DALLAS — Education session attendees at NEXUS, powered by BEMA and the American Bakers Association (ABA) and held September 25-28, got a live look at RealWear technology in action.
During RealWear: The Baking Industry Use Case, presented by the Baking Industry Forum, attendees heard from Justus Larson, senior director of operations at United States Bakeries; Mike LaValle, corporate account manager at Intralox; and Kris McCarty, VP of sales, Americas at RealWear about the wearable tech and its various applications. Karl Thorson, global food safety and sanitation manager at General Mills, joined the session virtually from one of the company’s Minneapolis facilities to showcase RealWear’s Head Mounted Tablet (HMT) capabilities in real time. The panel also reserved a seat in honor of Jason Stricker, who passed away earlier this year and, according to LaValle, was integral to the creation of this education session.
On the bakery side, HMT’s integration with Microsoft Teams allows for additional accessibility on the factory floor. With the device’s hands-free nature and voice commands, the technology allows for enhanced worker safety, reduced downtime and errors, and improved access to info.
In addition to helping with troubleshooting problems at the moment, the tech’s recording capabilities can also serve as educational resources.
Another benefit highlighted by Larson was work-life balance. Oftentimes, troubleshooting in commercial bakeries can require specialists to travel long distances to look at the issue. When using RealWear HMT bakery employees can connect with specialists without the travel buffer, saving time and resources. This not only shortens the time it takes to troubleshoot issues but creates a better work-life balance for the team.
“It’s really helped us be a lot quicker in finding the solutions and getting the experts in front of the team to come up with solutions very quickly without a lot of lag time,” Larson said. “It also just really helped with that living balance by not having to drive into the bakery and find the chief engineer in the middle of the night to help solve the problem. I can call them, have them put the device on, walk them through and train them on how to solve that, and then go right back to bed.”
For suppliers like Intralox, LaValle shared an example similar to Larsons where an operator can get assistance sooner than it would take an expert to travel to the facility in person.
Thorson’s demo via Teams showed several features of the hands-free technology inside one of General Mills’ facilities. This included photo/video capabilities, voice commands, noise cancellation, zoom ability and more. While Thorson joined the call with the headset connected to a computer, the HMTs are also able to connect to the Teams mobile app on a cell phone via Bluetooth, which allows operators additional accessibility to the technology.
McCarty identified tips for companies to begin the process of bringing this technology into their operations. Identifying a use case — such as remote tech support, hands-on remote training, facility inspections and remote custom audits — is the first step. Once a use case is chosen, finding a champion for the technology is key, as well as looping in the IT department early on.
“One of the things that we’ve discussed is getting IT involved right in the very beginning because they’re going to want to make sure that they have what they need to get these on the system,” McCarty said.
Assembling a team with key stakeholders and defining a pilot project will follow. McCarty noted some example questions for narrowing the scope of the pilot project that define what success looks like and some key metrics the implementation of HMTs will help operators achieve. Once decided, the pilot can be deployed, and the results can be analyzed by ROIs.
“There are other industries that tell us just from the travel cost alone, it pays for itself with one time,” McCarty.
From there, leaders can circle back to put up a use case, define how to scale out and where, and add different use cases. In operations like United States Bakeries, RealWear has not only saved time in troubleshooting but also in documenting best sanitation practices from the facility, serving as an educational resource.
With varying uses, the hands-free technology is becoming an industry standard.
