Motion Tracking Is Your Key To Productivity Improvement
Productivity tracking is not a new endavour. It has certainly existed for years together, with several companies employing tracking mechanisms & seeing results that were previously thought to be unheard of.
Data shows that companies that employ productivity monitoring systems have seen a 10% increase in daily work time. Taking it a step further, the data also shows that these systems have lead to a productivity increase from 26–32% & time reporting became 60% more accurate.
That being said, tracking work that it carried out on computers & online, have become increasingly easy. As managers, all you would need to do is set up a software that then handles all the tracking & monitoring for you. At the end of the day, you would only need to look at a crisp & clear dashboard that highlights the key data points.
But what about work that does not require the use of a computer?
How would you track productivity & efficiency in work that requires manual execution in the physical form (At workshops, factories, carpentry, mechanics, etc) ?
The answer may be more obvious than you think… It’s motion tracking.
What is Motion Tracking?
To understand how this would work, you must first have an idea on what “motion tracking” means. Put simply, it is the ability to track & analyse movements or the displacement of objects through space. The data required for this tracking can be derived from a set of sensors including a gyroscope, accelerometer & a magnetometer. Most, if not all of this can be found even on your phone. It is also most definitely present in smart watches.
But let’s face it. It may not be the most practical option to carry your mobile in your hand while you work. And it most definitely would not be cost effective to have smart watches strapped onto every employee in a workshop. How do we then find the appropriate median ?
Wearable Productivity Trackers
Wearable trackers can be used to accurately measure motion data of employees at workshops & factories, where most of the work is primarily physical.
Let’s understand how this would work
Imagine a company where millions of employees come in, every single day, & work on repititive tasks that involve heavy labour. This could involve using wrenches, picking up objects, welding, sawing, checking the physical attributes of products, etc. Each of these employees has their own way of carrying out these tasks, & everyone has their own pace.
Now let’s say we have each of them wear a specific motion tracker on their wrists. This tracker would be assigned to them & connected to their employee id. The tracker would be capable of identifying the amount of time spent on various activities, time spent idle, activities performed incorrectly & the bottlenecks within each activity.
The data collected from these trackers would be sent to the dashboards of managers & decision makers. The data is presented in graphical views that can be easily read & interpreted by just about anyone. This data can then be used to identify the following
- Activities where employees spend the most time
- Activities that are most commonly done wrong
- Activities that may require retraining
- Most efficient way to carry out tasks
- Individual data on how each employee performs
- Activities that each employee may require to improve
- Hours spent doing productive work
- And so on…
This can allow decision makers to change their training guideline, remove activities that create bottle-necks, retrain employees, assist & aid productivity improvement & so on.
How long before we get there?
Not long at all. In fact, we are already there. The team at Vicara has been working with one of India’s larges automotive manufacturers to help monitor & improve the prodcutivty of their employees at workshops. The goals were achieved through wearable trackers built on Vicara’s proprietary technology, the Vicara Motion Engine.
The team was able to have the devices distributed to workshops across the coutnry & provide the company with useful & actionable data points.
If you see an application in your business that could require motion tracking, reach out to the team at Vicara to know more.
