Again, I would be interested in collaborating with anyone and maybe developing a few hypothetical scenarios of where I could use this and what it might take to get it implemented at my mill. Shoot me your email and I will invite you to my ideafarm slack team, #AR/VR to discuss this futher.
I can think of a few ideas for possible implementations, but there are always alternatives that come up that may be cheaper, and have been around for longer. So, if the Operations team hasn't taken the steps of implementing alternative ideas, I doubt they'll go for AR ideas.
A couple ideas for AR in a manufacturing setting:
- Equip a couple people from maintenance, or "set up" as it's called at my current factory, and using AR to show estimated life on grind wheels or other similar replaceable items.
- Benefit: Maintenance personnel can walk through production area and see which machines are going to need downtime in the near future.
- Alternative: Would it be simpler to have this person set up with a laptop or a connected tablet with IoT devices showing this same information?
- Equip facility maintenance personnel so that they can see a "monitor" reading out real-time data
- Benefit: Having both hands free to turn a wrench (or whatever), and see how your work is affecting the system.
- Alternative: Having a second person with a laptop reading off relevant data.
- Equip warehouse personnel and it could be used to highlight bin locations.
- Benefit: Expedite picking process. Possibly cut headcount down in warehouse if much more efficient.
- Alternative: Automated picking robots (Much more expensive initial investment)
These are just a couple things that I just came up with now, but the cost of setting it up and training to make it work would be quite difficult to plan out and get approved by management. Especially since there isn't much data to show benefits before it's implemented.
It's not really something I plan to focus on here, since I don't plan to stick around this place much longer. If I get hired somewhere as a manufacturing engineer or lean engineer or something similar, I would definitely pursue it.