Many industrial companies deal with complex operations in their plants. It often forces management to speed up the operational digitalization to be a competitive market player.

Although technological innovations make it possible to automate nearly an entire plant, it is still vital to have skilled personnel with in-depth knowledge. Unfortunately, due to an aging workforce, management sees themselves confronted with a possible loss of valuable knowledge and hands-on experience. Their main concern is how to safeguard the knowledge of senior operators and help juniors get up to speed with complex operations?

Geert Sergoyne is co-founder and CEO at Gemsotec. “Our mission is to enable companies with complex operations to make instructions, tasks and inspection rounds mobile and smart. It helps them to capture and organize the knowledge-based information of their senior operators and to create a digital buddy for future talent.”

Digital buddy: four critical success factors

Up till now, most junior operators get extensively training from seniors to gain complex operations knowledge and experience. However, the digital economy and the aging workforce urge companies to change the way they operate.

Geert: “We asked ourselves what the Software as a Service (SaaS) application critical success criteria are for a digital buddy, supporting less experienced employees during complex operations?” That resulted in a list of four success factors:

1. One software platform for all company departments involved in complex operations
2. Collect, analyze and visualize data to gain insights
3. An intuitive user interface
4. Augment: enriched data such as a detailed floor plan and pictures to guide operators during their inspection rounds

Based on these four critical success factors, Gemsotec created the application GoRound.

GoRound application

What is GoRound? “GoRound is a web and mobile application that assists you to perform inspections, instructions, and tasks.The web application facilitates the creation of templates, plans, and reports. It also manages tasks and collects valuable data insights for improvements. The GoRound mobile app is a digital buddy that guides operators and technicians via a step-by-step approach. For example, they can check the precise location to perform an inspection, log statuses, add text comments, check process values and make field service requests,” says Geert.

Projects and approach

Currently, several GoRound projects are ongoing in different industries. A food company is using the application to digitize the quality inspections of a product line. It means that paper-based management is replaced by tablets that run the GoRound application to log production failures and to perform critical checks such as temperature and fat content. It enables them to optimize the efficiency of the product line thanks to valuable data insights. Additionally, the digital logging of data improves its compliance with regulations and procedures.

“Another project is with a chemical company. Here, employees use tablets to inspect railway wagons containing hazardous substances and to perform full site inspections. The GoRound application provides them the instructions to execute checks and allows them to enrich their data with pictures and comments. That speeds up the time-frame to generate inspection reports and fix problems. In other words, it not only improves the efficiency and safety tracking of the railway wagons but that of the entire site,” says Geert.

“GoRound is a web and mobile application that assists people to perform inspections, instructions, and tasks.”

There is also a GoRound project ongoing with a production company in Spain to digitize more than eighty complex operations checklists for the inspection of many international product types linked to different customers and countries. The mobile GoRound app helps them to select the correct product type checklist.

All GoRound projects start with a customer kick-off meeting. Geert: “We carefully listen to our customer’s needs, identify all stakeholders, agree on what the objectives are, and how we are going to cooperate. It is our responsibility to deliver and configure the application and to provide user training. The customer arranges their team’s buy-in, enters the necessary know-how in the app, and uses it.

Active participation of stakeholders is crucial for a successful project, as well as a user-friendly interface and excellent user experience. Due to the project sizes, I expect to extend our portfolio with project management services to help customers with the implementation of the GoRound app.”

Rapid growing market

The worldwide market for mobile operations is expecting rapid growth in the coming years. That provides many opportunities for established businesses as well as start-ups. For example, in the future, operators will use smart glasses for complex mobile operations. The advantage is that you have easy access to information and work instructions. Besides, your hands are free to perform tasks, and an online expert is available if you need help to solve a problem.

“Currently, Gemsotec is active in the chemical, food, manufacturing, and logistics industries. We are often amazed by our customers with the new use cases they introduce. Although we have many projects dealing with inspections and tasks, I also see great potential for complex procedures such as the lockout tag-out procedures. The fast pace of technology innovations will further help us to develop the GoRound application and to meet the business needs of our customers,” says Geert.

Do you want to know more about the GoRound app to make your operations smart and mobile? Contact: geert.sergoyne@gemsotec.com