Anthony Murphy, Vice President and Head of Product Management at Plex, a Rockwell Automation Company, met with me for a bit at the recent Automation Fair. I had toured the show floor captivated by the demo of the connected factory worker. I’ve followed the workflow technology for many years. Companies keep improving both the technology and the utility.
Murphy explained that Plex has a design philosophy of building a platform then constructing apps on top.
We’ve written about the “coming” worker shortage for more than 20 years. The fat is evidently finally in the fire. I know that my neighbor in suburban Chicago, by means of example, cannot find workers for his sheet metal fabricating company. Often when someone is hired they show up for a day without returning. This story repeats often.
The connected worker solution provides digital tools to retain, attract, and reskill workers. It empowers them with real-time guidance, visual aids, and multimedia content, enhancing comprehension and reducing errors on the job. By streamlining the number of applications manufacturers need, the solution also reduces total cost of ownership, time to value, and cybersecurity risk.
The connected worker offerings provide the following benefits:
- Recruiting and retaining a connected workforce: The new capabilities provide digital tools and real-time information to enhance worker productivity and engagement.
- Addressing the talent gap: Through these offerings, Plex helps manufacturers empower their workers with advanced training and tools to stay competitive in the evolving workforce landscape.
- Knowledge retention and transfer: As a large amount of the current workforce in manufacturing retires, safeguarding industry expertise is critical to ensure smooth knowledge transition to the next generation. The capabilities create and capture the corpus of manufacturing knowledge in an organic way.
- Guided and Interactive Work Instructions, providing step-by-step task guidance for people, machines, and devices.
- Interactive Work Instructions—developed in partnership with Canvas GFX and currently available—enables users to author and work with model-based 3D and 2D multimedia formats within a single document to drive better understanding of the work at hand.
