1. Virtual Reality Training in
Manufacturing: Minimizing
Errors
December 12th, 2016
Ezekiel Skovron, PSY 527
2. Employee Misunderstanding
● “LONDON and NEW YORK--(Marketwire - June 18, 2008) - US and UK
employees are costing business $37 billion a year because they do not fully
understand their jobs.” -IDC white paper, Cognisco
● “On average, businesses with 100,000 employees are each losing $62 million
per year at an average of $624 per employee.” -IDC white paper, Cognisco
3. What Is Virtual Reality?
Simple! A headset connected to a computer
Virtual Reality is not a new concept
Sensorama
Telesphere Mask
Uses for virtual reality
Entertainment & games
Science & Medicine (molecular modeling)
Training
5. Training Costs per Employee for Small, Medium, and Large
Companies
Training Industry Report Magazine, 2015
6. Virtual Reality Training Analogy: Surgical Simulators
● Fried et al. 2005
○ Endoscopic Sinus Surgery Simulator (ES3) and Minimally Invasive Surgical Trainer-Virtual
Reality (MIST-VR)
■ Surgery requires precision and technical dexterity
■ High risk, and errors can lead to death of patient!
■ Simulator allows medical students to perform actual surgery without facing real
consequences
○ Conclusion:
■ Less errors in operating room
■ Simulators were rated highly by participants
7. Importance of Training in Manufacturing
● Good Manufacturing Practice
Safety
Technical Ability
Standards
Risks of poor training
More errors
Production halts
Product recalls
8. Purpose of Our Study
● To see if virtual reality training decreases the amount of small and large
errors made on the manufacturing floor
○ If employees make less errors, we reduce the likelihood of GMP violations
○ Reduce likelihood of employee misunderstanding
10. IV and DV
IV: Types of training
Traditional training:
Computer based training (10 subjects)
Lecture/demonstration (10 subjects)
Virtual Reality Training
DV: Performance
Number of error (determined by an expert)
Small error: 1
11. Schedule of Training
Day 1: Safety Training/Introduction to Working on the Manufacturing Floor
Day 2: Operating the centrifuge and inserting precipitate into a flask
Day 3: Operating bioreactor
Day 4: Operating pH machine
Day 5: Do the whole task
Day 6: Training on another task (shadowing)
Day 7: Training on another task (shadowing)
Day 8: Training on another task (shadowing)
Day 9: Training on another task (shadowing)
Day 12: Retention test
12. Testing
Day 12: Retention test - what they have learned and remember in the first five
days.
Subjective Measures: Employees will fill out a questionnaire about how they felt
about their type of training.
14. Results: Implications
Possible Outcomes
VR < traditional methods
VR = traditional methods
VR > traditional methods
Skill acquisition
Subjective Measure
Implement any suggestions
As a manager of multiple employees, you understand the importance of properly preparing employees to perform their jobs. However, some ways may not be as effective, but they are cheaper and quicker and get employees on the floor quicker. Well, what if I told you that by not providing your employees with the proper training, you are actually potentially losing thousands to even millions of dollars. What if I told you that there may be a less expensive, a more immersive, and more effective way to train your employees? We believe virtual reality is the future of training and I’ll tell you why.
But first, i want to show you an excerpt from from an article thatanalyzed employee misunderstanding in the work place by Cognisco, a leading employee performance analytics company.
Telephone interviews with 400 employees
Tried to find out if able to perform critical functions of their job
It turns out many employees were not on the same page as management, and if certain aspects of their job were performed incorrectly it would have financial consequences
So overall, large business in 2008 were losing a combined 37 billion dollars and this is anything from safety regulation violations to injuries as a result of continual bad manual labor practices
All you do is plug the headset into a computer, run the software, and you are in a high fidelity virtual environment
Because virtuality can recreate enironments in which a variety of tasks are performed, it allows user to complete tasks without facing the actual consequences of failure
These consequences occur within the virtual reality environment, but not in actual reality
Thus, the user can witness what a failure looks like in order to prevent it in the actual environment
Sensorama: huge machine where an individual would be presented with one of 6th films that stimulated all of the senses
Telesphere mask first head mounted VR display that worked similarly to the sensorama
And VR is already being implemented in the workplace, and more mid-sized companies are using it.
Training industry report 2014 vs 2015
Conducted by an outside research firm
So let’s look at some numbers; lets see how much companies are already spending on training. This is a figure from the 2015 training industry report that conducts survey evaluations of different sized companies to determine their training expenditures.
As of 2015, mid size companies are spending $544; however, that cost of training is way lower than in 2014! We do not think it is a coincidence that cost to train is going down, and VR may actually cost less per employee than this figure
How could VR training fit in to the manuacturing industry? Well lets use an analogy to help us solve this problem.
But we are a Biotech Manufacturing company...what does this have to do with biotech manufacturing?
To examine if there any differences in error committed we will use a one way between subjects anova to compare the three groups
We predict that the VR training group will significantly commit less errors the groups that underwent traditional training methods
We have three possible outcomes and we have to consider what to do in each one.
In the case VR does not perform better than traditional methods we suggest not to incorporate VR in training
In the case that VR performs equally as good, not better or worse, than traditional methods we would say to incorporate in training and ill explain why in the following slides.
In the case that VR training performs better than traditional methods we would suggest to incorporate in training. There is a possibility that the VR training also leads to faster skill and acquisition. This is important to examine so we can refine the training schedule of an employee.
In regards to subjective measure, in the case that we decide to incorporate VR we will make sure to implement any suggestion made by the partipcanpts in order to enhance their experience.
So now we get to bottom line, what do you have to invest and what will you get in return.
You won't spend any additional money on researchers or participants because we will already salary.
However you will have to spend 20-30k on hardware and software.
Portion of this money will go to buying 10 VR sets which bost 10-15k.
The other portion will contracting a VR software development company to design the training program, which will cost 10-15.
At lastly there will have to replace the VR systems every 5 years which will cost you about 10-15k.
So that was cost and now we start looking at savings from a training perspective.
The best way to look at potential training savings is by looking at the cost of training with VR systems during one life cycle which is 5 years and the cost of traditional training methods in the same time frame.
Like previously stated it cost $544 to train a single person with traditional methods. And if you are hire 15 new people each year, which is a conservative figure, it would cost you 40k in training over a 5 years.
However with VR you would be spending 15k regardless of how many many people you train.
And is difference of 25k. This saving alone nearly covers the cost of the initial cost and after the initial cost is covered you would be saving 25k every 5 years.
And this is the reason we suggest incorporating VR in the case there is no difference in performance between traditional and VR methods. You would be saving 25k in training every 5 years.
Another way in which VR can lead to savings is by reducing error which will reduce error cost
As mentioned earlier, error cost companies $624 yearly/ per employee. This number is not same for every company but we will use it as a baseline to demonstrates the effects it could have.
For a company like our in which we have 1000 employees and if all employees were VR trained, if a VR has a 1% error reduction cost it would lead to a saving $6400 yearly
We don't want our company to suffer because technicians don't know how to do their jobs properly. We believe VR has the potential to provide employees with the training they deserve that will prepare them for all functions of their job description and more. Most importantly we believe VR will minimize the amount of error on the manufacturing floor and this could potentially save you thousands of dollars per year. More and more companies are using VR as a training method and training costs on average are going down. We feel that even if VR does not prove to be the most cost effective method, this study could reveal a lot about how successful our current training programs are and what direction we should take in the future. Thank you for your time.
