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4 Issues Facing Manufacturers in 2024 and How Training Can Solve Them

Zac Francis
Zac Francis

To thrive in any industry, you must be adept at solving problems. Every company in history has run into roadblocks at some point—yes, even the likes of Disney and Apple—but what separates industry leaders from the rest is their ability to employ strategies that solve current problems and are pliable enough to offer solutions further down the line.

Manufacturing is a high-stakes sector. So much can go wrong on those factory floors, and when productivity and efficiency are the most important things, businesses wishing to thrive must have effective strategies in place to fix any issues.

We’re going to offer you a solution: employee training. Yes, we’re serious. When optimized, employee training can solve a wide array of issues and increase productivity and efficiency. 

But the important word is optimized. Those of you scratching your head at our suggestion might be rolling out training that’s causing more problems than it solves. It’s time for change.

Curious? Keep reading to find out 4 of the biggest issues facing manufacturing in 2024 and how training can solve them.

4 manufacturing problems and their solutions

1. Sustainability

As the threat of climate change grows, every industry is expected (and, in some cases, legally obligated) to help. This is especially true for manufacturing, where the scale of operations and the toxic products used are adding to the problem. 

The good news is that industry leaders are aware of this, and 87% highlight sustainability as increasingly important. But good intentions aren’t enough, and 3 out of 10 companies struggle to form effective strategies to improve the sustainability of their operations. 

There is of course the elephant in the room: businesses are run for profit, not to save the world. Yet sustainability doesn’t need to be costly. In fact, there are sustainable practices that make businesses more efficient and productive. For example, effective waste management in manufacturing can lead to savings of $15 billion annually globally. Why not do both?

A great place to start your green journey is with your employees. 

The solution: AI-powered training

Change starts with the people who make up your company. To make your business more sustainable, you’ll need to train your staff on best practices.

However, training creation and distribution can be a time-consuming process. On average, it takes 38 hours to develop one hour of training content, and 44% of organizations report that creating engaging training content is their biggest L&D challenge. Beyond standard training, you must also cover sustainability—a ‘non-critical’ training area. It’s a lot to ask of an operation that requires minimal disruption to succeed. 

AI-powered training is here to help. With just some basic input on your end, artificial intelligence can generate content in seconds, convert any relevant existing content you may have into digital form, and even translate training material for those with global operations. Using AI can reduce training production time by up to 70%.

Manufacturers have relied on technology to help optimize their operations. Let it do the same for your training. 

2. Health and Safety

Health and safety is a problem that will never go away as long as you have a workforce. There’s not so much a solution but rather a set of strategies that work in tandem, trying their best to reduce the number of workplace accidents. Manufacturers want to get that number as close to 0 as possible.

What’s difficult is that as manufacturing evolves, so do the risks. Technological advancements and new business practices bring new challenges, and, to ensure workplace safety, businesses must regularly update and retrain their staff.

But a manufacturing workforce is by nature hard to train. They’re a dispersed group that’s constantly on the move, working a variety of shift patterns, and each member is vital to maintaining productivity and efficiency. How do you solve this?

The solution: Training that’s accessible contextually

Lets paint a picture.

An employee needs to operate a band saw. They’ve used one before, but this model is slightly different, there are a few extra steps in the process. What do they do?

A common approach is to find a colleague willing to show them how to use it. This could work, but what if the colleague also lacks the expertise? They may show them the wrong way, or at least not the right one, thus creating knowledge on a bad foundation. This cycle could continue, spreading until a large percentage of your workforce is incorrectly operating the machine.

Or maybe they decide to go for it, trying desperately to recall bits of information from an in-person training session a few weeks ago. Disaster isn’t far away! Some proactive members might utilize Google and YouTube until they’ve found a walkthrough of that specific model, but it's taken them a long time to find it.

The best approach is less time-consuming, more accurate, and, most importantly, far safer. Temco Logistics attach QR codes to their equipment, allowing users to scan and watch a highly detailed step-by-step, with each step playing on loop until the employee is ready to move on to the next step.

The result of delivering training contextually like this, and in this format, was safety improvements the equivalent of $600k saved for the business, (and that was just for a 30% reduction for a single injury-related metric).

3. Efficiency

 

 

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