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Though we spend ample time examining consumer-based XR endpoints, greater near-term impact is seen in the enterprise. This includes brands that use AR to promote products in greater dimension (B2B2C) and industrial enterprises that streamline their own operations (B2B).
These industrial endpoints include visual support in areas like assembly and maintenance. The idea is that AR’s line-of-sight orientation can guide front-line workers. Compared to the “mental mapping” they must do with 2D instructions, visual support makes them more effective.
And with VR, employee training and onboarding can be elevated through immersive sequences that boost experiential learning and memory recall. It also scales given that far-flung employees can get the same quality training, versus costly travel for senior training staff.
Altogether, there are micro and macro benefits to enterprise XR. The above micro-efficiencies add up to worthwhile bottom-line impact when deployed at scale. Macro benefits include lessening job strain and closing the “skills gap,” which can preserve institutional knowledge.
But how is this materializing today and who’s realizing enterprise XR benefits? Our research arm ARtillery Intelligence tackled these questions in a recent report. It joins our report excerpt series, with the latest below on CannonDesign’s efforts to virtualize design collaboration.
Expensive Endeavors
United Rentals employs 18,500+ employees who help rent more than $14 billion in equipment to construction companies, utilities, and municipalities. Given this operational scale, training and upskilling are expensive endeavors, especially in the valuable role of field sales reps.
They need to not only know the product inside/out, but be comfortable in chaotic job sites. This drove United to look for effective ways – beyond classrooms and video tutorials – to simulate high-pressure sales scenarios and accomplish experiential learning in a safe space.
Working with Strivr, United Rentals placed trainees in VR-rendered construction sites to simulate typical sales scenarios. There, users can look around and orient themselves. VR modules then lead trainees through ”scene explorations” followed by timed site assessments.
Those assessments are all about identifying problems in virtual environment, which helps trainees with safety awareness and identifying sales opportunities. Five 20-minute sessions get progressively harder, mapping to a specific curriculum. Altogether, it engenders memory retention.
Simulation & Scale
So what were the results. Leaning into VR’s “bits versus atoms” advantages and scalability, United Rentals was able to roll out the VR training program to field sales reps across 1,000 rental locations. Across that broad footprint, it was able to cut training time, a real cost, by 40 percent.
More importantly, what were strategic takeaways from this depolyment? Like many VR training case studies in this report, the technology has a proven ability to cut costs. But the operative word here is scale. Applied to 1000 rental locations, the total bottom-line impact was felt greater.
This is a key point because percentage gains – whether they be elevated output or cost savings – aren’t worth the adoption and activation energy if done on a small scale. Though the results can be positive in smaller doses, the ROI is abundantly clear when programs operate at scale.
So though they often have to start small with pilot programs, VR training proponents should always push for larger-scale deployments to boost the likelihood of worthwhile impact. That goes for anyone selling VR into an organization, as well as internal champions of the technology.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next case study with more enterprise XR best practices and tactical takeaways…
Header image credit: Jeriden Villegas on Unsplash