Operations Management and Augmented Reality: The Next Big Thing
“Augmented Reality is playing a vital role in revolutionizing several business processes. Operations management, too, holds a massive potential to transform organizations’ operations with AR by entailing a user-immersive virtual environment”.
The world has changed the ways of doing business. Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have shifted to an all-new mode of doing business, which is the product of challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
What was seen as a future challenge turned out to be an opportunity with companies moving to a remote work model, organizations shifting to all-new digital ways of doing business, and emerging technologies coming to the forefront of industries.
Emerging technologies, such as IoT, AI, Blockchain, and RPA, are already setting industry benchmarks, enabling a hassle-free way of tracking, managing, and monitoring business processes, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
What is worth noticing is the surge in the use of these emerging technologies, which was not the case a few decades ago.
Something new that joins the digitization league is Augmented Reality. Abbreviated as AR, it integrates digital information using the user’s environment in real time.
People often get confused between AR and VR.
While they look almost similar, there is a massive underlying difference between the two; unlike virtual reality (VR), which creates an artificial environment, AR lets users experience a real-world environment without having present in it.
Just like the Retail sector, AR is all set to transform the Operations Management of organizations.
Every organization has its own set of practices for managing its operations. From supply chain to Logistics, it involves a wide array of business processes that utilize AR for smooth functioning across the entire value chain of the operations management processes.
Augmented Reality and Operations Management
Operations management plays a vital role in an organization’s success.
In supply chain processes, AR helps organizations massively, focusing not only on the streamlining of business processes in the Supply chain but also on putting forth a strategy for utilizing the unidentified potential and delivering services digitally.
AR lets remote users have an immersive glimpse of what a wearer sees. It effectively means that OEMs, consultants, and repair experts, extend their remote helping hand to workers and avoid unnecessary travel and downtime-related expenses.
In the supply chain industry, warehouse management is one of the most essential elements. With AR’s application, the process gets optimized in unimaginable ways.
For instance, a recent report from DHL suggests that warehouse activities such as packing and storage represent around 20% of all logistics costs. To mitigate such costs, AR-based smart glasses and devices are used, which ensure a faster order-picking process by enabling workers to perform their warehouse tasks, and streamlining the functions such as picking following items, packaging them, and finally dispatching them having a real-time view through AR.
Augmented Reality in Supply Chain Management detects machine breakdowns at warehouses. AR-based smart glasses enhance image recognition capabilities and identify the machine breakdowns in sorting and repackaging goods.
Furthermore, this technology also ensures timely maintenance of equipment and supply chain systems that are instrumental in preventing any significant delay in supply chains using the camera-enabled smart glasses and fixing them in real time.
Not only this, AR holds massive potential with supply chain and logistics as well, where companies are utilizing it for ensuring hassle-free AR-based business functions and drive growth, promote resilience, and entail sustainable supply chain processes.
Conclusion
AR is an emerging technology that has made a massive impact across industries.
Its immersive virtual nature and ability to allow users to get a real-time view of reality without physically being present in a particular location make it one of the most influential technologies.
With its unique application, AR has set the industry benchmark in operation management processes and will only thrive with its potential in the upcoming years.
