Empower your workforce for a digital future

I often get asked whether industrial workers are prepared for the digital transformation overtaking the process industries. My answer is this: they’re at a crossroads.

New advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Digital Twin, etc., play a valuable role in transforming industrial operations and creating additional business value. Each allow plant personnel to model the plant dynamics and complexity needed to make better informed decisions. For example, Digital Twin technology can replicate physical processes and assets within a virtual environment. This approach provides the closest possible virtual image of a real control system, serving as a simulation model of reality with all components, their characteristics, functionalities, and parameters. It can help retain and transfer valuable expertise to a newer control room and field operators.

As digital technologies evolve, plant-wide applications will only multiply, allowing workers to perform their jobs more safely and efficiently, and with more satisfaction, than ever before.

Successful enterprises recognize this reality and are empowering their workforces to succeed in a future that looks overwhelmingly digital.

In some respects, the digital transformation has come at the right time. Veteran workers are retiring at a rapid rate and taking their knowledge and experience with them. At the same time, the adoption of digital technologies is helping industrial companies attract younger workers who might have opted for different industry careers while also serving as a means by which to capture, catalog and transfer retiring workers’ knowledge.

Honeywell’s VR based Immersive Field Simulator (IFS), for example, brings 3D experiences and environments to industrial settings. VR can gamify training, simulating a response to an accident or disaster in a nuclear power plant or offshore natural gas rig without endangering colleagues, the public or the environment. By gamifying training, you increase user interest, engagement, and fun.

More importantly, VR training delivers better knowledge retention than classroom learning or e-learning techniques. In 2020, PwC concluded that VR learners learned faster, were more focused, were more emotionally connected to course content, and were more confident in applying the skills they learned after training.

Elsewhere, digital applications such as our Experion? Operations Advisor are helping to establish best practice responses to common process incidents or upsets. The solution monitors how operators react to a given situation and identifies which responses are best-in-class and which are sub optimal. Using it, operations managers can develop their teams to be best-in-class.

Another game-changer is connected wearables. Using head-mounted displays, this solution responds to voice and brings live data, documents, work procedures and health and safety information into view. They also connect field or maintenance workers with operations teams or remote experts in real time and allow them to build skills and knowledge while working.

If you ask me, digitalization makes a compelling business case for itself: reduced skills gaps, workers better prepared for whatever job is at hand, safer workplaces, minimal waste and maximal performance. Those enterprises that empower their workers for the digital future are the ones best positioned to succeed.

Learn more about Honeywell Workforce Excellence.