Bringing Extended Reality into the Manufacturing and Industrial landscape can have a number of benefits for today’s business leaders.
First, the right technology opens the door to faster prototyping and product development, while allowing teams to work more collaboratively, no matter where their colleagues are located. Secondly, XR can strengthen training initiatives, and ensure team members have more guidance from subject matter experts on the move.
One of the areas of potential benefit frequently overlooked by industrial and manufacturing brands considering XR investment, however, is customer experience. Increasingly, companies like SEACOMP are beginning to discover the right XR initiatives could be the key to helping develop stronger relationships with prospects and clients.
Let’s take a closer look at SEACOMP’s journey with Matterport, and how the two companies worked together to transform the customer experience.
A Focus on Delivering Amazing Customer Experience
SEACOMP, a company committed to producing a range of manufacturing solutions for customers across the consumer goods, medical, and industrial industry first got its start in 1997. The brand came to life as an American sales office for a Hong Kong LCD device company. Since then, the brand has evolved, splitting into three separate divisions all focused on helping customers across the industrial, consumer product, and medical landscapes to turn their ideas into reality.
The company opened its first manufacturing facility in the Dong Guan location of China, in 2012, and has since worked with a number of established industry leaders and startups alike, through multiple stages of product development.
What sets SEACOMP apart from most brands in the electronic manufacturing industry, is the commitment the organisation has to provide customers with a reliable, ethical, and immersive partnership. This includes providing a phenomenal customer experience through all aspects of the product development, manufacturing, and engineering roadmap.
According to Terry Arbaugh, the VP of Sales and Marketing for SEACOMP, the mission of the business is to help innovators in their respective landscapes deliver incredible things. All of SEACOMP’s customers are primarily in the medical, industrial, and consumer product spaces, and they come to the company with ideas for the next-gen products they’re working on. The aim of SEACOMP is to help their clients get those amazing solutions to market.
Bringing Clients to Manufacturing Facilities
When SEACOMP works with a client to develop their new innovative idea, the focus is on building a relationship of trust from day one. According to Arbaugh, when customers are choosing a manufacturer today, they need to be able to do more than simply prove their capabilities as a manufacturing expert – they also have to showcase their credibility. Companies need to trust their manufacturing partner to deliver the right results.
Before the pandemic, the SEACOMP brand worked on establishing trust with an open-door policy. This meant any stakeholder on the customer side was welcome to visit the factory, meet the team, and tour the facility, getting an insight into the processes first-hand.
Unfortunately, when the pandemic hit, the customers of SEACOMP and the brand’s internal team were unable to visit the manufacturing facility. This meant the brand needed to suddenly change its strategy. SEACOMP had to find a new way of showing prospects and clients detailed processes that standard corporate videos and 2D images simply couldn’t provide.
While competitors had turned to live video chats and conferencing, the team still needed to overcome significant differences in time zones between customers, and employees in China. Eventually, SEACOMP discovered Matterport as a solution provider, capable of offering a safe and immersive service to bring clients into facilities.
Working with the Matterport Capture Services and a technician dedicated to assisting the company in reaching its goals, SEACOMP was able to scan multiple digital twins of manufacturing facilities and offices to give clients and prospects 3D walkthroughs of their layout and equipment without the cost, time, and health risk of travel.
According to Arbaugh, the use of digital twin technology with Matterport is saving the company around $250,0000 in travel costs on a yearly basis, for employee and customer travel around the manufacturing facility.
Unlocking New Opportunities with Digital Twins
Already, SEACOMP has seen phenomenal success with its decision to bring the digital twin technology from Matterport into its interactions with customers. For instance, Bird Buddy, the smart bird feeder solution with internet-enabled technology, found the Matterport digital twin very useful in choosing SEACOMP as their preferred partner for product development.
Since the company wasn’t able to visit SEACOMP in person due to the pandemic, the digital twin ended up being extremely helpful to ensure the brand could understand the layout and quality of the facility. Bird Buddy’s team was able to visualise how and where products would be handled on a more significant level. This helped to build an extra layer of confidence in the SEACOMP brand.
Notably, the digital twins created by Matterport can be applied at multiple stages of the customer journey. For prospects, it’s easy for high-level decision-makers to visit the facility earlier than they usually would in the sales cycle. When it comes time to bring internal engineers into the mix, Matterport’s twin can be used in various parts of the quality assurance process.
Client-side professionals get to benefit from enhanced collaboration, referencing Matterport during the first assembly trials. What’s more, with Matterport, SEACOMP can add specific information to every zone in the facility a professional might want to visit.
Although the digital twins were initially captured primarily for sales and marketing purposes, SEACOMP says they’ve become a valuable tool in onboarding new employees and helping team members to grasp the knowledge they need to use various pieces of equipment and facilities. What’s more, the spatial data is useful for measuring and analysing new production lines or reconfiguring the factory floor on a regular basis.
Arbaugh believes there will be even more opportunities to leverage Matterport throughout the company’s operations in the years ahead.
