Parsables Connected Worker Technology: The Human-Centric Manufacturing Revolution – Forbes

Parsable's connected worker technology

Assessing the impact of the pandemic on the challenges faced by a wide range of economic industries, Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle notes that A lot has changed, and a lot hasnt. Something that has not changed, right at the top of his list, is the need for companies to meet a growing talent shortage. In part, this is driven by demographics, as large cohorts of experienced workers have begun to retire and need to be replaced by younger cohorts with different expectations. By 2035, Whittle notes, Millennials will make up three-quarters of the US industrial workforce; and unlike their baby-boomer predecessors, very few of them will stick with the same company for thirty years. This will require a major change in training, retraining and retention strategies.

This workforce transformation has been in the works for several years, but the pandemic has magnified the challenge and made it more complex: all of a sudden companies have had to manage a (partly) remote workforce, implement new safety measures on the factory floor to prevent contagion, and react to sudden changes in product demand and disruptions in supply chains. The crisis has exposed a much greater need for agility, and for many companies it has turned efficiency gains into a survival imperative rather than just a competitive advantage.

Parsable has a front-line seat to this trend: its a connected worker platform that serves a broad spectrum of clients from Suntory to Heineken, from Pirelli to Coca Cola, covering over 400 manufacturing-specific sites in more than 70 countries. During the pandemic, the amount of digital work execution that customer companies do on the Parsable platform has grown by 500%, says Whittle. His company must be doing something right.

Whittle describes the Parsable platform as enabling a real time kaizen the continuous improvement process originally adopted by Japanese companies along four phases: Digitize; Execute; Measure; Transform.

Parsable's apps guide workers through complex procedures

In the first step, Parsable Digitizes all the paper-based knowledge and procedures that guide work throughout a company and make them accessible to employees in real time through user-friendly mobile apps. Through the apps, workers can get training on demand, when and where they need it, and can collaborate with each other; this is phase two, where the digital platform helps workers Execute, and at the same time collects new data on operations and performance.

This data become the input for phase three, where the analytics Measures execution and performance. This is where the Parsable platform can yield crucial insights for better performance and safety. Phase three can be a multi-step procedure. A customer company will start with what it already knows, and Parsable will build a library of analytics to assess the usual or most likely sources of inefficiencies; but it can then go beyond it, analyzing the data collected by the platform to uncover correlations or sources of inefficiency that it had not identified before. The data collected on the platform allows for a much more rigorous analysis of how different worker practices map to different outcomes; this can for example highlight cases where workers in one facility have come up with a better way of performing certain operations, fueling a rise in productivity; or cases where insufficient training results in lower efficiency. These insights open the way for phase four, where the company can Transform its operations by disseminating best practices and addressing key sources of inefficiency.

New insights and greater visibility across operations and production processes also make it much easier for a company to react and adapt to sudden changes in demand and to supply chain disruptions: changing strategy is a lot easier if you can very quickly identify, for example, how shifting to a different production line will reverberate through your entire operations and can make sure your workers have updated instructions at their fingertips.

Analytics and data visualization play a key role here, but the worker is at the center of it all Parsable is a connected worker platform. The secret sauce is the intuitive user interface on mobile devices, which guides workers through their tasks while sharing information across teams to facilitate collaboration. This new working environment feels second nature to the digital native younger generations accelerating adoption of the technology and allowing them to learn on the job at a faster pace.

Lawrence Whittle believes that 2020 has marked the rebirth (or rediscovery) of the importance of humans in manufacturing. After long years of excitement and handwringing about the growing role of automation and robots, this past year has demonstrated that humans are indispensable, and that the key to success lies in upgrading simultaneously technology and human capital.

Besides leading Parsable, Whittle is an active member of the World Economic Forums New Generation Manufacturing Leaders initiative, which aims at making manufacturing not only more advanced and sustainable, but also more attractive to new generations of workers and leaders.

With the global economy caught between rising unemployment and a widening skills gap, turning manufacturing into a faster-growing creator of high-quality job attractive to younger generations is crucial to a sustainable recovery. Putting the right technology platforms in place will be a key enabler.

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Parsables Connected Worker Technology: The Human-Centric Manufacturing Revolution - Forbes