Hannah Bailey, Business Development Director at Intoware explains how the pandemic is accelerating the push toward digitisation and wearables as part of the new ‘working normal’ being adopted across many different industry sectors from Energy and Utilities to Manufacturing and Pharmaceuticals.
With many more businesses now getting themselves back up and running and workers returning to their jobs and physical locations under a ‘new normal’ way of working, employers must continue to adhere to new and changing health guidelines and impose restrictions to ensure all employees are compliant while keeping safe.
But, with so much uncertainty still around the pandemic and the ongoing effects, what can organisations do to protect their employees while still maintaining operational efficiency?
The Importance of Technology During and After the Pandemic
As working patterns for many industrial companies continue to change, the pandemic has put two key considerations in the spotlight: employees’ health and safety, and the importance of technology’s role in connecting workers to necessary information and people.
Using digital collaboration technologies to create connected worker solutions combining augmented reality (AR), digital workflow software, and wearable devices have become more relevant than ever for digitally transforming the enterprise model. Companies are looking for easy to deploy, digital tools that can optimise productivity, reduce costs and increase remote working to ensure staff safety measures are met while helping their workforce collaborate and stay connected across geographies and functions.
While there is no “one size fits all” approach on how best to adapt to the situation to ensure compliance is maintained and your workforce is protected, the digitisation of business processes and operational procedures is proving to be one of the quicker and less complicated for larger organisations struggling to meet the necessary pace of change.
Replacing paper-driven processes with digital work instructions, executing them across systems and people, and using real-time data capture output for continual data analytics, provides the necessary key insights to evaluate new digital processes that are put in place to effectively accelerate the recovery needed and continue to drive toward future operational improvement and efficiency.
Stabilise business operations for future-readiness and resilience
As the world continues to reopen for business many of the quick technical fixes adopted during the response phase may have proven not to be robust enough or scalable for the longer term. The focus at this stage should be on future-proofing and adopting solutions that align with your organisation's overarching digital strategy, so being more thoughtful and strategic about their deployment and fully understanding the impact they will have across the business.
What will happen if companies revert back and don’t adjust to this change?
Companies must continually reevaluate their digital strategy and put measures in place that establish sustainability for any future challenges, otherwise, business operations will be challenged again and the next time organisations face a crisis, they may not be so lucky to come out the other side!
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