VR training for an industrial warehouse

The context

The client is an industrial company with its own warehouse and fairly high operator turnover. Every new hire started the same way: a manual on the desk, plenty of supervision and a senior colleague keeping an eye on the first few days. The business worked, but training each new person ate up the team's hours and depended on who was free to teach.

The challenge

The procedures lived in PDF manuals nobody read. A new operator took weeks to become productive, and while learning they handled forklifts, loads and real routes inside the floor, with the risk of error that brings in physical tasks. Training depended on having someone on hand, and that someone stopped doing their own job to keep watch.

What we did

We started by walking the warehouse with the training lead to see how the work really happened, not what the manual said. From there we built a virtual reality simulation where each person practises the full procedure before touching anything physical.

• We built a 3D simulation of the real warehouse, with its shelving, routes and zones.
• We brought the procedures step by step into VR headsets, to practise them first-hand.
• We made the training repeatable as many times as needed, with no cost per repetition.
• We added progress tracking for each person, so you know who is ready.
• We left everything running without stopping the production line.

Results

New hires arrive on the floor having already practised the procedure, so day one isn't starting from scratch. And the trainer stops being a bottleneck: the simulation teaches, and they just review and answer questions.

At first I thought VR in a warehouse was a joke. But it works. New hires put on the headset and within three days they're working on their own. Before, it took us weeks with manuals nobody read.