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If there’s one thing clear from our market coverage over the past couple years, it’s that AR has the potential for real bottom line impact in enterprise functions like manufacturing, assembly and design. But that ROI still has to be quantified.
Along those lines, we continue to hear proof of AR’s bottom-line impact through operational efficiencies like cost and error reduction. Coca-cola recently explicated AR’s impact on maintenance and assembly line changeovers. And in a lot of these cases, it’s about saving time.
“There are a couple variables that we typically track, and one is time,” said Upskill CSO Jay Kim at AWE Europe (video below). “It’s simple to measure and the benefit is obvious for time saved in your business process, and what that means as a first-order variable to determine ROI.”
More specifically Kim claims that Upskill sees an average of 30 percent reduction in project time. And this is a meaningful figure considering Upskill’s client base so far which includes GE, Boeing, and Coca-Cola. Compared to other technologies, this is a huge efficiency boost.
“30 percent is a game changing number,” he says. “People in lean manufacturing and continuous improvement will spend millions and millions of dollars chasing a 5 percent improvement… So imagine what you’re able to do when you can go and do things 30 percent faster.”
In addition to time-efficiency and bottom-line impact, another key metric is resolving “exceptions.” These are basically the unforeseen incidents that can slow down production or manufacturing output, such as maintenance. This was a key variable for Coca-Cola in our recent analysis.
“Each of the trips that they have to go and pay one of their vendors’ technicians to come and repair a piece of bottling equipment is going to cost a minimum of $10,” said Kim. “So there, the savings are lumpy but each savings makes it a solution that easily pays for itself.”
See the panel discussion below, moderated by Christine Perey. It’s coded to start at Kim’s talking points, but you can also see the full session. Also check out our related enterprise AR market sizing (previewed above) and stay tuned for lots more commentary and analysis.
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Disclosure: ARtillry has no financial stake in the companies mentioned in this post, nor received payment for its production. Disclosure and ethics policy can be seen here.
Header Image Credit: Google Poly