Andonix Presents Live Business Case to Harvard Business School to Highlight Innovation and the Future of Work in Manufacturing

DETROIT, Sept. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Andonix, the developer of Smart Work Station™, is being showcased by Harvard Business School as a live business case highlighting innovation, entrepreneurship and the future of work. Andonix CEO, David Salazar, presented at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 14th, emphasizing the process by which the company has developed Industry 4.0 solutions for the front line in leading manufacturing companies.

Founded in Detroit in 2017, Andonix is a cloud-based technology company built on extensive experience working with Fortune 50 companies in locations around the world. Designed to not just augment, but unleash the full potential of human effort on the front line, Smart Work Station™ is an integral tool for companies pursuing gains in lean manufacturing.

Smart Work Station™ was developed in response to the growing complexity of 21st-century shop floors and the need for a fully integrated connected work platform. Global consulting agency Polaris Market Research recently analyzed the connected worker market and puts it at $8.9 billion by 2026, a significant increase from the $1.7 billion of 2017. And for good reason. According to Mckinsey, a tech-enabled transformation represents a trillion-dollar opportunity for industrials. The cost reductions through productivity improvements and efficiency gains alone, including the implementation of a connected worker platform can unlock value up to 700B per year.

"Our Smart Work Station™ platform was designed around the front line worker with a deep understanding of their environment, needs, and challenges," says David Salazar, Andonix CEO, "We aim to transform laborers into knowledge workers and to empower ordinary people like us to perform extraordinary work."

Despite this growth, there are significant challenges to implementing IIoT and Augmented Reality initiatives. While the industry has adopted advanced automation and increasingly sophisticated Lean manufacturing methods, the managerial model by which the front line is managed remains largely the same as it was 100 years ago. That top-down approach can be costly and undermines the potential benefits of an Industry 4.0 initiative. Challenges that prevent new technology implementations include hardware updates, training time, and the length of time it takes to realize ROI. All of which can exacerbate the 2.4 million jobs expected to go unfilled in the next 10 years due to a shortage of qualified talent.

Smart Work Station™ was developed to work with existing technology and onboard rapidly to help realize benefits more immediately. By addressing one of the most significant gaps in front line workforce technology (the continued use of paper), Smart Work Station™ helps address a number of continuing problems, including a 6-12 week average training period that can cost millions of dollars a year in wage inefficiency. Paper also leads to increased costs due to safety compliance, an increase in cost due to quality incidents, and a general lack of efficiency in the organization.

With decades of experience on the shop floors of Detroit and manufacturing plants throughout North America, Andonix was founded to address these challenges in the most immediate way possible. Built to replace paper-based work instructions with a fully digital instruction and checklist system, enhance problem-solving capabilities through Digital Andon Cord, and accelerate training with video and image-guided resources, Smart Work Station™ leverages Industry 4.0 through existing smartphones, tablets and any other web-enabled computer devices to address these common issues.

Harvard Business School selected Andonix as a live business case to showcase how a creative approach to technology can make Lean initiatives viable in any environment, reducing pilot time, empowering the front-line workforce, and addressing productivity and baseline cost concerns. Andonix will next present the live business case at ICIC National Conference in Boston, MA on November 13, 2019.

About Andonix
Andonix connects front line automotive workers with a solid, robust and scalable digital work instruction and communications platform. The Smart Work Station™ improves the safety, productivity, and efficiency of the manufacturing process by putting Andon Cord functionality in the hands of front line workers. Built on the lean manufacturing pillars of continuous improvement, visibility, and standardization, the Smart Work Station™ improves workforce training, process deployment and supervision. Andonix leverages cloud and low-cost smart devices to deliver enhanced operational performance with an intuitive, scalable, and fast-to-implement platform. Powerful data analytics transforms into insights on people and process performance.

SOURCE Andonix