From pilot to production: How large enterprises can scale XR projects

Broad adoption of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) technologies remains at an early stage, but many businesses are already seeing value in the systems they’ve rolled out: immersive training for frontline employees, for example, or engineers who can collaborate on design using 3D models.  

But getting these systems up and running can be complicated. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of AR, VR and mixed reality (referred to collectively as XR) tools, companies still face a variety of technical, cultural and organizational challenges. 

At last month’s Augmented Enterprise Summit, several executives from large global enterprises offered insights into how to get XR projects started — and how to move from proof of concept (PoC) to successful real-world use. (They did not detail which XR systems they’re companies are using, focusing instead more broadly on how to successfully deploy the technology.)

Focus on outcomes, not just cost savings

Convincing senior leaders about the value of XR projects is one of the key challenges teams will face. 

Nic Sabo, AR program leader at GE Aerospace, said it’s often best to focus on what the technology enables rather than purely on potential cost savings. “What really does resonate is when you start talking about creating capacity,” Sabo said during the event, which took place Sept. 23-25 in Dallas.

This is a particular challenge for GE Aerospace, which regularly recruits and trains new technicians for its MRO [maintenance, repair and overhaul] shops; many are new to the industry and may have only recently graduated from school. 

If XR tools can help train 50% more employees a year, for example, that can have a knock-on effect for the entire production chain. That’s more valuable than money saved on training itself, said Sabo, shifting the conversation from labor savings of “maybe tens of thousands” to affecting “multi-million-dollar ‘throughput’ through my organization,” he said. 

“If you find those key pain points that leadership is really feeling and find a way to say, ‘I think I can solve this using XR in XYZ capacity,’ that translation really starts to make a lot of sense for them,” he said.

It’s also smart to identify which senior leaders can back a project and be aware of top-level priorities. Sabo recommends finding a “champion” early, “someone who has the funding and has the willingness to kind of try something new.

“It’s important to identify the leaders that can support a project and understand their priorities and the high-level business objectives,” he said. “From there, it’s possible to present XR tools as a way to solve problems.” 

Understand the user

To build XR services that will get adopted by employees, IT decision makers need a strong understanding of users’ roles and daily tasks, said Nike Adeoye, advanced technology and innovation advisor for FedEx. 

At the logistics and delivery company, VR is used to train new employees. “We start with the trainers to get their pain points,” Adeoye said. “Try to understand what the customer journey is, then build the value into that journey so that you can easily sell it to your stakeholders.”

Laura Kinkle, immersive technologies lead at Daimler, recommends involving users in the design process as early as possible. “Start with them at the very beginning, so they feel like they’re involved in coming up with the solution,” she said.

“If you go to your stakeholder and say, ‘I’ve got this really wow factor technology and I think you should use it this way,’ they’re not going to feel they’re part of coming up with the solution and not be as open to your ideas.”

Another priority when working with proofs of concept is to keep users engaged throughout the process.  Otherwise, they might drop out before the trial is complete, resulting in less evidence of its effectiveness to present to leaders.

“I call it ‘after the wow factor;’ when the novelty wears off for the user. What do you do when they’re not as engaged as in the beginning?” Adeoye said. “Their engagement gives you enough data points to be able to prove the concept.” 

She advised that companies create incentives for users so that they remain involved. It’s also important to be up front about the level of commitment required to collect the necessary data.

Treat a proof of concept the same as production 

While Ford has had a high success rate converting PoCs to production, that was not always the case: several years ago, there were half a dozen such efforts in progress at the company, with few signs of success. 

“One thing that we learned, or that we do now, is we just don’t consider a PoC a trial or evaluation,” said Muhammad Anwar, technology lead for Extended, Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality & Visualization at Ford. “We consider it as a baseline and foundation of future deployments.”

There are two “make or break” factors to consider, he said. One is scalability to ensure the XR systems and data are available to large numbers of users globally across an organization. The other is stability to prevent disruptions when XR systems are accessed at scale. 

The problems Ford ran into during its first successful deployments were less about the XR technology itself. “It was device setup and configuration,” said Anwar. “It was enrollment into the MDM [mobile device management software]. It was connectivity with your corporate network, OS upgrades, firmware upgrades.” 

To address those stumbling blocks, Ford devised “a very comprehensive business continuity plan at the POC stage to minimize the disruption,” said Anwar.

At the same time, data security should be a clear priority from the start, according to Adeoye.

“If your organization is like mine, where data security is crucial to anything you do, you want to make sure that you don’t raise any red flags during PoC security review, because the red flags will mean that you probably get blocked at the end and not go to deployment,” she said.

IT support for scaling up

For XR projects to succeed at large companies and across continents, robust IT systems should be in place to deliver the technology reliably to users wherever they are.

For Volvo, deploying a device management application helped it scale its immersive training to workers in 80 different countries. “We can push applications pretty much anywhere in the world,” said Matthew Connors, XR digital product area owner, Volvo Group Digital & IT, Volvo Group. “We don’t have that many applications, there are probably about 22 applications — technical, sales; they have different use cases — but we can push those out pretty much immediately.”

Volvos has used some 300 or so Meta Quest 2 and 3 devices and relies on management software from ArborXR, Connors said. “We can manage groups, indicate who’s got what device, where are they, is it up to date, is all the software already installed, do they need to have the application set. It’s been working out very well for us.”

At GE Aerospace, Sabo said the relationship with IT is critical when scaling up XR projects across a company’s operations. As soon as his team created its first successful piece of XR content they were under pressure to supply more. 

“All of a sudden, there’s a lot more demand, and a lot of demand for, ‘Can you do it faster, and can you produce a lot more?’” he said. “Without having that close partnership with IT and understanding what our digital strategy was, we didn’t have a place to really start for scaling. So, we learned very quickly we had to bring those stakeholders in as well.”