We live in a time of unprecedented movement and motion. Whether people are moving across the land, transportation hubs buzzing, ports flush with products coming and going, or fleets of delivery trucks whizzing from place to place, it is a blur of activity and expectation. At the center of all of this are American manufacturers and their warehouse and distribution facilities.

It’s difficult to overstate the centrality of these industries to the US economy. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, the total output for manufacturing was $2.3 trillion in 2020. The National Institute for Standards and Technology reports that the sector employs more than 15 million people – approximately 10 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Warehousing and fulfillment are critical steps in putting products into the hands of customers. According to Capital Counselor, in 2019, Amazon processed 66,000 orders every hour in the U.S. That’s more than half-a-BILLION packages flowing from warehouses to homes and businesses across the country.

This is a complex and multi-faceted operation. Some of the challenges facing the women and men doing this work include finding one’s way within a sprawling warehouse, optimizing product pick-up routes, and confirming that a package picked contains the intended product, among other things. Fortunately, ARway has proven technology that can address these various needs.

ARway’s key capabilities include:

• MetaMaps – digital blueprints of a physical environment that allows people to orient themselves in the space, wayfind through it, and interact with location-persistent augmented reality elements.

• Spatials – location-anchored AR content that can be used for interactive experiences, gamification, marketing campaigns, and information provisioning to provide people with the right information in the right location and at the right time.

• MetaTours – location-persistent AR experiences that lead people across physical environments while displaying a wide range of content.

• Location Intelligence – deep insights and comprehensive location-based analytics for optimization of venue layouts, wayfinding recommendations, and positioning of AR assets to improve the flow of people through space.

Warehouse aisle – AR navigation leading to a specific product hotspot. Analytics are shown to the right.

These capabilities have a direct and dramatic impact on key areas of manufacturing and warehousing operations:

• Navigation and Wayfinding – Leveraging MetaMaps and MetaTours helps customers and employees locate products in a warehouse with step-by-step directions and overhead AR signage.

• Order Pick-Up and Route Optimization – MetaMaps and MetaTours can also be used to map out the most efficient route through a warehouse, making the collection of orders faster and more efficient. In some cases, the efficiency of the product picking process has improved by 25 percent when using AR.

• 3D Product Visualization – Leveraging Spatials helps customers and employees “see” the product in the box by visualizing it in AR – which is important in ensuring the right product is pulled, thus reducing returns.

• Employee Training and Information Sharing – Spatials supports AR-driven self-paced training that provides locationally-contextual videos, step-by-step instructions, holograms, and exploded views of key features and functions of a space.

• Operational Improvements – Location Intelligence uses location and other real-world data to improve processes, floor plan layouts, pickup routes, product placements, and more to optimize operations on an ongoing basis.

ARway is giving manufacturers, warehouses, and distributors a clear advantage by making products easier to find, identify, and pull. The most efficient way to move products off shelves, onto trucks, and into customers’ hands is being powered by ARway’s powerful – yet incredibly easy-to-use – augmented reality technology.

If you want to learn more about how ARway and augmented reality are powering the future of American manufacturing and distribution or to start your free trial to see how ARway can help your business, visit ARway.ai