In food manufacturing, quality can be the difference between long-term success and failure.
A major factor to integrating new technologies into your workflows is a clear understanding of their benefits. Reluctance can be particularly acute in industries that aren’t, by tradition, necessarily known for being tech forward-looking. Numbers and demonstrable benefits help overcome this hesitance. Here is an overview of how a properly integrated Augmented Reality solution can address Food Manufacturing business concerns.
AR as an Expansion Aid
As a workforce expands, both in numbers as well as geographically, the need for subject matter experts increases even as their finite presence becomes diluted. An AR hardware/software solution, such as the one offered by Mira, allows experts to address concerns globally in an instant. Your IT team can exist at any site, without the need for travel. Additionally, due to the unique nature of the food industry, where teams must perfectly match recipes at different locations with different chefs, process development technologists are often in-need frequent flyers.
Mira’s Connect app combines with our Prism headset to create a unified hardware/software solution from a single company that can deliver heads-up and hands-free remote assistance. Deploying an AR solution from Mira to get your end users up and running only requires four steps:
1. Purchasing hardware
2. Creating a Mira account
3. Downloading the Mira Prism app
4. Make your first call
Just four steps and you have a working end-to-end AR solution.
AR for Quality Assurance
In food manufacturing, quality can be the difference between long-term success and failure. Your machines are your business’s lifeblood. Correct usage over time is key to employee performance and consistent quality. Building workflows with Mira Flow can act as a critical bridge for company-wide uniformity.
Easily use Flow’s drag-and-drop web interface to build workflows and checklists without writing any code. Once these workflows are created, frontline workers can flag processes to drive process improvement.
Deploying these potential improvements is as straightforward as the initial workflow creation. Additionally, with Flow, every operator run-through comes with actionable metrics that inform process improvements, so you can immediately see the impact of even the slightest workflow changes.
Consistency in workflows contributes to quality as well as safety concerns. Updates are instantly communicated company-wide, removing any concern of full, business-wide adoption that accompanies those based on paper. In addition to maintaining cross-company consistency, quality, and safety, digital workflows can be utilized for general employee training and safety training.
Empowering Employees and Decreasing Downtime
A mobile solution supplements your employees’ abilities with the computing power of the latest technology and, because it’s mobile by definition, ensures its continuous presence wherever the job takes them.
Tracking data that might otherwise go undetected allows companies to continuously address predictive maintenance. The maintenance of unique machines, such as those used for bagging and sealing food packaging, are only well-known by one or two employees — and of course, it’s always the most complicated machines that are prime for frequent breakdowns. With constant incoming data, potential operational safety concerns and systems failures can be dealt with in an expedited manner if not avoided altogether.
The Demonstrable Value of an AR Solution
Using Mira, Kettle Cuisine was able to save $236k in operational savings only one day.
With a working AR solution in place, your experts can service machines faster, regardless of their location. Travel costs and travel time are effectively negated through remote expert capability. Your customers benefit from the resulting decrease in downtime, delivering a direct uptick in business profitability. AR can also contribute to consistent workflows aiding in quality dependability.
