Gamifying Manufacturing
At Corso Systems, we are often asked how our customers motivate their plant floor staff to do more consistent work, work harder, or simply learn how to do their jobs more efficiently.
While there are many common approaches—including dashboards—to inspire competition among shifts, profit-sharing initiatives, or even prize raffles, we have also considered the now ubiquitous smartphone game industry for motivational ideas.
Implementing Achievements
One easy thing to build into a SCADA system for your operators is the concept of Achievements. In video games, these are typically given to players for completing tasks that are beyond their normal focus. Examples of Achievements might be completing the game without acquiring the best equipment in the game, doing an extensive collection quest, getting a perfect score at the highest difficulty, or completing 100% of the game.
Once a player has received an achievement, it will show up on their profile with a badge, as well as a ranking of how many people have completed that achievement. For some of the most difficult Achievements only an extremely small percentage (in the single digits of percentage points), or even single digits of players who have completed it. In many games these achievements will have quirky names.
Achievements can be applied to manufacturing scenarios with a few ideas like:
Produced 110% of the scheduled throughput on a shift
Showed up on time for 100 days in a row
Achieved over 85% OEE during a shift
Completed a work order with zero scrap or rework
Worked 365 days without an accident
For achievements to be meaningful, they need to have badges associated with them—and a list of which achievements each person has unlocked (along with a list of the ones they haven’t). Now, operators will have goals to shoot for and a way to track their progress. Over time, you can create more Achievements to keep the system fresh for people who have been at the job for while.
It is also important to display the Achievements to instill a sense of accomplishment, camaraderie, and competition. An Ac could easily be used as a screen as part of the normal plant dashboard rotation for example.
Leveling Up
Another common video game concept is the idea of leveling up your character. As you perform certain actions in the game, you gain experience points which will unlock different skills and abilities for your character. For example, if you are playing as a wizard and use spells to dispatch enemies, you will get experience points to unlock stronger versions of spells or new spells entirely. If you are a thief character, you might get better at pick-pocketing or sneaking around the town undetected.
In the manufacturing world, this idea has a direct application to training. As your operators receive more training, they are leveling up their skills. Tracking their progress in a way similar to a video game—and assigning an experience point value to each task or job they have learned—will give them a sense of growth. The idea of Leveling Up can even be applied to acquiring more skills, or tie into a rewards program.
For example, let’s say everyone needs to train on a base skill set before they can do any of the more advanced jobs in the facility. Once they have completed the training, they will gain 100 experience points. To advance to Level 2 training for future tasks, they will need to invest those points in the Level 2 training classes. This way, employees can decide how to specialize and choose what they learn to build their career path through the company.
Gamification and Rewards
The last general concept in gamifying manufacturing is the idea of rewards. Rewards can be simple—operators score points throughout the year that they can use in the employee store, or at the company holiday party as part of a prize raffle or silent auction setup.
Similar to achievements (or even a basic profit sharing plan), goals need to be clearly defined with their point totals so that everyone feels like they are on a level playing field.
Further competition and camaraderie can be instilled with a “leaderboard” displaying who has the most points available at any given time. There could also be a perk for getting onto the leaderboard such as a fancy badge holder, or first dibs on shifts or days off.
This concept is strongly implemented in mobile games. The idea is that scoring points in the game (instead of spending money) will allow you to earn more resources to do more in the game—and win faster. Of course the concept isn’t a 1:1 direct match to how manufacturing works, still the general principles are there.
Ready Player One
When gamifying anything, make sure that people understand the game (and the rules) so they feel like they are on a fair playing field. In manufacturing, it is also important to make sure you are building game systems with safety in mind. The last thing you want is OSHA showing up because people are getting injured while cutting corners to score more points.
Understand what motivates your employees and find a game system you can use that will motivate them—while also staying true to the culture of your organization.
Once you understand how to safely motivate people, building the rest of the game system will be the easy part.
Updated - 6/16/2022
