XR Training Advances Global Water Management
HTC VIVE and SynergyXR partnered to help Grundfos in its mission to solve the world's water challenges
AEC | Manufacturing | Sales/Marketing | Training/Simulation | Case Study
6 minute read
About two two-thirds of the surface of the Earth is covered in water. For Grundfos , that means a world of opportunities.
Grundfos, based in Denmark, is the world’s leading pump manufacturer. The company is dedicated to pioneering solutions for the world’s water and climate challenges and improving people’s quality of life. That means innovating sustainable solutions to flooding, wastewater treatment, housing and industrial water access, and more. Basically, if it requires or involves water, Grundfos has a solution.
The Challenge
Grundfos’s solutions can be complex, often involving massive machinery and complicated operations. A wastewater treatment plant, for example, requires dozens of skilled workers with many hours of experience and training. Grundfos engineers and trainers have to be physically present to ensure proper set-up and operation. If the facility is in a remote location, this could mean days or even weeks of travel.
Grundfos also needs to be able to explain its operations in simple terms to potential new customers. After all, it’s hard to sell a solution if the customer doesn’t fully understand the problem. Being able to walk customers through a facility and explain its operation in detail would be highly effective, but it’s hard to ask customers to take the time to travel to the facility — it’s even harder to bring the facility to the customer.
Grundfos needed to be able to deploy its team of experts anywhere in the world. It needed to speed up training for new workers and walk potential customers through massive operations clearly and easily. And it needed to do it all in a way that was scalable and that would save time and money. To do all of this, Grundfos turned to XR.
Grundfos worked with XR solutions provider SynergyXR to create an XR platform that could address its onboarding, training, and sales needs.
“Grundfos wants to provide fresh water everywhere, and with XR, you can virtually fly in VIP clients and talk about it,” says Thomas Fenger, Chief Experience Officer and Co-Founder at SynergyXR. “You can present this from anywhere in the world, and you can present the walkthroughs and talk about all the solutions. It’s a sales and onboarding tool that would be completely impossible in any other way.”
SynergyXR creates custom XR platforms on demand for customers like Bosch, Volkswagen, and Total Energies. With more than a decade of experience in XR, the experts at SynergyXR understood how to help Grundfos.
“When we have stakeholders, they will usually be open to technology, but they will always have to cover their backs,” says Fenger. “They need to trust that the XR platform is user-friendly, secure and won't lead to a flood of support calls when recommending it or distributing headsets.”
The Solution
To create their training solution for Grundfos, SynergyXR used architectural drawings and CAD files that already existed to rapidly create virtual models. Working from existing files allowed them to create interactive training materials that would faithfully represent the facilities and machinery workers were being trained on.
This approach added value in a number of ways. The most important of which was that it helped Grundfos ensure that workers were actually doing the training and taking learning away from it.
“What we're doing here is basically replacing a PowerPoint presentation that literally no one will be able to remember,” says Fenger. “With a PowerPoint, you don’t have to actually experience the content. You could be sleeping, but say, ‘Yeah I'm not sleeping, I was there.’ In an XR module, you have to be wearing the headset and experiencing the content — often with others — so there’s no way to fake it. Instead of passively absorbing, you’re actually doing the thing, but virtually. So by actually doing it, you show that you know what to do.”
The virtual training also helped address limitations of traditional training, such as ensuring consistent standards, eliminating learned bad habits, or preventing trainers from cutting corners.
“Some of the things that we figured out were, in terms of safety updates, they might have learned to use this machine, and they might have developed some bad habits,” says Fenger. “They might even have missed some memos along the way. So depending on what trainer you happen to have on the day, not all the updates might be in there. But when you actually digitize the training, and you run it on the headset, it's exactly the same every time.”
Results
SynergyXR found that Grundfos team members quickly and easily adopted the proposed solution and began using it almost immediately.
“The potential worry that people would not adopt XR was pretty quickly put to rest,” he says.
One of the biggest enhancements came in regards to training on a complex machine that prefabricates materials that are used further down the production line. Because of how integral this machine is to almost everything else on the production line, it operates at all hours, going down only briefly each week so that teams can perform maintenance and training.
“Since it has to be running and it's very expensive and kind of dangerous also, the training will always happen on Sunday nights,” says Fenger. “You can maybe have two or three people training and learning on this machine at a time.”
Not only was training slow, but it was not scalable. Because of this small window and limited availability for training, new workers hired to run this machine often had to wait a long time after hiring to be able to start actually operating it.
SynergyXR took on the task of digitizing the training for this machine. It created a training module workers could use instead of waiting for the Sunday night window to train on the actual machine. The result: a huge success.
“They hired a new person and had him train using completely virtual training,” says Fenger. “He did not disturb any trainers, did not disturb the production line in any way. In days, he was ready to get certified and get to work. So we could scale this up from up to three people over a number of weeks to as many people as you have headsets in just days.”
SynergyXR took the same approach to develop a sales solution for Grundfos, using CAD files to create virtual models of the company’s installations and machinery that could be sent out with headsets to potential customers. This solution was also employed at conferences and anywhere Grundfos salespeople were likely to interface with leads.”
Why VIVE
When it came time for Grundfos to expand to certain territories, the company needed a solution that would be capable of running its existing XR platform anywhere in the world. SynergyXR recommended HTC VIVE.
“They needed a headset that they could know in and out and that they could recommend everywhere,” says Thomas Fenger, Chief Experience Officer and Co-Founder at SynergyXR. “That was what Grundfos was looking for, and HTC was a good solution.”
HTC VIVE headsets would allow SynergyXR to quickly deploy their existing XR software platform in Grundfos’s new territories. The headset itself would also be simple and reliable enough that it could be shipped anywhere in the world and be usable right out of the box. This is a huge benefit to a company like Grundfos, which is shipping headsets to potential customers.
“What is attractive for us about the HTC VIVE is the ease of use,” says Fenger. “Within a week, we had a prototype running, and within about two weeks we were ready to deploy.”
For SynergyXR, the partnership with HTC VIVE is just the beginning. The company envisions a world in which XR makes training and sales easier by bringing people together across vast distances and allowing digital collaboration.
“From our side, we just want our platform to be spread out into the world as much as possible, and a big part of that is having a reliable partner,” says Fenger.” So the fact that we can point to HTC VIVE and without blinking recommend the devices and the things that VIVE continues to develop and bring to the world is big for us.”
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