From legacy to innovation: the new frontiers of knowledge transfer among connected workers

In the picturesque city of Goiana in Brazil’s northeastern Pernambuco state, Aristoteles Neto was facing a challenge. He and his engineering manager, Claudia Lima, were tasked with boosting production capacity at the flagship factory owned by float glass manufacturer, Vivix. The company had successfully built up the business, using highly automated processes to manage the complex manufacturing of float glass. Now, they wanted to extend production with a new factory. However, they lacked the information needed to begin that process.

After researching the problem, Claudia hit upon a novel solution: they could laser scan the existing plant, where each pixel would be a data point to create a blueprint for the new factory. Known as a ‘point cloud’, this scanning technique is used extensively in brownfield industrial sites. It rapidly maps facilities to help create a virtual 3D replica. With the scan complete and uploaded to the cloud, Claudia’s team enriched and built out the scan information, augmenting it with vast volumes of plant documentation, technical diagrams and construction specifications, creating a living digital twin of the facility. This virtual view enabled the team to access any technical information they needed in real time, speeding up planning and construction of the new factory. Using the cloud platform, they could share all this data with partners, both during the construction and in the plant’s operational phase. With everyone — from seasoned veterans to digital natives — accessing shared information and insights, work proceeded more quickly, bridging knowledge gaps and experience levels. Claudia and her colleagues addressed building snags more efficiently, cut engineering project costs by 15%, and reduced travel budgets by half thanks to live progress meetings, which were also held in the cloud.

In part, this is because businesses increasingly rely on technical processes that must evolve to accommodate changing regulations, particularly around sustainability. Jobs are now more technically complex, demanding continual learning. Keeping up is a serious challenge, more so when you can’t rely on years of experience to sharpen your instincts. This is why many leaders like Aristoteles and Claudia see digital tools and automation as the answer.

Three-fourths of industrial companies (73%) interviewed by Omdia for Schneider Electric in 2023 expect automation and digitalisation to substantially change the nature of work. Further, in many critical sectors, domain experts are retiring and are not being replaced quickly enough owing to a tight labour market—even as business demand is rising. Those just entering the workforce have very different expectations, including remote or hybrid working.

Virtual practice enables smarter real-world decisions

When it comes to onboarding or training staff, digital tools can help to engage teams through immersive experiences and gamification. The German chemicals leader BASF turned to extended reality (XR) to accelerate training and boost collaboration among apprentices entering the business.

With 50% of its plant operators due to retire within a 10-year span, the multinational needed a scalable program to train 300 new staff every year at its Ludwigshafen headquarters, to avoid losing valuable skills, experience, and institutional knowledge. Working with its existing team to capture their knowledge, BASF developed an immersive virtual operator training simulator, where apprentices can explore simulations within an environment that bridges the virtual and physical worlds. The intuitive, gamified training program resonates with these tech-savvy newcomers, who can test out complex chemical processes in safe, fun ways.

We learn best by doing, in a hands-on experience that textbooks or videos simply cannot match. Seasoned workers can also use the approach to ‘walk through’ new processes—sometimes with remote guidance from colleagues sitting miles away. Supporting this transformation is industrial intelligence, a set of data and artificial intelligence technologies that analyse, visualise and contextualise data, enhancing decisions and accelerating sustainable growth.

“Industrial intelligence technologies are driving a new culture of learning and openness, preparing industrial workers for an Industry 5.0 future, where machines and humans work side by side,” says Rob McGreevy, Chief Product Officer at AVEVA.

Connected success in changing times

The track record of BASF and Vivix clearly demonstrates that long-term resilience will hinge on how well industrial workers can connect with information and intelligence that spans their entire engineering and operations lifecycle, equipping them with the insights they need to intuitively adapt, collaborate, and innovate to create sustainable growth. Industrial intelligence, the power to unify insights and information intuitively to accelerate learning and make better decisions, unlocks the potential of the connected workforce.

As Claudia says, “Today we are in a completely different scenario, planning and executing our expansion project with collaborative, cloud- based tools that allow greater technical, cross-generational and budgetary efficiency.”