The COVID-19 field service challenge: ensuring business continuity with AR- Remote Assistance

Nowadays, the COVID-19 outbreak, in addition to its terrible cost in human life, is creating lots of challenges for the continuity of all businesses around the world. The current pandemic situation is incurring for businesses direct costs that are mostly related to the losses of output caused by reductions in productivity or in the available workforce. Already this new reality is made of complexity, uncertainty, and opportunities. What businesses need to do is adapt to this new reality and to become flexible and agile in embracing new and innovative technologies. One of these technologies is Augmented Reality, which day by day is demonstrating its potential to bring connectivity to another level while the whole world is confined within the borders of remote working. Numerous restrictions on individuals and businesses are resulting in a large adoption of Augmented Reality and what this technology offers. The pandemic has increased use cases, including Remote Assistance and Training because employees are less willing to be in close contact with each other.

Remote Assistance is seen as a key to successfully overcoming the challenge of free movement of employees and not only. Travel restrictions prevent the most specialized technicians from being present in the field, while various issues may arise. AR Remote Assistance plays an effective role in mitigating this barrier by bringing virtually real-time experts to the field where the work is being performed and, at the same time, providing them with the ability to collaborate with field workers. And in fact, the lack of collaboration is an important factor that makes it difficult to solve various problems in the most effective and fastest way possible. Various problems cause the production processes to be interrupted, and what businesses are looking for is finding the most flexible solutions to help ensure the continuity of production. And this is exactly what Remote Assistance provides- addressing problems and offering the opportunity to start a collaboration via live video or audio powered by Augmented Reality.

AR-enhanced Remote Assistance goes beyond the borders of normal collaboration by enriching it with effective AR annotations and file sharing features such as a 3D object, PDF, or image. This enables users to have a much more understandable and effective collaboration. All this helps to alleviate the reduction of travel costs, time spent, and of course mitigate impacts of travel reduction while keeping social distance.

Businesses are embracing AR Remote assistance for another purpose as well, which is to improve employee training. This type of training gives employees the opportunity to gain experience in a simpler and clearer way through real-world situations that are shown through live video streaming enhanced with sticking annotations on it. Training through AR technology is emerging quite useful nowadays, thus becoming the best possible option for distance learning. AR is being the best solution for distance training for workers who are unable to travel and cost reduction for businesses that in the past have needed to pay high priced programs for having a better-skilled workforce. In addition, especially during these days, distance training eliminates the need for mass gatherings of workers to attend certain training as now through remote assistance they can do this in a very simple way in real-time wherever they are.

Management and inspection are two other very important keys for businesses. Their importance lies in the continuity in a normal course of various processes and identifies in advance the existing or potential risks that may arise. Now remote management and inspection give remote users access to perform their tasks based on data and real-time information about the productivity of field workers and the work done by them. Through remote inspection, it is possible to predict various risks that prevent injuries to workers and interruption of the process that may occur due to machine downtime.

We must admit that businesses not only during this pandemic situation but have always had the need to increase revenue and optimize their operations. All of this is aimed at minimizing errors, downtime, training time, and all other forms of cost and loss. What AR technology is doing is transforming the Remote Assistance traditional concept by improving efficiency and data transfer between employees located in different locations.

VSight - a collaborative remote assistance tool helps your business to keep your employees safe and connected during this challenging time. VSight Remote makes it possible to enable your offsite and on-site employees for collaborative operation, maintenance, and repair products in all types of industries. With the new feature of the training room released now by VSight Remote you can give your employees a safe learning environment where they can take risks without affecting customers or the business while keeping social distance.