Digital Manufacturing Assistant
Digital Support Directly at the Workstation: Relief for Your Team
Skilled labor shortages, increasing product variance, and increasingly complex workflows – the demands on your production staff are growing daily. What if every machine operator had a personal, digital assistant by their side? A system that provides support precisely when needed, minimizes errors, and eliminates paperwork entirely.
A Digital Manufacturing Assistant is the direct link between your IT department and the people on the shop floor. It delivers the relevant knowledge exactly where value creation takes place: directly at the workstation.
How a Digital Manufacturing Assistant Supports Your Day-to-Day Operations:
- Interactive Worker Guidance: Instead of thick binders with outdated paper instructions, your employees receive step-by-step, visual work instructions on a tablet or touchscreen – perfectly tailored to the current order variant.
- Real-Time Quality Assurance: The assistant guides the employee safely through inspection steps (e.g., using checklists or camera-based inspection). Defects are detected before the component leaves the station.
- Paperless Documentation: Confirmations, quality logs, or fault reports are digitally captured with a single click and flow back into your system without delay. No more manual data entry from paper slips!
- Fast Onboarding: Thanks to intuitive guidance, new employees or temporary workers become productive and ready to work safely in no time.
Mastering High Product Variance and Batch Size 1
You build outstanding products, but today’s customers demand maximum customization. The result: an enormous number of variants with countless possible combinations—whether through different housing colors or completely distinct internal technical components.
To make matters more complex, these are usually requested in small quantities, often down to a single unit.
Maintaining a constant overview under these conditions is a major challenge for your team. A Digital Manufacturing Assistant makes this complexity manageable: It guides operators step-by-step through the process. If they pick the wrong component, the system immediately triggers an alert and indicates which part is actually required.
Safe and Seamless Commissioning of Complex Systems
The system also proves its value during the commissioning of complex, large-scale equipment. In these scenarios, every single step must be executed at the exact right time and in a precisely specified sequence.
The digital assistant ensures error-free commissioning. Thanks to precise, interactive guidance, even employees who have never set up or started a specific system before can master the task safely and effortlessly.
Accelerating Time-to-Productivity: Support During Onboarding
Onboarding new employees typically requires intensive, time-consuming training. The Digital Manufacturing Assistant significantly relieves your experienced staff: It guides new hires step-by-step, enabling them to perform the necessary tasks flawlessly and independently in no time.
Turbocharging Maintenance: Remote Support via Smart Glasses
Another highly impactful application is in maintenance and repair. When a critical machine fails, every minute counts. It often takes hours, if not days, for an external service technician from the manufacturer to arrive on-site—resulting in a severe loss of valuable production capacity.
The smart solution: Your on-site technician puts on AR smart glasses and connects live with the manufacturer’s remote expert.
- Live View: The remote expert sees exactly what your on-site employee sees, allowing them to instantly analyze the root cause of the issue.
- Precise Instructions: Digital work instructions, annotations, and visual markers are projected directly into the technician's field of vision.
- Minimal Downtime: The fault is isolated and resolved in the shortest time possible. Even if a replacement part has to be couriered in, the expert provides live guidance via the smart glasses during installation and calibration, getting the machine back up and running in record time.