Start with a use case where the benefits become visible quickly. The ideal first pilot isn’t your most advanced process, but also not the simplest one, where the impact might be too limited to notice.
At Ansomat you can ask a free trial to explore the full potential of digital work instructions with minimal risk. Alternatively, hosting a demo day through us or one of our partners is another great way to kick things off: invite stakeholders from process engineering, SOP teams, shop floor team leaders, production, and quality. Letting them experience the solution firsthand helps build alignment, buy-in, and momentum early on.
Start small and controlled. Test your instructions with a “guinea pig” user in a safe environment before rolling them out broadly. The key is to observe whether the instructions make sense without additional explanation, any mistakes or questions will quickly highlight gaps or unclear steps.
Test with operators of different skill levels, both experienced and inexperienced, to understand varying needs. Some of our customers with +50 stations even use a dedicated “test station” where new technology integrations and capabilities are tested.
Getting started is fast and depends on the complexity of your setup and the devices involved.
For larger deployments, timelines depend mainly on:
Once the foundation is in place, scaling across the factory becomes significantly quicker.
When managing multiple product variants, work instructions don’t need to be rebuilt from scratch. Common steps can be reused across variants, similar to using the same “cut tomatoes” step in multiple recipes. Only the steps that differ are created once, and the system automatically assembles the correct instruction flow for each variant.
Digital work instruction platforms allow instructions to be created, distributed, and maintained centrally from a single hub. This makes it easy to scale, duplicate, and adapt instruction sets across stations with similar operations, without starting over.
With the Ansomat Management System, instructions can be accessed and updated centrally, changes can be monitored in real time, and both instruction authors and shop-floor operators always work from the latest version.
Shop floor operators can provide direct feedback on every individual instruction step. They can rate steps and submit comments such as “wrong order,” “not clear,” or “visual needs improvement.”
All feedback is automatically captured and stored in a central database. Continuous improvement teams can review this input directly from their desk using the Ansomat Management System, evaluate the requests, update the work instructions, and instantly push the approved changes back to the shop floor stations. This creates a fast, closed-loop improvement process between operators and engineering teams.
Digital work instructions must be confirmed to move to the next step. This can be done manually or fully automated, depending on your setup.
Manual confirmation options include:
To further automate the process, smart devices can be connected so steps are validated automatically: