For experts in the manufacturing landscape, extended reality can offer a host of potential benefits. Immersive solutions not only provide companies with the tools they need to better train their employees and enhance collaboration, they also ensure staff members can complete tasks in a range of environments, with high levels of efficiency.
With XR tools, manufacturing leaders can ensure employees on the field, and working with clients have access to all of the high-quality resources they need to deliver results. This is something the Surepoint Group discovered for themselves when they began working with Kognitiv Spark.
The RemoteSpark solution from Kognitiv Spark has empowered Surepoint to unlock new levels of productivity and engagement among their teams, while significantly reducing equipment downtime.
Improving Employee Efficiency with XR
The Surepoint group is a leading industrial contractor, specializing in manufacturing, construction, instrumentation, and electrical services. Headquartered in Canada, the company operates in a range of different sectors, supporting a host of business leaders across Canada and the United States.
To ensure tools can continue to operate at peak performance, Surepoint frequently sends trained technicians to remote job sites, to perform maintenance, complete repairs, or offer hands-on assistance. Unfortunately, while this strategy allows the company to deliver a human-centric experience to customers, it does have its downsides. If technicians encounter problems they don’t know how to solve, they need to find a way to connect with an expert located elsewhere.
In the past, field workers often used smartphones to call experts and transfer videos and photos to troubleshoot an issue. However, this often meant technicians were left waiting hours for a response. Additionally, at least 20% of the time, they discovered issues couldn’t be diagnosed over the phone, forcing subject matter experts to travel to a client location to complete the task themselves.
Since an expert can take anywhere up to 20 hours to reach a job site, this led to costly equipment downtime for clients, and a loss of productivity for technicians.
Unlocking the Power of Augmented Reality
To solve these issues, Surepoint turned to Kognitiv Spark, leveraging the mixed reality remote worker support tool, RemoteSpark. This immersive technology now allows subject matter experts and field workers to connect seamlessly, through a secure audio-video connection, with 3D content. Experts can deliver field-of-view annotations, share files and photos, and even leverage multi-step animated holograms to assist in resolving a problem.
Designed for industrial use in the field landscape, RemoteSpark performs well even when bandwidth availability is low, and offers a secure architecture, for peace of mind. Surepoint rapidly equipped their field technicians with RemoteSpark-enabled HoloLens headsets, ensuring they could receive real-time support from experts, wherever they were.
After just 6 months of using the new technology, Surepoint has resolved 300 calls with RemoteSpark, and has seen huge benefits in their ability to serve customers. Every successful RemoteSpark interaction reduces equipment downtime by anywhere up to 20 hours, and more than 60% of support issues can now be resolved without sending a subject matter expert to a site.
