The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

74 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E network of partners will provide integrations with the platform, while services partners such as Accenture, Avanade, PwC and EY will provide consulting and advisory services to customers using Microsoft Viva. “We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboard- ing and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful from day one in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.” Another of the technologies making a par- ticular impact on the automotive workforce is mixed reality, with Microsoft HoloLens 2 offer- ing new capabilities to automotive organisa- tions. HoloLens can be used to deliver training to workers as they learn the complex systems and processes that go into producing a vehicle, while designers can visualise and share vehi- cle concepts in virtual 3D models. An organ- isation’s expertise can also be more efficiently used through remote assistance enabled by a HoloLens headset, as Imhoff explains. “An example of the power of HoloLens is in the installation of production machines, which are now very complex and expensive,” he says. “We work with a company from Switzerland that has machines installed in more than 120 countries. For them, it does not make financial sense to place trained engineers in every single country. With HoloLens, a very skilled engineer thousands of miles away at the headquarters in Switzerland can be put in contact with a worker at the site, walking them through the repair and sales cycle.” As the automotive industry enters a period of disruption and innovation driven by digital trans- formation, the need for efficiency and productiv- ity will become greater than ever. Developments in automotive are set to bring change the way that people move, and enabling their workforces to keep up with the swift pace of innovation will be important in enabling automotive companies to take advantage of the new possibilities. “Automotive today is touching so many other aspects of our daily lives,” said Imhoff. “Where once the industry was a known ecosystem, today it’s expanding into a wide array of areas such as autonomous vehicle fleets, logistics, charging infrastructures and more. It’s really becoming more about the wider discussion of mobility, and how we will define mobility in the future. The improvement in productivity is part of the journey towards realising this vision of emerging mobility services.” Experts can provide remote support to workers through Microsoft HoloLens