Improved Onboarding
OptiworX was implemented in a complex bottle packing line with many small batches and many change overs at an Austrian plant of Fresenius Kabi to improve process quality and encourage onboarding of new employees as well as upskilling of experienced staff.
The Situation
A broad range of products and small single batches often push many lines to their economic limit. One reason for this is that complex change-over processes in pharmaceutical packaging lines stretch the abilities of lesser skilled employees. Thus, errors accumulate, the line has less output and the productivity drops.
The Solution
To strike the root of this problem Fresenius Kabi started in Summer 2019 a pilot phase with OptiworX and implemented our dynamic team-based augmented reality system specially designed to meet the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry. The aim was to replace paper-based instructions in change over processes and save precious time in onboarding as well as reduce the error rate significantly at the same time. Using this hands-free system finally amplifies the team’s potential and boost productivity in the packaging line.
Results
Based on Fresenius Kabi’s experience, the platform works perfectly for fast, precise and error free onboarding. OptiworX as a collaborative multi-user system has proven very effective its value in the training and onboarding of new employees. The operators get only the instructions they need on the chosen device according to each operator’s skill level. Therefore they are able to complete their tasks faster, more flexible and precise through the change-over. Making each production step visible employees neither forget nor miss a task even if the process is very complex.
With OptiworX new employees are operational and error free from the first day compared with 3 months of supervised training sessions of unskilled workers without AR. As a consequence, more batches could be done per day. Productivity boosts over 50%.