Parsable’s connected worker technology: The human-centric manufacturing revolution

Parsable is a connected worker platform that serves a broad spectrum of clients from Suntory to Heineken, from Pirelli to Coca Cola, covering over 400 manufacturing-specific sites in more than 70 countries, according to an article in Forbes magazine. During the pandemic, the amount of digital work execution that customer companies do on the Parsable platform has grown by 500%. Company officials describe the Parsable platform as enabling a real time kaizen – the continuous improvement process originally adopted by Japanese companies – along four phases: Digitize; Execute; Measure; Transform.

In the first step, Parsable Digitizes all the paper-based knowledge and procedures that guide work throughout a company and make them accessible to employees in real time through user-friendly mobile apps. Through the apps, workers can get training on demand, when and where they need it, and can collaborate with each other; this is phase two, where the digital platform helps workers Execute, and at the same time collects new data on operations and performance.

This data become the input for phase three, where the analytics Measures execution and performance. This is where the Parsable platform can yield crucial insights for better performance and safety. Phase three can be a multi-step procedure. A customer company will start with what it already knows, and Parsable will build a library of analytics to assess the usual or most likely sources of inefficiencies; but it can then go beyond it, analyzing the data collected by the platform to uncover correlations or sources of inefficiency that it had not identified before. The data collected on the platform allows for a much more rigorous analysis of how different worker practices map to different outcomes; this can for example highlight cases where workers in one facility have come up with a better way of performing certain operations, fueling a rise in productivity; or cases where insufficient training results in lower efficiency. These insights open the way for phase four, where the company can Transform its operations by disseminating best practices and addressing key sources of inefficiency.

Analytics and data visualization play a key role here, but the worker is at the center of it all – Parsable is a connected worker platform. The “secret sauce” is the intuitive user interface on mobile devices, which guides workers through their tasks while sharing information across teams to facilitate collaboration.

This new working environment feels second nature to the digital native younger generations – accelerating adoption of the technology and allowing them to learn on the job at a faster pace.

Company officials believe 2020 has marked the rebirth (or rediscovery) of the importance of humans in manufacturing. After long years of excitement and handwringing about the growing role of automation and robots, this past year has demonstrated that humans are indispensable, and that the key to success lies in upgrading simultaneously technology and human capital.

With the global economy caught between rising unemployment and a widening skills gap, turning manufacturing into a faster-growing creator of high-quality job attractive to younger generations is crucial to a sustainable recovery. Putting the right technology platforms in place will be a key enabler.