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MANUFACTURING COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Choose a Radio Communication System Built for a Connected Frontline

When workers feel enabled, productive, and safe, they drive real results. The Walt® Smart Radio System by weavix® brings smarter manufacturing communications solutions to support your workforce.

manufacturing communication

A Trusted Partner in Manufacturing Communications

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Manufacturing Communications Solutions Tailored for Your Industry

You Know the Problems. Walt Helps You Solve Them.

Some challenges are obvious, like underperforming shifts, downtime with no clear cause, or updates that get lost between handoffs. The problem? You can’t measure them, predict them, or fix them with your current tools.

Walt Smart Radios change that. By bridging communication gaps, boosting visibility, and reinforcing frontline accountability, Walt gives operations leaders the data they need to take action — right when it matters.

Labor Productivity Gaps

Challenge: Certain teams underperform despite having consistent headcount and shift coverage. Leadership lacks clarity into who is productive vs just busy.

Walt Solution:
Walt Smart Radios capture real-time communication volume, responsiveness, and interaction data for each team member. Supervisors gain visibility into who is actively coordinating, who is idle, and who is disengaged, enabling more accurate assessments of labor effectiveness and overall productivity.

Cover image for a blog on frontline workforce collaboration.

Limited Real-Time Operational Visibility

Challenge: Plant leadership frequently lack timely insight into frontline activities, delays, and issue resolution status across the floor. Which machines, people, or processes are causing today’s bottlenecks regardless of their physical location.

Walt Solution:
With built-in voice, photo, and video messaging, frontline workers can instantly report equipment issues, status updates, or process changes. Every message is time-stamped, archived, and assignment-tracked, giving supervisors and leadership a real-time, verifiable view of plant activity—whether they’re on-site or offsite. Walt enables live communication across voice, text, photo, and video, so leaders can immediately see which workstations are stalled, which teams need support, and where operations are breaking down—all without relying on secondhand updates or walking the floor.

Inability to Quantify the True Cost of Downtime

Challenge: Unplanned downtime is frequently underreported, misclassified, or vaguely attributed, making it difficult to analyze root causes or implement preventive actions.

Walt Solution:
Every frontline communication, whether it’s “line jam on packer 3” or “waiting on maintenance”, is automatically recorded and logged. This builds a searchable, timestamped audit trail by shift, department, and issue type, enabling teams to analyze downtime events with precision. Walt captures every call, escalation, and response, creating full traceability for each incident. Operations can now measure real delay durations, identify lag in response times, and surface recurring causes. Leadership gains the ability to distinguish avoidable disruptions from systemic issues and take informed action to reduce future downtime.

A frontline worker uses the push-to-talk (PTT) capabilities of the Walt Smart Radio to communicate with one of their co-workers. Countless interactions like this one can create a better frontline employee experience on your worksite.

Communication Breakdowns Between Shifts and Departments

Challenge: Critical updates are often lost during shift handovers. Disputes arise between departments regarding who was notified, when, and how.

Walt Solution:
Every message sent through Walt is time-stamped, transcribed, and archived by user, group, and craft. This removes ambiguity, eliminates hearsay, and puts an end to “I told someone”excuses. Department specific channels and shift-specific channels ensure that critical updates and instructions are documented, not passed through hallway conversations or forgotten in transition. Incoming crews gain immediate visibility into unresolved issues, previous actions taken, and next steps, enabling smooth shift handovers and uninterrupted operations.

Chemical Manufacturing

Workforce Retention and Skills Gaps

Challenge: Knowing who is about to leave or when experienced technicians depart, their institutional knowledge leaves with them. New hires face long ramp-up times due to limited hands-on guidance.

Walt Solution:
Walt serves as a real-time knowledge capture platform. Technicians can document repair steps, record voice notes, and share photos or videos directly to team or company channels. This creates a searchable, role-specific knowledge base that supports consistent execution and faster onboarding. Veteran workers can preserve critical know-how like SOP clarifications, troubleshooting methods, and best practices, so it’s accessible to new hires and cross-functional teams. The result: reduced ramp-up time, less reliance on tribal knowledge, and stronger operational consistency across shifts and experience levels.

