The past couple of years has been challenging for businesses and individuals across the globe. However, frontline workers were among those who faced the most pressure to keep the proverbial lights on throughout the pandemic.
From healthcare to hospitality, the manufacturing floor to the retail sales floor, frontline workers withstood health risks, labour shortages, supply chain challenges and more.
With frontline workers’ roles more important than ever, helping connect every one of them and their tools is vital in providing them with visibility, and connectivity and keeping them fully optimised.
At the recently held GITEX Global, Zebra Technologies showcased its solutions that will help support companies that are looking to modernise their operations and better equip their front-line workers through a ‘sense, analyse, act’ approach.
“Our products and services help optimise the frontline workers in any organisation across industry verticals,” said Hozefa Saylawala, Director of Sales, Middle East & Africa, Zebra Technologies.
“It allows the organisations to connect the frontline workers and the assets in a way that gives them visibility across the operation. We use a framework architecture of what we call ‘sense, analyse, act, which means all your frontline workers and your assets can be tracked using a sensor mechanism that comes in a form of mobile computers in the hands of the frontline workers.
“We have RFID readers that are tagging your assets and then transmitting information about the assets, locations, and so on. This is then sent back into a database where the information about their movement, their productivity and performance are analysed.”
Saylawala noted that this data then drives operational insights into what these workers and assets are doing, allowing businesses to evaluate their optimal performance and make necessary adjustments to enhance productivity.
Zebra has a vast portfolio of hardware, software, services and solutions that are designed to digitise and automate workflows across a range of industries. The company offers the latest robotics, AI, software, 5G and RFID solutions engineered to boost productivity, service, and safety.
“So, we as Zebra are market leaders in each of these frontline technologies. At GITEX we demonstrated a combination of these technologies, which when bundled with an ecosystem of the products and solutions that the partners bring, complete the journey of digital transformation for the customer,” said Saylawala.
Future trends
Robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will be among the technological trends that will impact the tech and business landscape in the next few years as people look to drive increased efficiencies and better productivity, according to Saylawala.
“Looking ahead we can also expect the adoption of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) to increase as companies look to remove human error and then drive efficiencies. To achieve that, there will be a need to have a lot of data that the robots and the machines can analyse and understand. It will enable companies to make predictive analyses, which will drive actionable insights,” he explained.
“However, this transformation is a journey. A lot of organisations and a lot of companies including ourselves are still in the learning phase. All these changes will not immediately happen in the next year or so, but if you start planting the seeds today then you’ll have the roadmap for the future.”
Ushering the next digital universe
With increasing conversations about what the future holds for the digital landscape, Saylawala noted that the ‘next digital universe’ is more than virtual worlds and avatars.
“In the enterprise world, when you look at how business organisations or B2B companies will have to look at that digital transformation journey to make every piece of information available in digital format. They will need to ensure that they have visibility over every staff, every asset and every inventory of theirs. They should be able to capture and analyse data from these resources. It would be ideal for them to deploy a ‘sense, analyse, act’ framework to really drive their presence and visibility in the digital universe,” he explained.
