Aerospace and Defense is a highly competitive, complex, and regulated industry. And while companies compete to provide increasingly complex and customised products, the aging workforce is proving difficult to replenish. Industrial AR is an invaluable new solution for Final Assembly & Delivery (FA&D) workforces: offering efficiency, agility, compliance and safety gains—while reducing costs.
AR applications offer a continuum of support for manufacturing workers across all experience levels. AR-based onboarding and training can accelerate ramping-up new workers, while improving their retention and competency. AR-enhanced guidance and work instruction can assist newer and seasoned workers—with immersive guidance for even the most specific and customised tasks. In the event that unforeseen challenges arise, remote assistance and collaboration can enable tenured workers to assist their less experienced colleagues—regardless of their physical proximity.
Improving Quality and Profitability
As competition escalates in aerospace and defense, a service-led focus on customer satisfaction and new revenue streams is helping companies differentiate and drive growth. True service-led transformation can be a challenging strategy to execute and places a premium on experience. Skilled career experts are aging out of service markets. Conversely, underskilled workers can have a detrimental effect on service outcomes and customer satisfaction. Industrial augmented reality is proving to be instrumental in improving technician proficiency—and in ensuring service efforts are successful.
Similar to manufacturing use cases, AR supports service workers throughout their skills development process. AR-based onboarding and training can speed ramp-up time for new or redeployed service techs, while ensuring that once in the field, they are equipped to handle the task at hand. AR-enhanced guidance and work instruction helps ensure that service visits have faster, more successful resolutions. Easy access to live remote assistance is invaluable for rapid trouble-shooting of complex or unexpected problems, allowing companies to use their valued experts more effectively—by providing real-time remote assistance to more junior technicians.
Enhancing Learning Outcomes
The lack of an able workforce in FA&D has intensified the need for companies to quickly onboard and upskill new or seasonal workers. There’s an urgent need to transfer the skills and knowledge of experts to the new generation of workers, but poor training methodology and complexities across assets,workflows, and facilities make ramping up new workers challenging.
AR delivers tremendous value for training use cases with visual, highly engaging training experiences that have been proven to improve comprehension, retention, safety and time to worker productivity with fewer errors. AR allows for real-time, on-the-job training and upskilling for new or unfamiliar tasks. Interactive in-context 3D instructions and expert guided procedures provide industrial workforces with critical domain knowledge.
Differentiating Product Demonstrations
With fierce competition in the FA&D market, the ability to differentiate products and the buying experience can pay serious dividends. Expectations are shifting—today’s customers are no longer satisfied by physical product brochures, cumbersome demonstrations, and painfully slow sales cycles. Industrial AR enables manufacturers to stay several steps ahead of the competition, while also reducing avoidable sales and marketing costs.
As full-scale digital renditions of physical parts and equipment, AR-based product demonstrations make unique features and product innovations easier to visualise and understand. AR-driven demonstrations cost less because they can be culled from anywhere—including at trade shows, in factories, or in meeting rooms—without any shipping or transportation required. Creative uses of AR can also provide manufacturers with enticing interactive experiences that delight brand enthusiasts.
Bottom Line
When correctly implemented, industrial AR can have a transformative effect for FA&D companies. Specifically, AR has proven to improve processes and outcomes through a more effective, technical workforce. Digital transformation initiatives that include industrial AR can lead to increases in productivity, reduced waste, and safety and compliance improvements. Leading FA&D companies are turning AR investments into real-world gains. With adoption easier than ever, the time to get started is now.
Improving Efficiency Across the Value Chain with Digital Product Visualization
Design review and demonstration have become increasingly important for product development and sales. However, there are several obstacles that can prevent a company from fully realising their product’s potential.
ABI Research explores how Augmented Reality improves product development and sales in three key areas:
• Product Visualisation and Interaction: Reduce the time required to design, iterate and sell products
• Real-Time Collaboration and Remote Service: Reduce travel costs via AR- enabled communication
• Workflow Guidance: Increase worker efficiency and reduce error rates
