Audience Opinion Piece

Where do I begin with putting XR into my enterprise?

In this multiple-month series on XR for manufacturing I’ll cover things like where to begin, what obstacles you might encounter, what sort of impact XR can have on your company’s operations and some of the challenges you might encounter. This month we’ll dig deep into where to start.

From time to time somebody will reach out to me that has been charged with trying XR or experimenting with how to make it work in their company’s facilities. Where to begin can be a daunting task, especially if you have no real background in technology or your experience in tech has been in an area not super closely related to spatial computing. It’s understandable. We’ve all been there.  

To get started, let me say that it’s going to be ok. Augmented and virtual reality have had a positive impact on manufacturing, oil & gas, warehousing, aerospace, logistics and automotive for many years. The value proposition is there, and the ROI can be proven and measured if you stick to a few fundamentals. We’ll talk about these in this article.  

Every successful journey begins with some sort of plan. Even if it’s rough or seemingly unreachable, start with a goal that you want to achieve and keep that top of mind. I print my vision statement out and look at it every day. You might say something like: “Reduce training time for machine operators by 10%” or “Decrease time-to-repair by 10%” or even “Give factory employees the ability to look up information about their machine’s settings on a tablet”  

All of these are admirable goals and they have a positive impact on your company’s operations! From this point on, everything you do will either help you get to where you’re trying to go or it will distract you. Discard the distractions and focus on moving towards your aspirations. I do encourage you to find a real pain point in your operations to address. Things like “how to move from three-ring binders to tablets” or “provide a standardized, digital set of procedures for machine troubleshooting” are good places to start. You’ll need to find your company’s pain points. This is an art in and of itself but there are people that can help you by sharing their experience with this. I recommend our community of XR Practitioners called XR at Work. https://xratwork.org

One thing to come to grips with is that you’re going to have to stay flexible. Vendors will go under or get gobbled up by larger competitors. Co-workers that are helping you will quit or change departments. Sometimes our colleagues get put on other, higher priority projects and we’re left out in the cold. Technologies change and people change and we have to change as well.

Be willing to start small, measure before/during/after the implementation and be willing to refine and start over when necessary. It’s difficult to prove ROI if you aren’t measuring how your solution is impacting the problem you’ve identified in operations. Work with key stakeholders in the factory to choose what to work towards and how to measure it.

In future articles in this series I will cover how to overcome obstacles and we’ll get further into how to implement and track and prove the ROI of extended reality technologies.

One final word. Seek out wise council on your digital transformation path. I work with mentors and have a solid network of people like me that do what I do for companies like the one I work for. Get involved in networking and attend conferences like the MX.0 Southeast and MX.0 Midwest events. They are great places to get into conversations and learn and share experiences. Please reach out to me if you want to dig deeper on anything I mentioned in this month’s installment of the newsletter. scott@xratwork.org  

Scott Burkey

Scott Burkey is a Technology Fellow at Smurfit Westrock, a global manufacturing and consumer packaging company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. He takes a pragmatic approach to implementing new ways of making training more effective and supporting front-line workers. Having worked as a software developer for over 20 years for brands like CNN, TBS/TNT and Coca-Cola, Scott now champions new technologies in the manufacturing industry which is one of the biggest adopters of augmented and virtual reality.

Prior to Smurfit WestRock Scott delivered VR products for the National Basketball Association. He serves in an advisory capacity to startups and non-profits, as well as serving on the Advisory Boards for the Georgia Association of Manufacturers and MX.0. Scott is a United States Marine Veteran that enjoys running and backpacking with his wife and 4 children in Atlanta, Georgia.