Creating a Flexible and Engaged Workforce with a Connected Worker Platform

Richard Milnes is a man on a mission: to make the working lives of frontline employees easier.

Milnes is the founder and CEO of Zaptic, a Connected Worker platform that helps frontline workers collaborate, manage daily task lists, and easily access work instructions.

The company has been running since 2015 and has a large customer base in the food and beverage industry. Well-known brands such as Carlsberg, Danone, Proctor and Gamble, and Hovis, are among its clients.  

Milnes says that he and his co-founders got the idea for the company when they were developing digital solutions for large companies in the manufacturing, logistics, and retail sectors. They realized, he explains, that frontline workers were too often left behind. Zaptic aims to change that by creating a digital solution that solves real problems for the frontline.

But there’s another reason that manufacturers might be interested in what Milnes is up to. The ongoing worker shortage means that workers within companies are being called upon to do more, and less experienced staff must get up to speed quickly. At one food and beverage company, Milnes explains, his platform helped to reduce the onboarding process from 3 months down to 2 weeks.

In this interview, Milnes, who will be presenting at our upcoming Connected Worker event this month in Chicago, offers his perspectives on how a digital platform can support operational excellence and continuous improvement, his thoughts on winning over users with technology, and explains how connected worker technology can help with worker retention, flexibility and upskilling.

Diana Davis, IX Network: How did you get interested in this notion of Connected Worker?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic:  It really started from work I was doing building solutions for various parts of the supply chain in manufacturing, logistics, and retail.

My co-founders and I were finding that frontline workers were often left out of the picture. That didn’t make sense to us. The people who sit behind desks in fancy offices have a heap of solutions that help them to be their best selves. But there was a huge gap when it came to how we connect and empower the workforce to get their jobs done.

As digitalization creeps into more and more parts of the enterprise we felt we needed a digital solution to help bring frontline workers along on the journey.

That’s when we decided to build a solution that would to allow process experts to digitize knowledge and make it available to the frontline, while also providing solutions for frontline workers to capture data, digitally complete their work, and share their knowledge. We wanted to enable businesses to create a network of the best practices so the entire workforce could perform at the highest skill level.

WATCH: The Importance of Connected Worker in Ensuring Resilience Post-Covid

Diana Davis, IX Network: How does a platform like yours support continuous improvement and operational excellence in industrial environments?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic:  If you imagine you come to work in the morning before you’ve implemented a connected worker system like Zaptic. Typically, you would need to look at whiteboard, check a logbook, or talk to somebody, to find out what you need to do that day. Then, when you're carrying out a task, the instructions on what to do tend to be filed away somewhere or locked up inside somebody's head.

There’s a lot of information that is required to work in a place like a factory or warehouse. Nobody can remember everything. That means they spend a lot of time looking for information.

It also means that people end up working off many standards. Taiichi Ohno, one of the leading thinkers in the Toyota production system, observed that if you don't have a standard, then you can't improve it.

So, step one is digitalized day-to-day activity so that you've got a standard that's consistent, reusable, and deployable.

Once you have that, then give tools to the workers to enable them to share their knowledge and experience to continuously improve what they're doing.

Then, once you have a better process, we make it easy to roll that process and knowledge out to other people in the organization so that you continuously improve the skill level.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  We often hear that technology is only useful if workers are actually using it. There are many instances where corporate head office comes up with a great solution that is firmly rejected by the frontline users. What's your advice on what it takes to get frontline workers on board with new technology?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic:  You need to create something that is actually going to solve problems for them. These projects can sometimes become about getting a whole bunch of data for the people who sit in corporate head office.  

Typically, we find user adoption of our solution to be fairly easy. That’s because we're solving problems for them; we are here to make life easier for the frontline worker.

We don’t want workers to have to rummage through 30 different paper binders. We don’t want them write down a fault on a piece of paper and put it in the post box.

We give them the digital tools that they're used to in your personal life. It's going to make their job easier, more rewarding, and make more productive.

READ: Developing a High Performing Connected Culture

Diana Davis, IX Network: The Great Resignation is hurting a lot of industries, especially manufacturing. How does a platform like Zaptic help with upskilling and retaining workers?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic: In the example I mentioned before, the day starts with figuring out what needs to be done. With a solution like Zaptic, when you open the application, and you automatically get a ‘to do’ list.

