As part of France's reindustrialization push and the rise of Industry 4.0, digitizing the operator workstation is becoming a key competitiveness lever. At the Tech For Industry Show, Florian Bubalo, Account Executive (Azumuta) presented the Belgian vendor's digital work instructions platform, designed to replace the paper, PDFs, Word and Excel files still widely used on shop floors.

On many production lines, instructions remain scattered across the ERP, the PLM, Excel files and paper documents. This fragmentation creates several recurring friction points, identified by Azumuta among its industrial customers:

Instructions designed by the engineering office don't always reflect what actually happens on the line: some steps are adapted, or even skipped, by operators, without that information being fed back.

The know-how built up by experienced operators often remains tribal, passed on orally and never captured in official instructions. When an expert leaves the company, that knowledge disappears with them.

Mass customization, a growing number of variants, shorter product cycles: teams have to manage an increasingly complex high-mix, low-volume environment, with a higher risk of error for new hires.

Azumuta offers a SaaS platform accessible with no installation, usable on tablet, computer or phone, to create multi-format digital work instructions: photos, videos, 3D elements, PDFs or external links. Instructions can be versioned — much like GitHub —, compared against each other, and an earlier version can be restored in a few clicks.

For highly customized environments, the platform makes it possible to build a common base of instructions and adapt only the steps specific to each variant — a key issue for clients such as Toyota or mechatronics component maker Naftec Radar.

A continuous-improvement module lets operators report an issue (faulty equipment, observed discrepancy) directly from their workstation, with an automatic notification sent to the right person via email, Teams or Slack — without going through a call to a supervisor.

Azumuta has developed an AI module capable of automatically translating instructions into another language, along with a tool, AzumutaLab, that generates work instructions from a simple assembly video, automatically identifying the steps and associated images.

At Atlas Copco, the first adopter of the solution and now an internal standard for digitizing work instructions, Azumuta interfaces with connected tools (such as torque wrench values) and guides new operators step by step. This approach has reduced onboarding time for new hires.

For this fast-growing generator manufacturer, which started from an empty production site with 90% new operators, Azumuta helped achieve workstation proficiency from day one, thanks to instructions accompanied by photos and videos.

This supplier within the ASML/TSMC ecosystem, where even a small error carries a high cost, was able to move from paper to digital while giving systems engineers and supervisors the ability to create and edit instructions themselves, without systematically depending on IT.

On its European assembly lines, where more than 600 accessories are available on vehicles, Toyota uses Azumuta to guide operators through the many possible variants and roll out its digitized Kaizen method across all its sites.

This mechatronics component manufacturer implemented QR code scanning to prevent part mix-ups between visually similar references with different uses, reducing rework.

Digitizing work instructions fits squarely within the challenges of Industry 4.0: traceability, fewer errors, capturing operator know-how, and adapting to increasingly customized production lines. The Azumuta case shows how easy-to-use industrial software can support new operator onboarding, product variability management and industrial quality all at once.

Watch the full session, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.