Applications of TANDBERG Video Conferencing in the Manufacturing and Energy Industries
TANDBERG provides video conferencing and telepresence equipment to numerous industries throughout the U.S. and around the world.
Hello. Thanks for joining me. My name is John Paul Williams and I would like to talk about how video is becoming strategic in the manufacturing and energy segments on the global basis. My responsibilities are global practice leader for manufacturing and energy and energy is defined as oil and gas as well as power generation.
So let’s take a look at how video is being embedded in key processes in these industries and how it’s transforming how those processes are run.
One of the key aspects in any corporations now is the need for innovation; and innovation could be in product, that can be in process. Often organizations look for new business models and innovation plays a key role in discovering those new business models. One of the elements that most manufacturers wrestle with is integration of these major elements of their business, to design, operate and maintain elements of their business; operate, you could substitute the word manufacturing in that often. And each of these segments of the business often collaborate within their groups but there is quite a challenge to collaborate outside their groups and that’s one of the goals in the 21st century for organizations to integrate these levels of business as well as suppliers into these innovation events.
So manufacturing sites has looked at this trend and they see several key elements of this push towards quality collaboration, true collaboration and unified collaboration or unified communications is one of the key elements, the merging of video, audio, voice, and data, the convergence of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration functions, especially in the design element where they might send information to another design party that’s in a different time zone, so that would be asynchronous collaboration but now they want to bring that to much more synchronous platforms.
That brings to the third element, which is, I think one of the most important ones, the ones I have seen in many accounts that I work with, the society of enterprise wide collaboration; again, knitting together those three elements of the business as well as suppliers into this. Now what I have seen is that video conferencing is one of the true enterprise wide collaboration platforms in the industry. You will see for instance in Boeing and a few other examples in this quick case study here that video is playing a key role in that collaboration. And then obviously mobility is a big issue, FieldView plays a critical role in bringing video — mobile video as well as Movi into the enterprise like collaboration platform right now.
So what are these mega video applications? Well, first we will take a look at those but I want to emphasize some key elements of this. One, they have great return on investments, these applications. And often, companies enter into video with room systems and desktop systems but it’s very powerful to let them know the future expansion of that video network can lead to tremendous ROI. Even in the original selling event, it relieves some of the pressure on [release] that are value to this investment because they can see when they roll video out into these critical business processes that the ROI only gets more steep as time goes on.
The other element is that we are seeing issues first hand is essential. So telemedicine is one example of that as well as when this problem where solutions between supplier and the customer, being able to see what those issues are critical. Then the other element is leveraging out. So the experts can see what the problem is from remote position and help troubleshoot and resolve those kind of issues.
So the first application as you might expect is in product or process design or simply if you are designing something. So project teams are often globally dispersed, so the coordination of them becomes quite difficult and video plays excellent role there. Compliance is the key issue, especially in pharmaceuticals that the protocols for drug development are being followed on a global basis, supplier integration as we talked about, often this technical reviews and product development, first article inspections, these are again very much facilitated by video.
Core competence segmentation is a big element, we will take a look at that in a moment, case study coming out where they want to use the competence of suppliers to reinforce the competitive advantage of the product that they are designing and being able to integrate on a daily basis, ad hoc basis with suppliers is a great role for video, team peer-to-peer practices and also teleworking initiatives. We will take a look at some of those in a minute.
So if you are making something, it’s another great application for video either discreet or process manufacturer. Again, you can link remote design centers to the manufacturing facilities quite easily. Root cause analysis is the key role for video in the manufacturing process. Quality audits is increasingly becoming a dominant practice. Several manufacturers have design groups in the U.S., manufacturer in New Mexico or China and they are using video for audits. Supplier integration again, you will see supplier chain issues running all throughout these presentations. Technical reviews, peer-to-peer, again best practices, and lean manufacturing implementation is a key element for video, especially in a multi-plant environment where one plant is doing quite well with lean manufacturing or what used to be called just in time and the other plants want to imitate that, it’s much easier to do that over video, especially if there is an Intern, that’s right on the factory floor, they can see exactly what the best practice plant is doing.
To be continued…
