One of the main challenges many companies in the manufacturing industry face these days is the hiring of skilled operators. Unemployment rates are historically low, and there is a harsh competition among employers to bring in the best candidates. Whereas in the past companies could decide for themselves who to hire, now they have to go through great lengths to be an attractive employer and convince job seekers to choose a career with them. They need to invest a lot of time and effort in the hiring process, and even then, often it is not sufficient to adequately support their growth. And after having found the perfect candidate, the challenge is not over yet. There is always that risk that an employee decides to accept another offer. All the work that went into the hiring and training process is lost then and everything starts all over again.
Arkite offers you an efficient way to combat labour shortages and control the ever increasing costs of the recruitment process.
Fight labour shortages with Arkite
Arkite offers you the ultimate operator guidance technology. Through augmented reality, the system projects real-time work instructions on the operator’s workbench that lead him step by step through the assembly process. The Arkite 3D sensor validates the actions that are executed. When the operator is about to make an error, he gets an alert from the system and the progress of the assembly process is immediately stopped. In this way, costly mistakes can be avoided.
Arkite supports your operators, but will never replace them. That means that you will still have to find and hire employees. Still, our solution will be of great help in the onboarding, training and efficient allocation of your staff.
A closer look at how Arkite supports
you and your staff
First of all, our solution will allow you to drastically reduce the training time and costs for newcomers. Because detailed step-by-step instructions are projected on the workbench, operators can be trained on-the-job. This way, they are able to work independently and without supervision and can be deployed in production very soon. Meanwhile, line managers and supervisors can focus on other tasks.
The use of the operator guidance platform will also enable you to expand the target audience for your recruiting. Candidates lacking some of the skills that were mandatory before, can now we be adequately supported to overcome their challenges. For example, for foreign operators with limited command of the language, communication and understanding complex assembly processes can be a major issue. In our system, instructions can be configured in any language, and also image and video instructions can be used. With a single action, the operator’s mother tongue can be selected and instructions are provided in his own language.
Also job seekers with a larger distance to the labour market can get the support and confidence they need to execute the required procedures. Because instructions are shown in real-time and at the moment they need to be executed, the amount of information that needs to be processed at the same time is limited. Even very complex assembly processes become a lot easier to manage and absorb once they are broken down in small steps.
Even if hiring new employees remains challenging, Arkite will also help you to improve the results you obtain with your current staff. Thanks to the validation of assembly steps by our Arkite 3D sensor, errors can be prevented and the scrap and rework rate reduced. You will be able to increase your product output without having to expand your workforce.
Arkite can also be a great asset for more experienced employees. It allows them to switch easily to the assembly of a different product or product variant. Your staff increase their skill set and become more flexible, which makes it a lot easier to quickly respond to changes in demand.
You might think that for the most experienced employees, the instructions provided by our system slows them down, rather than helping them. This is countered by our Experience Level feature. This allows you to configure the system in such a way the assembly will proceed faster and with less instructions for more experienced operators. The experience level can be selected manually, but it can also be calculated by the Arkite software itself. When the system notices the number of errors going down and the speed of execution increasing, it will automatically adapt the operator’s experience level for that particular part of the assembly.
Any assembly process, even the most complicated one, can easily be translated and standardized into a set of practical, real-time instructions thanks to our user-friendly software. No programming knowledge is required. Once the initial configuration has been done, the system will train your new employees for you. Training time and costs will go down, with an average of 50% across implementations in different industries. The system will also validate each assembly and prevent errors . Your scrap and rework rate will be reduced to an absolute minimum. Last but not least, the cycle times for a product assembly will go down, and your production process will become more efficient.
Interested in seeing Arkite’s operator guidance platform in action? Have a look at our references and case studies. For more information, contact info@arkite.com