Image of a worker equipped with an industrial radio.

Low Visibility Into Technology ROI

Challenge: Investments in systems like CMMS, ERP, or HRIS often underdeliver due to poor frontline adoption or limited integration with real work processes.

Walt Solution:
Walt is built for the way manufacturing teams actually work, used by every team, on every shift, without requiring a desktop or portal login. It fits naturally into daily routines on the floor, delivering immediate ROI by accelerating communication, reducing downtime, and capturing real-time data from the frontline. Unlike traditional systems, Walt doesn’t add another software layer, it becomes the connective tissue for communication, coordination, and visibility across the plant. It solves the real problem: operational misalignment caused by delays, blind spots, and fragmented information.

Man in a hard helmet and safety glasses holds up a device for language translation.
Cover image for a blog on frontline workforce collaboration.

See the Invisible

Some issues don’t show up on a dashboard. Disengaged workers. Missed safety warnings. Critical knowledge that disappears when someone walks out the door.

Walt uncovers these hidden risks in real time. By capturing and organizing frontline communication — across voice, photo, video, and text — Walt exposes the blind spots that cause costly delays, compliance issues, and operational failures before they snowball.

Invisible Worker Disengagement

Challenge: Disengaged employees often go undetected. Workers who have mentally checked out but show up everyday. No current metric or system alerts leaders until turnover or quality issues spike.

Walt Solution: Walt monitors day-to-day engagement by tracking communication frequency, responsiveness, and participation in operational threads. Are workers acknowledging dispatches, contributing to team updates, or reporting issues in real time? These signals give supervisors early visibility into disengagement, often before it affects quality, culture, or retention. With this insight, leaders can proactively coach, re-engage, or make staffing adjustments before small issues escalate into larger workforce problems.

Untraceable Safety Risks and Near-Misses

Challenge: Many safety incidents, especially near-misses and minor violations, are never formally reported. These unlogged events represent major risk for future incidents.

Walt Solution: Walt gives workers a fast, frictionless way to report hazards in real time using voice, or photos through a dedicated safety channel. Each report is time-stamped, and automatically routed to the appropriate EHS leaders or supervisors, providing immediate visibility into emerging risks across all shifts and departments. Over time, these entries build a comprehensive safety archive that captures near-misses, repeat infractions, and high-risk trends giving teams the insight they need to act before an incident becomes recordable or results in regulatory scrutiny. By removing the traditional barriers to reporting and increasing frontline participation, Walt shifts safety from a reactive compliance task to a proactive, continuous improvement process—driven by the people closest to the hazards and empowered to speak up.

Breakdown of Tribal Knowledge

Challenge: Longtime workers often possess undocumented knowledge about equipment quirks, process shortcuts, and maintenance workarounds. When they leave, that expertise leaves with them leaving the floor with a “knowledge vacuum.”

Walt Solution: Walt captures valuable frontline communication in real time, whether it’s a workaround during a repair, a key detail during a production run, or a quick fix to a recurring issue. Workers document these insights through voice, photo, or video, right in the flow of work. Each entry is automatically archived into a channel specific “knowledge base.” Over time, this becomes a living playbook that preserves institutional knowledge and ensures continuity, even as experienced employees retire or move on. Instead of walking out the door, expertise stays on the floor and is accessible to new hires, technicians, and training teams when they need it most.

A close-up of a Walt Smart Radio with a screen displaying its language translation capabilities for Spanish

Cascading Effects of Miscommunication

Challenge: A single missed or misunderstood message during a shift change or maintenance escalation can create hours of lost production, unplanned downtime, or rework without a clear root cause traced back to the message failure.

Walt Solution: Walt automatically transcribes, timestamps, and archives every piece of communication, from individual messages to group escalation messages. This gives supervisors a complete, verifiable record of who said what, when, and to whom. When issues arise, there’s no ambiguity, just a clear timeline of events. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) shifts from speculation to precision, allowing teams to isolate communication breakdowns and take corrective action with confidence.

