

Making the workplace more safe and more efficient

From a business standpoint, the biggest advantages in implementing wearable applications comes in the form of increased safety and efficiency. Production facilities, for instance, especially in primary production have their share of blind spots. Augmented reality applications might prove as a solution for making sure that the activity near these areas will not end up disrupting the work flow or cause hazards in the facility.

Wearing a helmet, a vest, or a watch that informs the surrounding ecosystem of your location at all times could, for example, be integrated into a system that instructs automated large or moving machinery to slow down or halt when a person approaches them from around a corner. Due to the advancement in video technology and the decreased amount of time it takes to process large amounts of incoming data, personnel won’t even have to enter possibly hazardous environments in the future. Instead they can manage and follow the production of goods from any location they deem suitable.

As for the efficiency, having an automated log of every object in the facility is a huge time saver, as is the possibility to automate the maintenance of machinery: If a machine is arriving to the end of its lifecycle, or if a certain part is enduring more wear than it is intended to, it is possible to have the equipment send diagnostic data automatically to order repair or replacement.

The demands for operator skills evolve with the changing machinery

The changing demands and opportunities on the factory floor also affect the needs for the training of the employees. Compared to the production plants of yesterday, the modern equipment have a much shorter lifecycle. Earlier there might have been, for example, a controlling device for a hoisting device that hadn’t changed for decades, and it still could have been completely suitable for the surroundings, but now the technology is evolving rapidly, bringing new demands to the support functions, ways of thinking and the need for a solid understanding of the changing surroundings.

This also has the effect of making the demand in the workforce shift from direct operators to a more process control oriented approach, where the emphasis is more on the diagnostics and ensuring that the machinery runs proficiently in contrast to physically operating them. This also increases the demand for continuous training: with new technology comes new user interfaces, operating systems and through them, new skills required. The operations will be more digital and require more skills to utilize IT than before.

These are only a few examples of the road to a more complete intelligent industrial environment. With the amount of innovations that are made every day, we can only imagine, what new types of applications might be on their way to help provide a frictionless, smoother workflow, and how the production plant of the – surprisingly near – future might operate or look like. Not to mention the personnel operating within.

Johannes Tarkiainen works as Industrial Design Manager at Konecranes.

[i] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694
[ii] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-Users-Worldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014/1010536

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