Rethinking the Cost of Doing Business

Let’s not mince words: today’s industrial landscape is strewn with potholes and landmines, and few organisations have the budget to sidestep every challenge. Competition is fierce. Geopolitical tensions and trade restrictions continue to ratchet up uncertainty. Seasoned personnel are retiring in greater numbers, and the transfer of their knowledge is proving increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, head offices across the UK and beyond are asking departments to do more with less, and travel budgets are often the first to be cut.

While this reality places added strain on senior leadership, it’s especially tough on frontline workers, the pipeline inspector in the Midlands, the engineer in a manufacturing facility in the North East, or the technician maintaining systems at an offshore wind farm. Often working in remote locations, they’ve long relied on experienced professionals visiting site to help troubleshoot and guide.

But these traditional, travel-heavy support models are quickly becoming unfit for purpose. Relying on senior staff to be physically present for inspections, maintenance, or incident resolution isn’t just costly,  it slows the business down and weakens agility at a time when speed and scale matter most.

The Limitations of a Traditional Approach

Until now, field operations have leaned heavily on in-person support, with engineers, supervisors or OEM specialists flying in, sometimes across borders, to provide assistance. From my conversations with clients across the UK and EMEA, it’s clear this model is under pressure for three key reasons:

• Escalating Costs
  Flights, accommodation, car hire, meals, the expense of travel stacks up quickly. And the real cost isn’t just financial. The rigours of travel can wear down even the most committed engineers and can be the reason why experienced staff look to retire earlier than planned. When a senior specialist is sitting on a plane, they’re not delivering value elsewhere, and ultimately that’s a poor use of precious expertise.

• Delays and Downtime
  Coordinating travel to remote or international sites takes time, and in the meantime, operations stall. The delay between diagnosing and resolving an issue leads to prolonged downtime, and the associated costs can be huge.

• Limited Expert Availability
  As experienced personnel exit the workforce, getting the right expert on-site is becoming increasingly difficult. And in many cases, those experts aren’t even within the company, they’re with an OEM based in another country. Flying them in isn’t always possible or timely.

The result? A reactive support culture, where critical issues are only addressed once disruption has already occurred. Downtime increases. Productivity dips. Costs rise. The bottom line suffers.

The Case for Remote Support

Remote support, particularly when enabled by augmented reality (AR), offers a strategic and scalable alternative. Using tools like AR headsets or smart glasses, frontline technicians can connect in real time with remote experts using platforms like RemoteSpark.

Imagine a senior engineer in Manchester guiding a technician on-site in West Africa or the Middle East, both seeing the same thing through the technician’s headset, talking through next steps, referencing manuals, and sharing real time photo annotations. It’s not a hypothetical; it’s happening now, and the organisations embracing it are seeing measurable results.

The Advantages Are Clear

• Cost Efficiency
  Reducing (or eliminating) the need for travel significantly cuts operational expenditure and allows organisations to redeploy resources more effectively.

• Rapid Response
  No need to coordinate flights or delay responses. Issues can be triaged and addressed as soon as they arise, minimising unplanned downtime.

• Real-Time Knowledge Transfer
  This is perhaps the most transformative benefit. On-site teams gain hands-on experience under direct expert supervision. They’re not just fixing the issue, they’re learning how to do it next time. Combined with a secure digital resource library, this builds in-house competence and reduces long-term dependency on external support.

With a shrinking pool of experienced technicians and an urgent need to upskill the next generation, remote support isn’t a stopgap; it’s a critical piece of workforce strategy. It allows organisations to deliver just-in-time training, reinforce task accuracy with documentation on the job, and ensure support is always within reach, no matter where in the world it’s needed.

In practical terms, this means your team can resolve issues faster, reduce the number of trips to a site or location, and scale the reach of your internal experts. Instead of one engineer travelling to a single site, they can now support multiple locations in a day, all from headquarters, the home office, or on the move.

Overcoming the Barriers to Implementation

Like any shift in operations, moving to remote support requires careful planning. From our work with clients, we’ve identified three essential steps to success:

• Use Case Selection
  Adoption efforts often fail when the technology is applied to the wrong challenge. Identifying the right first use case, one that solves a real pain point and delivers value early, is mandatory.

• Change Management
  Technological change is as much about people as it is about platforms. Building internal champions to guide teams through the transition, addressing concerns, and showing, not just telling, the benefits of AR-driven remote support is crucial.

• Technology Adoption
  Ensure the digital infrastructure is ready. This includes stable connectivity at the worksite and tested, reliable AR-compatible devices.

Toward a More Resilient Industrial Model

We envision a future where critical support isn’t bound by geography. Where junior engineers can gain knowledge from veterans without waiting for them to arrive. Where downtime is measured in minutes, not days.

For industrial organisations in the UK and beyond, remote support solutions like RemoteSpark are a powerful lever. They don’t just reduce cost, they increase capability, agility, and resilience.

If you’re exploring ways to modernise your field operations, or you’re a solutions provider looking to bring AR-enabled remote support to your clients, we’d love to connect. Whether you’re adopting it for your own teams or delivering it as part of a broader solution, we’re here to help. Let’s build the future of field support, together.