Vicara Motion Engine for Productivity Tracking — A Case Study

The one common goal that unites all businesses, companies, industries, and organizations is the mission to achieve higher productivity. Productivity not only results in the efficient delivery of tasks, increased work output, proper time management but also drives the growth and revenue of a company. One of the largest industries that works closely on the basis of metrics to dynamically improve their performance is the automotive industry. In 2020, India had the fifth-largest auto market, with almost 3.49 million units sold in the passenger and commercial vehicles categories. It was also the seventh-largest manufacturer of commercial vehicles in 2019.

When you’ve such a huge market, the demands ramp up proportionally which in return boil down to delivering the maximum in the minimum time given. To meet these massive demands, the automotive industry uses KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track its overall performance. It helps companies make better business decisions and are extremely crucial for their longevity. In today’s times, a critical measure that has helped in turning around automotive companies is productivity. But productivity alone cannot create wonders. It needs to be regularly tracked so that the insights gained can bring out dynamic changes in the overall process.

In cases of online tracking productivity, software-based systems are increasingly being integrated in organizations, but when it comes to hardware-based tracking that involves physical labor, it’s an entirely different ball game. Vicara is enabling one of India’s largest automotive manufacturers to track and monitor the productivity of their employees at the workshops. This automotive company faced multiple issues when it came to enhancing the productivity of its employees as well. They couldn’t assess the amount of time spent on different tasks, the way the tasks were carried out, if an employee was doing it in the right manner or if it was skipped altogether. In addition to this, there was no way in which they could analyze the efficiency of their methodology, process, and their employees. All of these problems coalesced together to result in a situation of utter chaos and a complete lack of accountability.

Now, tracking a variety of physical movements of employees and then monitoring them throughout the day can be quite challenging. So how did we solve this imminent problem that the company faced on a daily basis?

The key to the solution is the Vicara Motion Engine (VME). The VME is a platform-independent firmware stack that leverages data from motion engines to accurately identify motion & gestures with minimal processor & memory requirements. The VME allows the motion tracking of the activities and gestures used in tasks that employees carry out in a day. Basically, Motion tracking is the process of the ability to monitor the movements or the displacement of objects through space. The data required for this is obtained through a set of sensors including a gyroscope, accelerometer & magnetometer.

When it comes to large-scale organizations, they have an entire workflow and methodology built out over the years, that they adhere to and expect their employees to stick to as well. But this is easier said than done.

A lot of elements come into play when it involves tracking the productivity — convenience of the tracker, the level of intrusion it causes to the employee, the ease of using, and lastly how resourceful it turns out for them. Is it possible to collate all of these features into a single product?

Yes, it definitely is. Vicara developed a customized wearable productivity tracker for the automotive company so that the employees could be efficiently and easily monitored. We went on to build a product that would completely cater to the company’s requirements and was specifically made to target the roadblocks it faced.

We started out by narrowing the activities that the employees have to perform every day which included tasks like brake maintenance, parts replacement, engine replacement, welding, picking up objects, etc. Once we’d singled out the activities that were to be specifically monitored, the next step was to collect data. In order to gather data, each of the employees was made to wear a motion tracker on their wrists. This tracker would be assigned to each particular employee and would have a specific ID linked to it. The employees would’ve to change the present task in the dashboard, every time they would get started with a different activity. In this way, we amassed the gestures and collected the motion data associated with each action. The tracker would be capable of identifying the amount of time spent on various activities, time spent idle, activities performed incorrectly & the bottlenecks within each activity.

The data collected from these trackers would then be uploaded onto the dashboards, where seniors or managers can readily access it. The data was displayed and visualized in a graphical format so that it could be easily read & interpreted by anyone who would analyze it. So what exactly could this data be used for?

• Tasks that consume maximum time of the employees
• To identify the mistakes made in activities
• Jobs that might require retraining
• Realizing the most efficient manner of completing a task
• Specifics on the performance of each employee
• Tasks that require an overall revamp
• Time spent completing a task
• The methodology implemented in carrying out a task

The list goes on..

Motion tracking backed by the VME ensured high-resolution, filtered IMU samples for the POC, and enabled better research. It also enabled the training of different models to identify actions that were to be mapped to the gestures. What sets the Vicara Motion Engine apart from other motion engines are two key features:

• Storage & space have always been the deciding factor. The more lucrative space, the more it lags. Vicara has covered this clause very well. With the VME, memory efficiency becomes 108x better, enables motion tracking, that too without extensive memory requirements.
• With no need for external processing, the VME also offers 83x processor efficiency coupled with the flexibility of adding customized motion controls.
• Additionally, the motion data analysis by the VME can also be leveraged for user-behavior analytics and to enhance the user experience at large.

The insights derived from the data were collectively used to analyze a lot of the KPIs that were set by the company, helped the managers to organize their team, delivered a direction to the employees, and overall enhanced their performance. When you have a device that achieves all the criteria that bring about efficiency, ease, and excellence in your employees there’s no doubt about productivity right?

All of the automotive company’s goals were realized through the wearable trackers built on Vicara’s proprietary technology, the Vicara Motion Engine. The team was able to distribute the devices across workshops, all over the country & provide the company with useful & actionable data points that not only resulted in an improvement in their work but also the development and growth of each employee.