Resilience and remote work

Some time ago we wrote an article about” Facilitating interactions between teams: how does digitalization make it possible to dematerialize support for industrial performance? ”

The health crisis linked to the Covid-19 epidemic has highlighted the lack of resilience of certain activities. Through this article, we invite you to explore how digitalization makes it possible to gain resilience and to secure your industrial activity.

Digitalization and resilience in crisis situations

Many situations can lead to some teams working remotely: health crisis, weather conditions, personal reasons... These situations can have serious consequences on the ability of these teams to carry out their activity. They may find themselves unable to do their job or with much lower productivity.

However, we are now much better equipped to deal with these situations. Cloud and SaaS collaborative work tools have been democratized in companies. It is possible to have VPN accesses to access on-premises systems.

Design your Information System outside the company

The first aspect is to ensure that its Information System can be operational simply from the teams' mobile workstations, whether in the factory or outside. Many approaches exist: VPNs, SaaS solutions... with of course the pre-requisite of cyber security (whether from a technical, organizational but also human perspective).

Organize and equip yourself for teleworking

We must not forget the material aspect either. It's going to be difficult to be resilient if teams have fixed positions. On the other hand, in the event of a long period of teleworking, not having an adapted screen in addition to that of a laptop can prove to be a source of discomfort and inefficiency. On this subject, INRS is publishing a guide on best practices for remote working.

Facilitate remote exchanges and collaboration

Beyond business tools, it is necessary to integrate tools that facilitate remote interactions: instant messaging, videoconferences, virtual whiteboards... which will be a palliative to the disappearance of physical interactions.

And for industrial activity?

You have to look at the subject from several angles:

1. The empowerment of field teams: the implementation of approaches that lend a hand to operational teams by providing them with the information, tools and methods to be in control of their production tool is a very strong resilience lever. Digitalization has a key role to play in this field by providing them with the tools adapted to their needs and the necessary information.
2. The remote operational maintenance of support teams: process teams, methods, continuous improvement... If they cannot be in the field, they must be allowed to interact with the operational teams who will need it all the more. Access to information from the field in real time, the possibility of working remotely with the site... Digitalization can once again provide answers.

At Optimistik, during the Covid-19 epidemic in spring 2020, our teams organized themselves with those of our customers and our partners. For example, on a project where most of the teams were working from home, the SaaS aspect of our solution allowed us, with the teams still present on the site, to deploy our solution. OIAnalytics and to implement concrete actions to improve the performance of their production lines despite the situation.

Author: Mathieu Cura