Cover image for a blog on workplace communication barriers to overcome in 2025

Shadow IT and Unauthorized Processes

Challenge: Supervisors and frontline teams often implement their own systems, like text groups, or personal phones to bypass slow or disconnected internal tools. This creates data silos and compliance risks that leadership can’t see.

Walt Solution: Walt replaces fragmented, off-platform communication methods—such as personal phones, group texts, and informal messaging apps—with a centralized, purpose-built system for frontline operations. When teams rely on tools outside the company’s core infrastructure, it leads to communication silos, data gaps, and inconsistent visibility across shifts and departments. Walt eliminates these risks by providing a secure, compliant platform with access controls, automated transcription, and full auditability. By unifying all frontline communication in one system, Walt improves cross-functional coordination, protects data integrity, and gives leadership real-time visibility to drive more informed, accountable, and compliant decision-making at every level of the organization.

Misleading "Green" KPIs

Challenge: Operational dashboards may indicate that the plant is performing well—yet experienced leaders sense underlying issues. Metrics like OEE, efficiency, or attendance often fail to reflect floor-level problems like slow response times, poor shift transitions, or non-compliance.

Walt Solution: Walt provides the qualitative context that traditional quantitative metrics often overlook. While KPIs may suggest operations are running smoothly, Walt surfaces the underlying friction, such as delayed acknowledgments, slow shift transitions, unaddressed maintenance calls, and underutilized labor. By capturing these real-time signals from the floor, Walt enables leaders to reconcile “green” dashboards with actual plant performance. This deeper operational visibility supports more accurate forecasting, improved capacity planning, and continuous improvement grounded in real-world conditions, not assumptions.

Improved Cost Efficiency

Tough Enough for Manufacturing Communication, Simple for Everyone

Manufacturing communications starts with a simple, safe, and smart device. That’s where Walt comes in.

Coordinate Teams with Real-Time Communication

Plant Manager

Connect everyone to the right information with the best industrial communication system.

  • Walt on the Go: Use your smartphone with the Walt app for added leadership convenience.
  • Improve Operations: Give everyone access to Walt’s industrial wireless communication.
  • Monitor Real-Time: Support your team instantly from your smartphone or radio.

Respond Fast to Emergencies with Instant Alerts

Safety Manager

Walt’s radio communication systems give Safety leaders full visibility across multiple sites to keep workers safe.

  • Enhance Safety: Walt delivers real-time alerts when it matters most for worker protection.
  • Capture Close Calls: Workers report safety concerns directly for accurate incident logs.
  • Take Charge: Act swiftly with mass alerts, evacuation services, and emergency response tools.

Help Workers Achieve Operational Excellence

Operations Manager

Walt delivers simple, safe, and smart industrial wireless communication that outperforms legacy radios.

  • Simple to Deploy: Easy-to-use device with fast deployment even on guest networks.
  • We Care: Free replacement service if your Walt gets damaged without hassle or delay.
  • No Middlemen: Direct support from interest through deployment and beyond prioritizing you.

Integrate Devices Through a Unified Smart Platform

Technology Manager (IT)

Walt delivers a simple, safe, and smart industrial wireless communication platform that runs circles around legacy two-way radios. We will get your team up and running fast and set up for success.

  • Simple to deploy: Not only is the device easy for your team to use, our closed system allows for fast deployment even on a guest network. For users, our tap and go interface and familiar feel to other smart devices makes it a snap to pick up and get to work.
  • We Care: If your Walt gets damaged, our weCare service will provide you with a free replacement without hassle or delay.
  • No Middlemen: We take care of you and your team from the minute you express interest through deployment on your site and beyond. Your satisfaction is our top priority.

Talk, Snap Pictures, and Share Video on the Frontline

Production Associate

Walt is the flexible alternative to legacy two-way radios for manufacturing that workers wear proudly.

  • Beyond Talk: Share photos and videos with PT3 functionality without removing gloves.
  • Instant Translation: Communicate without interpreters in preferred languages automatically.
  • Never Miss: Scroll up to read transcriptions or play back messages at your convenience.

