Mobile workers can use wireless connectivity, no doubt about that. But ”mobile worker” takes on dozens of meanings, from road warriors armed with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and USB cell phone plug-ins, to back-lot roamers with pickups and two-way radios.

 “There’s no such thing as a fixed shift, at least for knowledge workers,” says Cliff Whitehead, manager, strategic applications for vendor Rockwell Automation Inc., Milwaukee. “People work around the clock, responding to voice or data or e-mail coming across a variety of devices from iPhones to Blackberries to laptops to you-name-it.”

In much of the industrial world, where there are fewer knowledge workers and more hands-on personnel, there appears to be only a limited number of truly mobile workers. Functions include engineering (including controls) and maintenance, with a smattering of people involved in processes that require equipment across large areas.

That said, there are whole ranges of production work where wireless connectivity can help, whether or not people, or machines, are in motion while broadcasting on the radio. In fact, perhaps we should rephrase the whole category: not “mobile worker,” the person, but “wireless work,” the category.

Wireless in manufacturing primarily transmits and receives data or information, things as disparate as instrumented temperatures drawn from the floor every x minutes, or repair procedures sent out to a crew dealing with a sick machine. The worker might not be mobile—might not even be involved, as in instrument automation—but at any given plant, things that could benefit from instant contact are everywhere. And they can be highly dynamic, where the point of greatest use at any given second (or millisecond) can be forever moving around.

As with everything that has such broad potential, the real gains come when you focus on application planning and details. There are really two basic approaches to the application of wireless to manufacturing: task-based and systems-based.

Task-based deployment essentially replaces a clipboard or a non-wireless handheld with a radio. “The key here is to buy or make an application that services a specific work function,” says Whitehead. “For example, maintenance can use instant access to work orders, asset locations and types of tasks. And in relation to maintenance, operations can use any feedback from the operation. Things like parts installed, pulled from inventory, recycled and the like. You could call these legacy applications—taking a paper-based workflow and making it electronic.”

While it is an application type that exploits virtually any kind of radio, including cell phones, real benefits accrue when people take the right approach—see  “Air-time for Operators,” below, for how a Cytec facility set about giving its operators and engineers wireless integration into workaday, manual data collection.

Theoretically, everything in the was-paper-now-electrons category is dead easy: just identify some task or set of existing tasks that go where wires cannot reach or where instant feedback would be useful, such as a quick report on a non-instrumented process. Then replace the old way, whether that be paper-and-clipboard, wired keyboards or non-wireless handhelds, with a radio.

In reality, there can be complex issues in task-based deployment, regardless of how simple it might appear on the surface. People resist change, so the benefits to the guy holding the radio have to be clear. And, as in Cytec’s case, the simple switch from paper to airwaves can quickly identify new, more effective ways of working. For Cytec, the ability to spot early trends toward equipment malfunction and fouling proved to be the big winner, and that is just one benefit among many.

The task-based approach fits (and potentially benefits) dozens of industrial scenarios, offering ways to connect immediately with maintenance personnel wherever they are; to capture and record data that otherwise might never make it to paper; and to send information directly to operators, at the time and place they need it. “Just make sure,” Rockwell’s Whitehead says, “that end-users are ready to support it. If you don’t plan and educate, you might be facing tissue rejection from the personnel who are the recipients of the ‘wonderful gift’ you’re giving them.”

For all its benefits, the task-based approach to deployment has less potential for dramatic payback than a systems-based approach. “There is more mobility than people think,” says Charles Mohrmann, vice president for sales, Wonderware mobile solutions, Lake Forest, Calif., and former vice president, strategy and business development for SAT Corp., a mobile solutions vendor acquired by manufacturing software supplier Wonderware in August, 2008.

 “The image of future manufacturing that was prevalent in the 1980s and ’90s, of a few guys sitting ...