[MUSIC] >> Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. Welcome to Hannover Messe event. Today, I have the great pleasure to be here with different partners, customers, and MS teams here at Microsoft.
We are delighted to be here representing what the workforce transformation looks like today. I'm Yury Gomez. I am the worldwide manufacturing leader and a strategy for manufacturing at Microsoft.
Today, we are going to really be talking about how transforming your workforce is really now a new setting that many manufacturers have to think about how to enable their workforce in many different fronts. You will be hearing a little bit about the solutions and capabilities that Schaeffler, for example, is implementing at their manufacturing place. You're also going to be hearing how Tulip, one of our key partners, what they're doing in terms of enabling customers around the world, in enhancing the operation for frontline workers. Then you're going to be hearing about how MS Teams is really one of the platform of choice when it really comes to collaboration and engagement. With that, I want to start with welcoming the panel.
Thank you so much for joining me. I would like to introduce ourselves. Can we start with Rony, Patrick, and Scott, little introduction about your companies and what you do? >> Sure. My name is Rony Kubat, I'm the Co-founder and CTO of a company called Tulip.
We're a spinoff from MIT about six-years-old now. We make a platform for frontline operators. This is a tool for them to create new applications for the shop floor.
These applications are in the Cloud. They are connected to the physical world through an IoT component. They have built-in analytics in them which allows those applications to be continuously refined. These applications are built in no code platform, so you don't have to be any expert in order to create and start using them. >> That sounds awesome, Patrick.
>> Hello, everyone. Thanks, Yury. My name is Patrick Kropp. I'm an IT Product Manager at Schaeffler. Schaeffler is a global automotive and industrial supplier that operates over 70 production plants and employs over 80,000 people globally.
Schaeffler is making its contribution to mobility with high precision components, and systems and engine transmission and chassis applications, in addition to rolling and plain bearing solutions for a large number of industrial application. Overall, we're doing everything what's turning, so to say. >> Fantastic. Thank you so much, Patrick. It's Scott. Please go ahead. >> Thanks, Yury. I'm Scott Morrison,
and I work at Microsoft on the Modern Workplace Transformation Team, leading our manufacturing efforts from Microsoft 365, including those focused on frontline workers. >> That's perfect. Well, thank you so much again everyone for joining me. This is great. When I really think about this topic of transforming your workforce, I get very excited. Because I see all the tremendous progress that technology is enabling for manufacturers, especially when it comes to empowering your frontline workers with no tools, with devices and technology in a way that they actually can achieve more.
For manufacturing leaders to understand a little bit about what transforming your workforce means, I would like to start asking the panel for your perspective on some of the most critical challenges that frontline workers are facing today. Even perhaps what they were facing before the pandemic hit. How it transitioned to perhaps even more challenges and deeper improvements in manufacturing for the working force. Then how COVID-19 has magnified those issues.
Rony, let me start with you. >> There's a lot to unpack there. You look to the challenges that we see when we go out to the shop-floors, there's a couple of key things among them. One, is the traditional lean manufacturing type challenges. Everybody in manufacturing leans in one way, shape or another, somewhere along their lean journey. They primarily have been using analog tools a lot of the times.
Say a ton of paper artifacts still on the shop-floor. There's a limit to where paper can take you and all of these analogs, and that's where digital technologies can start to step in and support them and improve them and give you faster visibility and a more data-driven approach to the continuous improvement efforts that you do on the shop-floor. Now, the challenge though, is that, how do the actual digital technologies allow you to make those changes quickly as possible? Make the changes quickly and better understand what it is the changes that you want to implement in order to get the continuous improvement results. That's like one class of problems where traditional mechanisms and a lot of the traditional digital technologies have not really been able to tell.
The second side is on the personnel side of things. One side you have the so-called Silver Tsunami. The aging workforce where you have the highest skilled, most talented folks on the production floor that are retiring and taking a lot of the knowledge with them, and at the same time, you have a new workforce coming in where they're used to having supercomputers in their pocket and you can't give them a clipboard or a piece of paper and expect them to be able to perform to the level that they're really able to.
These dual challenges are examples of things that we're seeing when we go to visit a lot of our customers on the floor. >> That's amazing to hear and thank you so much for sharing, Rony. I couldn't agree more. I think that those issues really have excessive by the way, with everything happening now. Patrick, what about what you see in in terms of Schaeffler? >> Well, First of all, everything what Rony told us, I can really support.
I think especially for us in the manufacturing industry, it has always been the goal to increasing productivity. Of course, there are many other goals, but that I think is the key to be competitive and create added value for our customers, but that implies in particular, of course, to the frontline workers and digital transformation. For them it means, from my point-of-view, we support them, that they can do their job to the best of their ability. Generally spoken, it's all about to provide the frontline workers with the right information at the right time and in the proper form, that really meets their needs. One example that we are facing is to provide them with a fast access to feed service for manufacturing equipment, and that's an even bigger challenge in times of travel restrictions during this corona pandemic.
