Calculating ROI for Your Connected Frontline Workforce

Digital disruption has reshaped the business landscape propelled by the pandemic, which means it’s a challenge to find a company that hasn’t either adopted or considered digitisation to help ensure future growth. That said, some sectors have seen more change than others, explains Intoware’s Sales Director, Vince Galvin

Traditional industries such as utilities, manufacturing, oil and gas and heavy civils have been slower to act compared with newer tech or media businesses. When industries are reliant on outdated and paper-based processes however, it results in process inefficiencies, leads to weak decision making, intelligence hidden in silos and an inability to attract new talent.

Connecting your frontline engineers, technicians and assembly line workers to legacy business processes by going paper-less is a critical first step in creating a digital workplace. If you are looking to gain actionable insights from the data in your business for future growth, it means digitising critical paper-based, legacy and human processes.

A frontline connected worker strategy joins legacy systems and new digital technologies such as Cloud, AI, sensors, smart phones, tablets and wearables so frontline industrial workers have the right information they need to do their jobs effectively. It empowers them by providing them with step-by-step digital workflow instructions and access to live video, audio and photos which they can share with experts here or on the other side of the world to get problems solved instantly.

Want to make savings from quicker, connected working?

By reducing the amount of paper within your business and connecting frontline workers by using portable devices integrated with digital workflow software such as Intoware’s WorkfloPlus will translate to immediate bottom-line improvements, use our ROI CALCULATOR to find out how?

Investing in connected working to change how you work leads to better decision making, profitability and future resilience – see how with these ‘Top-Tips’.

Here’s 10 reasons to go digital

1. Digitisation (putting physical manuals and tick-lists into a digital format) can streamline business processes, enabling easy access to ‘real-time’ data that flows across your business as part of a connected worker strategy to maximise performance.
2. By switching to digital workflows, you can build a huge bank of data and use the same information to predict when failures may occur. In heavy industry, H&S, compliance and audit checks are frequent and detailed. Unless these processes are done digitally, they create huge volumes of paper that are difficult to track and measure accurately.
3. Typically, data is recorded but scattered in data silos or manual processes, which its difficult to access and pass freely between systems preventing the possibility of better, connected working.
4. We all make mistakes we’re only human! We accidentally delete files or take short-cuts to get the job done quickly. The opportunity to make these types of mistakes is significantly reduced with digital workflow instructions.
5. Your frontline workers will complete their jobs in a shorter time to a higher quality. By providing the right data when needed, you can reduce the time need to make decisions. This allows workers to determine what is needed and what actions should be taken.
6. It’s not just about efficiencies – it’s about taking a granular view into operations, connected working provides access to better supporting data for strategic decision making. By taking data from various sources, your workers can analyse information to help predict failures based on historical trends which makes a huge difference when it comes to limiting downtime.
7. Streamlining asset maintenance tasks means therefore, that machines are available 100% of the time.
8. Using digital workflows to follow instructions frees workers up from mundane tasks so they aren’t frustrated by slow processes.
9. Constantly changing compliance needs are met by checking ‘who’, ‘did’ ‘what’ and ‘when’ with a ‘single source of truth’ by digitising inspections.
10. Safety, businesses can function with fewer staff out in the field, this helps when frontline workers are completing complex asset inspections in remote or hazardous environments.

By digitising critical processes and providing the digital ‘tools’ frontline workers need is the key to unlocking productivity, cost efficiencies and compliance – Intoware did just that for Petrofac, it gained 200% productivity increase by digitising North Sea inspections with WorkfloPlus, wearables from RealWear and digital twin technologies.