Integrating efficiency and fun into VR training

Today’s Medical Development (TMD): How can virtual reality (VR) training help overcome supply chain shortages in the medical field?

Lars Gerding (LG): If you work in a catheter assembly environment, training new associates is a big deal. You need to shut down a line, you need to bring them onto the floor, and you need to give them materials that might be scarce in disruptive environments. All of that takes time, money, and components that are very much needed.

With VR training, you do all of that away from the floor. You can train the associates off the floor, in a separate training room, even at home. They just put on their VR headset and are in their individual space, working in the virtual environment without wasting any materials. This really reduced our training times.

TMD: Why is it important to have quality training in medical equipment manufacturing and assembly?

LG: During a quality audit, the auditor will always ask: How are your employees trained?

How do you make sure they understand the training?; and are they actually doing it the way they are supposed to? It’s the number one thing that’s most important for quality assurance on the floor.

With the VR training, you’re able to show you do the same training for everybody. You need to program once with high effort and can use the same training for every employee. Without looking over the employee’s shoulder at all times, you provide them a safe zone to do what they need to do. You can check them offline by looking at the recording later and making sure they really implemented the training.

TMD: How has Freudenberg Medical successfully rolled out this training program internationally to its other locations?

LG: We started in our Ireland facility in Carrick-on-Shannon with one headset. VR sometimes is seen as a nerdy technology, and not everybody embraces it right from the beginning, and it was successful from the very first moment, so we did invest in additional hardware and headsets to train more associates right away.

Also, we connected with our sister site in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and informed them about the results. They were familiar with VR, but not in catheter manufacturing, so that’s what we’re currently in the process of implementing.

TMD: What challenges does VR training prevent from reoccurring in the medical industry?

LG: The deviation from standard work. I think that’s much more reliable in VR training because you build that muscle memory so much by redoing.

Plus, the waste of materials and the waste of time. If you need to shut down the line just for training purposes, or slow down the line for training when materials are desperately needed, that would have a negative impact. With VR, we overcome that.

In a classical training setting, you’d have the trainer looking over the shoulder of one or two trainees. There’s always a risk that they miss something. In VR, you don’t have that; you’re immersed in VR and it’s really a great experience.

TMD: During the VR training, what do participants learn in the span of three days?

LG: The individual is at a workstation. We started with one workstation, to see how well that worked, but with such great success, we immediately rolled it out to six stations.

An example: take a piece of Pebax tube, cut it to length, put it on a mandrel, check the positioning, expose it to some heat treatment or some cleaning step, and so on. The employee in the VR setting would be guided through: What component do they have to take?; When do they have to clean it?; When do they have to put it on?; and how do they check that everything is in place? In addition, they also learn the terminology of equipment and workstations they’re assigned to.

TMD: How accessible will this kind of training be in the future for other manufacturing positions at Freudenberg?

LG: I think the bottleneck right now is really the programming. At the initial stages, we were worried the acceptance on the employee level wouldn’t be there. It can look goofy with a headset on, so what if they worried about that? What if they didn’t accept it? It was the other way around. They really appreciate the training, and they also compete, having a competition of who can work faster and meet all the requirements. I really hope we can build on that success and use it for additional workstations, one at a time.

In the current environment, where there’s so much emphasis on digitalization, I think it’s more a transition toward a hybrid that understands the engineering, the digitalization, and the IT side of things.

TMD: What are the cost-savings for the company when implementing VR training?

LG: We thought the payback would be one year. We brought it down to a couple of months. That is how successful it was.

TMD: Now that this technology is being used internationally, do you think medical equipment supply chain shortages will still be an issue in the future?

LG: I would love to say that we won’t have any supply chain issues in the future, but unfortunately that greatly depends on the availability of raw materials and components.

One important bottleneck has been, especially during and after COVID-19, a scarce workforce, employee turnover, and people not coming back to work. We needed to backfill these positions, so the training helped to address these issues, but not so much the component availability.

What we do see in the data is reduced time for training, acceptance of training, and success. So, I’m confident that training, as long as we are able to bring workforce on the floor and hire people, won’t be the issue.

TMD: What are the advantages of using VR training?

LG: This is a private training space where you don’t feel monitored while you learn. It’s always the employees who expose some kind of weakness in the training, those who are new to a process and not familiar with the terminology. In a traditional training setting, from my point of view, if somebody is watching over my shoulder, I would not feel in control. Then, the trainee does something wrong, and wastes material, and what if others are better than you at the same time? You get nervous.

Putting on that headset, you’re in a different world. All by yourself. Nobody is judging. There’s a virtual trainer. You hear the voice giving you a set of instructions, but it’s really a safe zone. I think that’s the biggest benefit. Employees can learn, self-pace, and redo. They don’t have to worry about needing to keep up with a group during their training.

Also, a great advantage is screening candidates. It’s an easy screening from both sides. The employee can figure out what they really want to be doing, and the company also can see if the employee is capable.

You can also apply the same standardized training and translate the instructor’s voice into multiple languages. That’s a potential benefit of making sure everybody does the same thing globally and has training available in their native language.

About the author: Grace Koennecke is an editorial intern of GIE Media’s Manufacturing Group of magazines. She can be reached at gkoennecke@gie.net.

Freudenberg Medical LLC
https://www.freudenbergmedical.com