>> Now, that's great. I'm sure that probably with the pandemic, its magnified especially people can't travel anymore. >> Fantastic to hear.
Thank you, Patrick. Scott, what do you see from customers? Rony, do you want to make another comment? >> I was just going to say it made me think the pandemic has amplified this need of getting greater transparency and visibility to what's happening on the shop floor. It's magnified in a sense that that need has always been present, but now COVID-19 has forced the issue in a lot of ways. Whatever they anticipate is that the net result of this is that we will never go back to the way we were before.
That the kind of visibility that we're starting to get now through the use of this digital technology is here to stay forever. >> Yeah. It's so impactful Rony to need to hear from you, especially you serve many customers. Patrick, I know at Schaeffler, you see these magnified across all your plants, and Rony, with so many customers of different types that you actually serve through Tulip.
It's just so great to hear that you bring this forward because here at Microsoft and Scott will mention a few of these things even better than myself. But we hear all of these like the transformation digital technology has accelerated in a pace that we never thought of before. We have achieved in probably one year, if not a few months, what was perhaps in the pipeline for the next 10 years. Scott, I'm very curious to hear what your thoughts are. >> Definitely agree. If you boil it down what the biggest pain points that we saw across all our customers was around this need for communication.
You mentioned how we were seeing really fast digital transformation. In the first two months of the pandemic, we saw basically what would normally take organizations two years to transform, and throughout the rest of the year, we saw usage of Microsoft Teams triple even from that. >> Amazing. >> Really the reason is this need to digitally communicate and collaborate with everyone in the organization, which was always important, all of a sudden became absolutely essential. We saw a variety of different types of communication needs across our different customers, where the most basic one of being able to just connect the folks on the factory floor, we saw at Alcoa where they were able to use Teams so that they could safely return to work. Then Toyota was able to enable supplier, product, and plant walkthroughs completely virtually.
This saved them a lot of time and shortened their processes. Then Goodyear was able to connect their factories with remote experts. Once again, saving on travel and getting them back to what it is they need to do much more quickly. Alcoa also, not only organized within their own company but also connected their plants to their customers per factory acceptance testing. Those are just a couple of different ways in which we saw organizations bridging that communication gap with the new tools available to them. What's great is that not only did they find that this helped them avoid work stoppages, but it actually improved the efficiency and safety of their processes, which really shorten the time it took to make decisions.
>> Very good. Amazing. I think for decades in my own observation is that manufacturing workers, they have been left isolated in most of the transformation strategies that manufacturers undertake. Especially because typically manufacturing improvements are all focused on transforming operations, lowering costs, and even driving continuous process improvements.
But very rarely really do manufacturers leader take into account what is needed for enabling frontline workers. So with that in mind, I would like to really transition into asking then how are all these great capabilities, digital innovation and technology, helping to transform how manufacturers and frontline workers operate? Let me start with you, Patrick. Can you share a little bit about then the digital capabilities that you have enabled at Schaeffler and how that is transforming the way that operations are being managed nowadays? >> Sure. At Schaeffler, we've been working for quite a while and implementing such worker assistance systems like hands-free video calling, using augmented or mixed reality glasses. We just figured that it might be the solution to start with, because we think it's the most promising and flexible solution in terms of use cases for our frontline workers and because they are always faced with the issue if a machine breaks down to solve this issue as quick as possible or as quickly as possible. In case it's a serious problem, they can't solve on their own, it's crucial to get support from an expert who's not available on-site or always available on-site.
In the past, they either had to wait until the expert came to the location or they tried to solve the issue remotely by having just a phone call or sending emails with pictures back and forth and what you probably can imagine that was not the most effective way to solve an issue. That's exactly the point where HoloLens 2 and Remote Assist comes in here. It really helps us to make remote support and the communication way more effective just because of the live interaction between the frontline worker sharing his view and the expert giving him direct instructions using mixed reality annotations to highlight certain things in the scene. Because of this and also influenced by of course corona pandemic, I guess we've mentioned it a couple of times here now, that really pushed those solutions.
We decided last year to equip all our production plants globally with this solution to just keep our ability to act in times of travel restrictions and of course increase our productivity and support and global collaboration. >> Thank you, Patrick. That's great. Rony, what do you say in terms of Tulip? You mentioned before about how Tulip is enabling that transition from manual operations to automated operations. Can you expand a little bit about this and why this is important when we think about transforming these ways the manufacturers operate? >> I think it's really about empowering the workforce in different ways. I think it's important to understand a little bit about what is the Tulip does.
It's a platform that you build applications for the shop floor in short, and by the kinds of applications that you're building, these are quality applications. These are interactive, guided poka-yoke work instructions. These are process visibility applications.
There are a large spectrum of the things that sometimes they may be completely bespoke to a very particular workstation and the needs of that need, some of them can be completely generally applicable to the full workforce on the floor. These applications or the term that we're using is citizen-driven development. These are applications that are created, developed, modified by the people on the floor that are also the users of this tool.
