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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 Surepoint Group’s AR-guided maintenance work for field agents.
See What I See
Surepoint Group provides machine maintenance to several industries, such as oil & gas. When dispatched technicians encountered issues that they couldn’t solve on their own, they would contact remote senior experts, including voice calls and exchanging photos or video by email.
20 percent of these elevated issues couldn’t be solved over the phone, which then required waiting for experts to travel to the location. That took 16 hours on average, which means costly downtime. All of this got cumbersome and expensive, so Surepoint wanted to find a better way.
The company turned to Kognitiv Spark to implement its RemoteSpark AR support software running on Microsoft HoloLens 2.* This allowed field workers and remote experts to connect and share “see what I see” live views of issues in real time. The UX is built around two-way video and audio.
The system lets both sides share not only live feeds, but instructional line-of-sight annotations. Additionally, Kognitiv Spark enables pre-authored 3D animated sequences of step-by-step instructions – all optimized for field environments with bandwidth as low as 256 kbps.
Takeaways & Tactics
So what were the results? In 6 months, Surepoint resolved 60 percent of service issues without dispatching senior experts. It also reduced equipment downtime by 14-20 hours per job. Downtime is otherwise a major cost to its customers, so lessening that pain point is well-received.
As for takeaways and tactics to extract from Surepoint’s AR efforts, it’s worth noting that remote support is just one flavor of industrial AR. Its benefit is that there are still humans in the process. Those humans are empowered and enabled to cover more ground by being place-shifted.
Among other things, this lets subject matter experts (SMEs) graduate from strenuous field work to centralized remote-support functions, which appeals to senior-level associates. For that reason, AR can help delay the retirement of these valued SMEs, thus preserving institutional knowledge.
Furthermore, remote AR support is a modality that puts humans at the center of its execution, which allays fears that the technology will replace them. That fear can otherwise consume front-line workers, resulting in AR adoption inertia. So mitigating that fear is a key success factor for AR.
*Though the lessons above sustain, Microsoft has retreated from the enterprise AR market to some degree, given HoloLens’ recent discontinuation.
Header image credit: Isis França on Unsplash
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