Johannes Kanis, Cloud and Enterprise Business Group Lead at Microsoft South Africa

The global mixed reality market is expected to hit the $3.6 billion mark by 2025, a significant increase from the $83 million market size in 2018. This is hardly surprising given how the industrial use cases for mixed reality, which blends the physical and virtual worlds to create new environments, have grown in sophistication following the onset of the global pandemic.

Mixed reality is something that stems from the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). It takes the momentum generated by better connectivity and automation processes and looks to reinvent manual-intensive processes. Think of mixed reality as the means to visualise data to empower workers on the factory floor to become more efficient.

These mixed reality solutions, such as the Microsoft HoloLens 2, can help manufacturers to reduce downtime, transform their workforce, and build more agile factories. Employees can quickly learn complex tasks and collaborate regardless of their geographic location.

Consider the possibilities of creating step-by-step holographic instructions where the work happens and easily schedule work orders and view work checklists by integrating the likes of Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

This advanced guidance not only brings about improved productivity through accelerated learning, but it also standardises processes and reduces errors to increase yield.

The following manufacturing case studies practically examine how HoloLens 2 technology can transform the sector and bring about the necessary efficiency gains in a sector that is ripe for digital transformation.

Visual learning

Since 2018, Mitsubishi Electric has been promoting changes in the way people work by handing out tablets to all employees. This accelerated since the pandemic began with the goal being a new business style that is tailored to the new normal and is not tied to places, which eliminates the need for paper, name stamps, and signatures. From a manufacturing perspective, workers can use HoloLens to collaborate from remote locations, enabling the organisation to deploy development and design expertise on the frontlines.

Taking care of business continuity

When a large proportion of its skilled machine operators were in lockdown due to COVID-19 restrictions last year, Arla, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, enabled employees in some factories to go hands-free with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on Microsoft HoloLens 2.

Within two weeks, Arla kept its employees safe by adhering to social distancing measures, preserved essential food supply, and created a blueprint for remote assistance that supports its high-priority sustainability goals. The mixed reality environment helped the company respond to breakdowns of critical equipment as experts were virtually on hand to lend assistance right away with no travel time necessary. This also helped boost Arla’s knowledge base to develop an online repair library that employees, new hires, interns, and students can use to solve problems effectively.

Improving efficiencies

Similarly, global diversified industrial company Eaton has been using HoloLens 2 to accelerate the adoption of high-impact technologies in the power management segment of the market. The staff at its plant in Brazil, where it manufactures engine valves for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, achieved cost-avoidance and time savings while troubleshooting an Italian-built machine.

Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 brought the issues to life with the engineers in Italy being able to see what was happening and quickly diagnosing the problem using mixed-reality 3D annotations. The collaboration assisted Eaton to avoid equipment downtime and travel costs. Explaining something over email or on a call has potential for communication issues when people do not speak the same language. Using mixed reality technology, engineers can see the issues in real-time and explain solutions that people understand.

And at its plant in Mexico, where employees manufacture heavy- and medium-duty transmissions and heavy-duty clutches, virtual guides are used to train employees to conduct preventive maintenance on 1 500 pieces of equipment. For example, when it comes to total productive maintenance tasks on a welding system, a hologram appears in front of a user who then visually gets access to a checklist that can more efficiently be run through than using more traditional methods.

Remote support

When Burckhardt Compression, a global market leader in manufacturing and servicing reciprocating compressors, had to find a more efficient way of servicing the massive gas compressors on ships in remote locations, it turned to mixed reality solutions. The time and resources to dispatch a service engineer to fix an issue on a ship were significant.

By adopting HoloLens 2 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, its engineers can quickly collaborate with ship technicians in remote locations and provide specialised mechanical expertise.

Remote service engineers support a ship’s technicians by engaging in real-time video chat, providing instruction augmented with a schematic overlay, and creating markups onscreen over the actual compressor. The visual cues are especially helpful when the engineers and technicians are not native speakers of the same language. The company also uses Dynamics 365 Field Service to create and manage the service request cases. This has resulted in Burckhardt reducing costs, decrease its carbon footprint, and now being able to respond to customer needs in minutes instead of days.

Maintaining operations

The Schaeffler Group, a global automotive and industrial supplier, relies on a team of highly trained maintenance technicians to keep its advanced machines running smoothly across 75 plants worldwide. However, it looked to improve its operational effectiveness, strengthen efficiency in global cooperation, and reduce its carbon footprint by exploring ways for its experts to facilitate remote support and collaboration at each plant.

As such, it adopted HoloLens 2 to support mixed reality and remote collaboration environments at almost all of its plants. Now, an onsite Schaeffler technician can easily use Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 to get remote expert support in real time from a colleague using a PC or tablet, all while keeping their hands free to do their job.

From around the world, technicians can also use gestures through video streaming and mixed-reality 3D annotations to clearly guide local teams as they optimise machines and conduct maintenance. Since it adopted HoloLens 2, exchanges between experts and local teams now often take minutes, even while minimising physical contact to promote worker safety.

Mixed reality solutions in the manufacturing industry are here to stay. The performance benefits are simply too good to ignore with upskilling employees with more digital-centric training positioning manufacturers strongly for a connected environment.

Email hololens@tarsus.co.za for more information.