Four LI Industry Trends That Dominated 2020
We are into a new phase of the industrial revolution, famously known as Industry 4.0. This new phase works on a connected ecosystem of processes that are aimed to simplify the operations and accelerate the overall production speed. It provides a series of advanced smart manufacturing solutions that are supported by technology, automation, cloud, data, and analytics.
This blog will take you through four such Industry 4.0 influenced LI trends that dominated 2020, and will continue to do so in the coming years as well.
1. Internet of Things (IoT)
Plant managers manually handle the complete manufacturing cycle. From workers, processes to the final product, everything asks them to remain on toes.
This is where the Internet of Things (IoT) changes the ballgame for the manufacturing industry. IoT lets a manager supervise and regulate the whole manufacturing process through a centralized system.
In place of strolling around the factory to gather updates, IoT captures every ground-level activity and presents it to the supervisor. It does so by adding sensors to all the devices including workers’ equipment and helmets. These sensors immediately communicate the real-time data to the supervisor over the internet. Upon receiving any alarming data or red flags, managers immediately take cognizance of the situation and implement preemptive measures to curb it.
Here are some other examples of how IoT helps a plant manager in handling processes,
- Detects and avoid the issues that may cause delays
- Uses cognitive operations to improve production quality
- Enables managers to better allocate resources
- Takes preemptive measures for any red flags
- Does thorough testing of the products
- Builds digital twins for feasibility checks
2.On-demand Geo-targeting
Getting the LI industry workers to show up every next day is a challenge. To avoid getting themselves in such a pickle every day, now light industrial companies are turning to geo-targeted hiring.
Geo-targeting allows companies to draw a digital fence around an area or region and target candidates falling in its ambit. In this case, the job ads are only shown to potential workers who reside in the nearby areas or inside the digitally marked fence. This narrows down the search and only attracts those workers who do not need to relocate or travel long distances for work.
Geographically targeting candidates increases the response rate of the job post and decreases the chances of no-shows on the day of joining. Such solutions allow companies to prioritize their talent search based on the candidates’ location and get the workers onboard quickly in place of losing workers and delaying projects.
3. ML-based Intelligence
On average, the US business loses $171,340 per year due to repetitive, mundane, and time-wasting tasks like searching for order numbers, processing papers, and calculating the value of orders.
ML eliminates these process redundancies by perfecting all the stages gradually with the collected data. Be it managing inventory, improving the supply chain, or implementing quality control, ML collects the data and forecasts the next series of occurrences in advance.
Predictive maintenance has been one of the major areas where ML data has largely helped. Earlier, engineers invested a lot of their time to test and schedule equipment maintenance. ML algorithms lifted off this burden by predicting the equipment breakdowns before they occur and scheduling their maintenance accordingly. This is one of the reasons why ML is one of the persistent trends for the past few years and would continue to do so in the coming years as well.
Read More: Five Ways Artifical Intelligence Will Ease the Life of Recruiters
4. Direct Sourcing
Working with contractual labor isn’t breezy, especially if you are working with third-party hired workers. A lot of times, third-party vendors don’t set the expectations right or miscommunicate the requirements. This inversely affects the efficiency of the manufacturing process and causes money and productivity loss.
A direct sourcing platform is a solution to this staffing roadblock. It eliminates the dependency on any third-party recruiters, and instead, gives the LI industry total control of the recruitment. It allows companies to build their private talent pool and tap into it when catering to ad-hoc and urgent talent requests.
Read More: Things to Keep In Mind While Planning a Direct Sourcing Strategy
Today, most of the direct sourcing portals available in the market are utilizing Artificial Intelligence to integrate automation and intelligence into their talent sourcing, screening, and hiring processes. As a result, tech-led sourcing platforms are helping LI industry to hire better, faster, and economical talent for their requirements. Upwork, TalentDome, Career Builder are a few of the many Direct Sourcing platforms leveraging advanced tech to source talent.
