How VR Can Reduce Downtime
In business, downtime is nearly inevitable. However using Virtual Reality can help get operations running faster - saving you money!
There are a two categories of downtime there's machine/facility based, and labor based.
Machine downtime is your classic equipment failure. Facilities lost power, machine broke or fire system accidently trips. The issue is largely out of an employee's control.
Labor downtime is when an employee is not producing any production value. This could be when an employee causes and accident, makes a mistake that breaks equipment, or they don't know how to properly do a task and need to wait for help.
Either way, when downtime occurs, you're loosing money. How much, and how you can improve, are the big questions everyone from the C-Level to the operation manager wants to know.
Big And Obvious
Equipment failures typically don't happen too often in most businesses. If they are frequent, then there's a larger business operational issue that needs to be resolved.
However when equipment does fail - this could make a massive impact to your business's revenue within seconds of the failure, or the hour it took to get the machine operational again.
Some businesses have machines that never shut down (or very rarely). If this is your business, how much is it costing you when it does for just an hour? A few $100s? $1,000s? or $100,000s??
If your business is on the higher end of that scale, how proficient are your employees at getting that equipment running again? Could that downtime have been avoided if the employees noticed a possible fail point sooner?
Training your team to be ready when the worst case scenario happens could be worth it's weight in gold if they can get a machine running again in minutes instead of hours. Yet many businesses treat downtime like elections - caring about issues when something big goes on, but once the moments passed, it doesn't get talked about again.
Would be pretty nice to say you made more revenue this year because you prevented or reduced a few downtimes.
When The Little Dollars Add Up
Most companies that work in fast production like material handling have metrics to determine how performant an employee is compared to an ideal employee. However, in roles such as manufacturing, assembly, chemical processes, or even food production - there can be more nuanced parts to their work that become hard to track. This could be forgetting how to run a specific machine, what defects to check for or how to assemble a part, there can be multiple, short bursts of non productive time as employees wait for assistance.
Now, it is a good thing that an employee doesn't proceed and make mistakes, but due to a lack of understanding, how much are these little downtimes costing you?
Some quick math.. say we have a $40,000 / year employee:
30 mins of downtime a month...... $120 lost / year
30 mins of downtime a week........ $520 lost / year
30 mins of downtime a day........... $2,600 lost / year
Hopefully your business doesn't have 30 mins of unproductive time a day per employee, but let's say it was just per week. With a team of 30 employees at the same rate you spent $15,600 in year that you made no productive operational revenue on. Employees should not be worked to the bone, but it goes to show that when an employee isn't properly trained for their work you could be losing revenue.
Financially, these downtimes can add up but what if they resulted in a deadline being missed and you just lost what used to be a loyal client! Those little loses make a huge difference!
How Virtual Reality Can Help
Downtime regardless highlights a major point in businesses operations - how well does your machine of a business run?
If your business was delivery truck, are you just scrapping by through quick engine fixes and drivers that miss turns because they didn't know where they exactly were going? Or are you running smooth with a reliable engine and the driver knows the fastest route and delivers to clients on time consistently?
To keep your employees fluent in operations, or to be ready for the worst, consistent training can make a massive difference in your revenue and operations.
This is where virtual reality (VR) can shine. Through consistent, simulated bite-sized training modules, your team can:
Practice running that machine they could break in reality
Learn without wasting costly materials
Understand why processes need to be done in specific ways
Prepare for the worst case failure in a virtual space
Fail in a fake world instead of getting hurt in reality
Gamify finding defects or possible points of failure
Studies have shown users in VR training have a 275% increase in work confidence, save hours of training time or boost your teams ability to feel ready for risky situations.
If you're thinking about how to improve your business by improving your workforce, our team at Enhance-VR is ready to help!
Reach out to have a quick informational meeting on how our VR platform can improve your operations and we'll even work through your specific ROIs to see if VR is right for you!