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Transforming manufacturing operations with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

Planning on attending the upcoming Hannover Messe Digital Edition? If so, come discover how mixed reality business applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are helping transform organizations like Schaeffler. The Hannover Messe industry (HMI) conference covers all core themes of the industrial value-adding chain—from individual components to the complete smart factory. Join us at the “Transform Your Workforce” panel session to hear from Schaeffler on how they are using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to transform their manufacturing operations and boost productivity while saving cost. Also, learn how Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is helping create a more resilient and sustainable future through open standards and ecosystems.

What manufacturers can do with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

The manufacturing industry has proven to be one of the earliest adopters of mixed reality technologies, successfully leveraging mixed reality business applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist across discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, automotive, and more. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, global manufacturing companies such as Ecolab, Musashi, and Saint-Gobain have been able to get real-time remote assistance from experts around the world anytime, anywhere while still being able to access and anchor critical work order details, schematics, and diagrams within their physical work environment. Additionally, many manufacturers today are also now using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to conduct remote audits and inspections with videos, screenshots, and 3D annotations, ultimately driving cost savings and efficiency, and avoiding travel costs—all while minimizing their carbon footprint.

According to the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, studies conducted by Forrester showed that Dynamics 365 Remote Assist typically helped achieve the following impact in labor and travel costs savings for field technicians and experts, unlocked labor savings for manufacturing site technicians, and avoided lost income, labor, and direct costs stemming from common manufacturing issues:

  • Customers resolve throughput-impacting issues five days earlier, saving approximately $20,052 per issue. Experts and technicians can now collaborate to solve costly issues days or weeks faster. With issues modeled to cause an estimated 5 percent drop in throughput for the composite organization, resolving issues five days faster helped prevent approximately four hours of lost production and costly downtime.
  • Experts avoid 17 trips per year, saving $53,550 in travel costs and 384 hours valued at $39,744 per expert. Experts can now virtually see, annotate, and direct onsite users, avoiding trips for inspections and last-minute issue resolution. Each avoided trip saves $3,500 in travel costs and three to four days of labor.
  • Field technicians avoid 55 trips per year, saving 188 hours valued at $4,230 plus $2,498 in travel costs per technician. Field technicians shift 50 percent of inspections to virtual, improve first-time fix (FTF) by 10 percent for tier 1 issues and by 40 percent for tier 2 issues, and can now self-resolve 75 percent of tier 3 issues with remote expert support.
  • Manufacturing site technicians save 124 hours per year valued at $2,790 per technician. Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist for collaboration with onsite technicians and office staff plus remote experts boosts inspection productivity by 25 percent, halves labor for tier 2 issues, and slashes tier 3 issue resolution labor by 75 percent.

Additional benefits of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist include the ability to:

  • Accelerate manufacturing with fewer throughput drops, improving customer experience
  • Improve quality and accuracy of work with remote collaboration and guidance
  • Speed up decision making as plant workers demonstrate proposed work in real-time, helping remote stakeholders quickly understand, align on, and approve the work
  • Boost inspection frequency plus recording capture of work and inspections for auditing and compliance.
  • Ensure critical business continuity, especially with evolving macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions
  • Improve employee health and safety by avoiding travel and minimizing physical contact (especially with driving and pandemic-related risks), allowing onsite workers to complete tasks while still getting access to remote experts when needed
  • Enhance employee experience by avoiding time-consuming, often last-minute work travel. These experts can also now avoid travel-related fatigue and jetlag. An improved work-life balance helps improve employee satisfaction, and enables the company to attract, hire, and retain talent.
  • Improve knowledge acquisition, retention, and sharing with hands-on completion of task work with remote expert support enhanced with mixed reality 3D annotations, plus real-time or recorded observation for future training purposes.
  • Achieve sustainability goals by reducing travel-related emissions and carbon footprint

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Remote Assist in manufacturing

Read the full Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist report

Be sure to also check out the following customer evidence stories to discover how your organization can similarly leverage Dynamics 365 Remote Assist for accelerated deployment, thorough inspections, and efficient break/fix resolution.

  • Ecolab – Watch the video with Ecolab’s David Goforth, Vice President Sales North America, and Rick Stokes, Area Technical Support Manager, as they speak with Rodney Clark, Vice President IoT and Mixed Reality Sales at Microsoft, about how Ecolab Food and Beverage is transforming business processes to better serve customers and employees in the face of emerging challenges.
  • Musashi – Musashi Seimitsu Industry is an automotive parts manufacturer with production and sales facilities in 14 countries and 35 hubs worldwide. The global brand slogan, Power to Value, has represented its innovative manufacturing style since 1938. This can-do spirit has protected corporate infrastructure amidst COVID-19. By merging the real and digital worlds with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, the company launched a new production line in Mexico without a single engineer leaving Japan. Musashi Seimitsu is embracing the post COVID-19 new normal with its swift digital transformation.
  • Saint-Gobain – Saint-Gobain is a global leader in the manufacture of sustainable, high-performance building materials. The craftsmanship and innovation underlying the company’s technologically advanced products, particularly its specialized glass offerings, hinge on stellar production machine maintenance and in-depth training. Since the Saint-Gobain process experts who provide that deep expertise can’t be everywhere at once, the company turned to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to deliver remote expert assistance in real-time. Now, maintenance and training are faster, more impactful, and with dramatically less travel required, helping Saint-Gobain be aligned with their sustainability goals.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist resources

Sources: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, June 2020

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