That's probably one of the best features we have in the product for upskilling workers, even though it's not part of our skill management feature catalog. Knowing what needs to be done is a key part of the battle.

Then, for each of those tasks on your ‘to do’ list, you've got the very latest work instructions in all sorts of formats: videos, images, and text.  

The effect of this is that you can upskill work much faster.

We have one customer who took the average onboarding time for a productive employee from 3 months down to two weeks. We've got a larger project with large food manufacturer trying to take their onboarding time down from two years down to about 3 months.

We aim to make the right information available at the right time and then continuously improve. We think it could be a virtuous circle. The workforce is onboarded quickly. Then they become an expert. Then they begin to innovate and find better ways of doing things, and our platform gives them the ability to share that knowledge and improve it.

We give workers a solution to enact change in the workplace. That leads to higher worker retention and also higher productivity for your workforce. 

READ: The Disappearing Manufacturing Worker

Diana Davis, IX Network:  What kind of challenges are you seeing people are most interested in solving with a connected worker platform?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic: Companies are struggling with workforce flexibility, in general. As you're struggling to find people, and you're losing a lot of people from your workforce, you need to onboard a lot of people. But you also need to have more flexibility for the people that you've already got.

That might mean taking your workers from one line to another line that they’ve never worked on before.

I was at a factory a couple of months ago where there was somebody who'd worked at that site for 10 years. But it was his first day starting on a new line that he had never worked before. He was using Zaptic to manage his ‘to dos’ and watching the videos on how to carry out tasks. He was productive almost on day one, even though he wasn't familiar with the line.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  How do you differentiate yourself from other software providers that also focus on digital work instructions?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic: It comes down to product and partnerships.

On the product level, we've always been huge advocates that knowledge and skills management is just one aspect of creating a digital solution that's going to drive change.

For instance, if you have workers who spend their day updating checks on whiteboards and writing things down on paper. If your definition of digital transformation is making them duplicate their work by typing it up into a spreadsheet, you'll find that your workers aren't going to engage with a digital solution.

Why would they stop what they're doing at the machine, walk over to the computer or the tablet, open up some work instruction, read it, and then walk back to the line? They're busy people. They don’t have time for that.

From the product perspective, we combine three aspects: first, digitalization of daily management into an integrated, easy-to-use solution. Second, knowledge management to be able to create and share knowledge structured around day-to-day work and assets. Finally, skills management to be able to manage the qualification and advancement of your workforce all within a single solution.

The second aspect is partnership.

We are very focused on large manufacturers. We have a lot of experience working with companies like Carlsberg, General Mills, and P&G. We invest in our customer success and our customer success team is built up of people with Lean Six Sigma expertise.

We really want to help the implementation be a success because if we give you a great product and you're not able to deploy it, then you're not going to get the value out of it. Ultimately, we're here to give customers value, and not a piece of software.

My advice is to bring your workforce along on the journey. You must bring them into the discussions early on. For instance, we've been part of selection processes where frontline workers are part of the RFP or selection process.

Most providers will give a workshop or pilots so that you can try the solution. That's when you really see the difference between what's sales and marketing, and what's a great product and great partnership.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  Where are you going next with Zaptic? Any interesting new features or projects in the work that you can talk about?

Richard Milnes, Zaptic: There are a ton of great things coming in the road map. Our focus for this year has been rounding out those 3 pillars that I mentioned: daily management, knowledge management, and skills management.

We've got so much data from our customers on work performance and the right way to maintain assets. We’re looking at how we can make that data available so that we can help people make even smarter decisions.

For instance, you have the knowledge and data from an organization like Carlsberg. We’re looking at how you distill that information into something that's going to give people the most accurate, helpful information day-to-day, and in a way that's simple and easy-to-understand.

Interested in learning more about this topic?

Zaptic is one of the lead sponsors at our upcoming Connected Worker event taking place this month in Chicago. Meet Richard Milnes and other leading Connected Worker vendors, and learn how leading companies like LEGO, Georgia-Pacific, Johnson & Johnson, and many more, are leveraging Connected Worker technology to drive operational efficiencies, and improve performance.  Download the agenda now.