The result of this that we've seen is that you have more buy-in from the workforce itself to the use of these tools. You have the faster iteration of these tools in order to improve the performance. The performance can become not, I would say, as much from an automation in the sense of taking a human's job and replacing it with a robot or a machine. This is elimination of tedious tasks that a human might have to do. For example, taking a paper record of defect logs and transcribing that into a spreadsheet to do some reporting metrics.
That's something that can be completely encapsulated within an application that gives you a live view of that, something that would have been on some time delay. So I think that that's the empowerment of the people on the ground. This is the manufacturing engineers and even operators online is one of the key elements of the improvements he can get. >> Thank you so much for sharing.
Fantastic, so, Scott, MS Teams, what do you see that? How that is really the platform of choice? How is that enabling better collaboration and engagement? >> Yeah. What we've seen is, what makes teams so unique is once you've gotten your information workers and your frontline workers all in the same communication platform, it lets you digitize your workflows and bring all the tools and processes you're already using into the flow of the conversations that happened around them. It's hard to understate just the level of efficiency this brings to those processes. We saw at Unilever that they were using Teams and the power platform to improve their factory quality assurance testing.
While Toyota also digitized their continuous improvement or Kaizen process and were able to accelerate something that took months down to something that took a few days. We're seeing non-standard operational processes that were introduced due to COVID being able to be done in a compliant fashion, using the approvals to that process in Teams, and operational reviews and inspections were streamlined through tasks in Teams. Mark Pecker, they're able to do autonomous maintenance using Teams on real-ware to connect operator with experts instantly for troubleshooting and training. What's really cool is that they think they've permanently reduced 80 percent of their experts' needed travel even after the pandemic.
Alcoa is managing their operator schedules where they're able to use shifts to optimize when folks come in to improve health and safety. Then Volvo were seen them be able to train and on-board their employees using Teams. The thing that all of these many examples have in common is that Microsoft Teams is the platform that manufacturers all over the world in collaboration with this rich ecosystem of partners, they're able to connect their workforce, digitize their processes, and streamline on-boarding, which transforms the way that they're able to work. >> Thank you, Scott. That's great to hear. Impressive. Thank you for sharing all of those customer examples.
I would like to ask Rony, what do you see from one of customer examples, one in a minute or so. Can you highlight one example that you feel very proud about? >> Sure, yes. I'm here in Southern Germany. I'm at the plant for DMG Mori.
They are global leader in precision machine tools. They have taken Tulip and ran with it and how have a team of folks that are building Tulip Apps for all of their factories. It's present in basically every single floor elements where you have better guidance, better visibility, and better management, and communication across the teams between logistics and assembly, etc. >> Thank you. Patrick, if you were to summarize in a few words, what's the true impact that Dynamics 365 Remote Assistant HoloLens 2 has driven for Schaeffler. What is that?
>> Yeah, sure. I would like to maybe give also some experiences we've made while rolling out the system and HoloLens and Remote Assist at Schaeffler, since it was our first implementation project using cutting-edge technology like mixed reality glasses in a production environment. We learned a lot. What I especially would like to highlight besides all the technical aspects like device enrollment, IT security requirements, and so on.
What we could handle quite easily supported by Microsoft, its the enablement using solutions like that in people's heads. People are at least a little reserved. Usually are not always open-minded about using those digital technologies, and they don't know yet.
Sometimes they are even, let's say, afraid of losing their jobs because of digital technologies or automation technologies in general. That's something we needed to deal with and convinced them, and to be honest, again at as the Corona pandemic played a key role with this. Before, you often heard statements like, "Yeah, we always did it like that why should we change our processes, and so on." The pandemic just forced people to change because simply traveling was not allowed, and people needed to work, for example, in the home office, and they must use it, and they figured out it helps them to solve their problems. Since then, we overall are getting tremendously positive feedback and not just like that.
That's something what I guess also Rony mentioned. People and the plans come up continuously with new ideas, how to use it and how to leverage most of the technology, and there's even more now than just remote maintenance support meeting why we do a huge variety of use cases like commissioning of numerous support, commissioning of new machines, virtual plan towards quality, and security audits, and also started involving, for example, external machine vendors and also customers. To sum it up, that's a great basement for the next steps for further applications and it also by now helped us to, as mentioned in the beginning, keep our ability to act and increase productivity. >> Patrick, thank you so much.
That's such a great example of impact. From collaboration to engagement in cultural transformation, technology is truly empowering the way the manufacturers and frontline workers achieving more maximization of value for their business. They're achieving higher levels of productivity on either on-site or remotely, and they are lacking more worker in denoting while accelerating operational efficiency in a time that I think is so critical to optimize performance and well-being.
To learn more about our technology in manufacturing solutions, you are more than welcome to visit our most recent announcement for Manufacturing for Cloud. Thank you to my panel and very good luck to the audience in determining if this is the choice they want. Please contact Microsoft or our partners to explore more. Thank you. [MUSIC]
2021-04-18