Digitalisation of irreplaceable skills
03 September 2024
The skills gap is a prevalent problem across the industrial landscape, but can it be minimised through technology alone?
Undertaking digital transformation (DX) is essential for industrial companies to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving industrial landscape. A successful DX strategy enables the free flow of data throughout an organisation and creates a single digital thread, opening up a plethora of efficiency and maintenance improvements.
Enterprises that are well advanced on this journey can unlock the value from advanced technology capabilities, like AI, simulation and emulation software, and digital twins. Those less advanced will find plenty of improvement and return on investment to support future investment, from reduced downtime and improved energy efficiency.
Although DX looks different for every company and there is no one-size-fits-all solution, businesses that advance on this journey (even those at the start of the process) have a clear advantage over those who lag behind. So, with DX often seen as the answer to all problems felt by industrial leaders, how can it impact the long-term decline in skills availability in the UK and around the world?
The skills gap has been a topic of concern in industry for many years now. It spans all sectors and affects businesses of all sizes. Simply put, there isn’t enough new talent entering the workforce to offset the number of workers reaching retirement age.
When they leave the business, retirees take with them their hard-earned on-the-job knowledge that is a culmination of years of experience. With each departing worker, businesses are faced with the prospect of a less productive and efficient workforce, and must dedicate more resources to training workers to plug gaps.
Digital transformation for the ‘most’ valuable asset
When considering an industrial company’s assets, it’s easy to think in terms of hardware and software. In fact, the most important asset for most companies is the staff, and it can be helpful to think of the human element of an organisation as a focus for DX as much as any physical system.
In a digitally transformed organisation, data is returned from physical assets and overlaid with contextual data to drive insights. Comparisons can then be made between the performance of similar pumps, motors, or even whole lines and factories, to identify best practices, predict failures and much more besides. With the right software, for example, operators who previously couldn’t observe any different running conditions can now drill down into the data and see that something as small as a bearing needs to be replaced.
When considering the human resources of a company in the same way, it’s easy to see just how important experience is. Someone new to the workforce can be trained with the latest operating systems, they can be fully briefed on how to complete their job role effectively and, in the DX era, can be given an array of new tools to improve their ability to add value.
What they often won’t have is access to the integral in-situ experience of the ageing workforce. If an issue arises, the new employee will follow all the protocols they have been told, but if they had the opportunity to ask an experienced employee, they may be able to solve an issue quickly with in-situ knowledge.
Skills repository
As with the digital transformation of assets in the traditional sense, business owners need to view employee skills as a valuable commodity. Skills don’t have to be lost when the employee leaves a business – quite the opposite. Much of their experience ‘data’ can be digitalised and recorded, and then deployed to improve overall efficiency.
As with most DX projects, this all comes down to software choice. Business owners want to see overall improvement, but the information on how the operators reached that improvement often goes unrecorded. By making it a company policy to digitise best practices, businesses can capture those skills in the right format to welcome the next generation of industrial operators.
Not only does a digital skills repository aid in the onboarding of new employees, but it can also act as a benchmark for new facilities in a scaling business. Operators are no longer struggling to replicate the success of other facilities; they can very easily see the steps being taken to achieve that success and implement them within their own operations.
A digital skills repository also seeks to solve a much more recent industry challenge: remote working. Accelerated by COVID, it seems that flexible working is here to stay. Now, not only are skills leaving the workplace, but those that stay might be geographically spread, meaning that reaching the experienced operator with in-situ knowledge can still be a challenge.
Secure remote access to the site can help experienced staff work closely with less experienced staff on site to work through issues in real time. Add to this the advancing usability of xR technologies, such as virtual reality headsets and handheld devices with cameras and overlaid data, and the same engineer can potentially help resolve issues in multiple global locations on the same day, with expert over-the-shoulder support available at every turn.
The business implications of such capabilities are also likely to see changing relationships between vendors and end users. A digitally advanced end user can take advantage of skills outside their company through servitised contracts with remote machine builders or technology partners. Thus, the most efficient ways of owning and running technologies may soon only be available to companies that have reached a certain level of digital transformation.
It’s easy to imagine that in a relatively short period of time, those companies looking to buy and own in a traditional way will be at a sizeable competitive disadvantage – not only because of the skills gap, but also because they need to retain more specialised staff to service their assets.
The next industrial revolution
The human operator will always remain the most important asset of an industrial enterprise, no matter how technologically advanced a company is. Across industry, business leaders are seeing the value that can be found in the data produced by IoT devices and are deploying software to use that data to drive better decision-making.
Importantly, those better decisions, remain firmly in the purview of the human operator. Moreover, through DX, the value and productivity of each human operator are enhanced through the removal of repetitive task-based work, freeing them up to use their human insight to drive value.
Operator skills should be viewed in the same way as physical assets. Using technology to digitise, save and safeguard the valuable skills and experience of the ageing workforce is good business sense.
Organisations enacting a plan to digitise skills and use technology to improve training, remote servicing and job satisfaction will benefit from better staff retention, better productivity, and will be better placed to benefit from future trends that rely on a data-fluent approach to production.