Improve Equipment Downtime to Keep Operations Running Smoothly

Maintenance Manager

Use visual communication to troubleshoot issues and solve problems fast with multimedia capabilities.

  • Visual Troubleshooting: Send multimedia back and forth to solve problems quickly and effectively.
  • Get Tools Faster: Communicate without interpreters using automatic transcription and playback.
  • Save Knowledge: Access full maintenance conversation history with automatic timestamps.

Company Culture Starts with Protecting the Frontline

HR Manager

Communication is culture when you give workers smart two-way radios for manufacturing instead of legacy two-way systems.

  • Give Workers Voice: Enable communication in their own language for a connected, informed culture.
  • Reduce Turnover: Workers feel more effective when informed, engaged, and connected equally.
  • Keep Informed: Set up permission-based channels for key company messages and news.
Plant Manager
Safety Manager
Operations Manager
Technology Manager (IT)
Production Associate
Maintenance Manager
HR Manager

What Leaders Say About Our Manufacturing Communication Solutions

  • With Walt Smart Radio, users aren't tied to a phone number—they're tied to their badge. When people leave or change departments, you don't have to manually remove them from groups. That's a game-changer for managing communication across 4,500 employees.

    mark hammons

    Mark Hammons

    Vice President of IT at Howard Industries

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Read Our Case Study
Effective Communication in the Manufacturing Industry
Effective Communication in the Manufacturing Industry

Why Walt Is the Key for Effective Communication in the Manufacturing Industry

  • Waterproof Rugged Radio

    Walt Smart Radio System is a manufacturing communication IP68-rated platform, making it waterproof and dustproof.

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  • AI-Powered Language Translation

    Connect everyone and eliminate language barriers with Walt’s real-time translation across 20+ common languages.

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  • Alerting System

    Walt enables every frontline worker to receive targeted or mass alerts for quick action and safety anywhere.

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  • Multimedia Messaging

    Workers can effortlessly send clear voice messages, pictures, and videos to connect in the most effective way.

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  • Dictation and Text-to-Speech

    Miss something? Scroll up to see transcribed messages and get caught up within seconds to prioritize tasks ahead.

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  • Walt Music by iHeartRadio

    Never miss a beat with music streaming to keep workers engaged throughout their shifts on-site (feature must be turned on by weavix).

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Frequently 
Asked 
Questions

What is communication in manufacturing?

Communication in the manufacturing industry involves sharing knowledge, information, and data within facilities and across sites. This communication is critical for avoiding downtime, quality issues, and delays while maintaining streamlined workflows.

Communication in manufacturing includes both internal and external exchanges that improve decision-making speed and quality. When companies struggle with these challenges, they waste time daily in small ways that accumulate into millions of dollars lost quarterly.

These issues can be resolved by following best practices, eliminating language barriers, and deploying modern tools like the Walt Smart Radio System to keep teams informed and connected.

How does communication assist in production?

Manufacturing communication tools assist production by reducing frontline errors while improving quality and shipping speed. Clear communication solutions eliminate costly rework, and when frontline workers have proper tools, both product quality and customer satisfaction increase significantly.

Communication assists manufacturing production by reducing team misunderstandings. Errors often create cascading problems discovered only at the end of production lines, wasting valuable time and resources throughout the entire process.

Communications systems for the manufacturing industry like Walt solve these issues by enabling instant, clear communication that prevents problems before they escalate into costly mistakes.

What are the best practices for communicating with manufacturing employees

When communicating with manufacturing employees, communications must be instantaneous, clear, and delivered in the receiver’s language to ensure complete understanding. While face-to-face communication is ideal, it’s rarely possible in manufacturing environments.

Modern frontline communication tools close gaps so workers can share knowledge smoothly and report safety concerns quickly. Industrial communications solutions like Walt Smart Radio System keep employees and contractors connected at all times.

With features including PT3, unlimited channels, and AI translation, you can boost productivity and accelerate problem-solving through clear communication. Solutions like Walt include a complete system of record for easy conversation retrieval during audits or process improvements.

What is the best business communication solution for manufacturers?

The best communication solution for the manufacturing industry depends on worker needs, but common requirements exist. Growing numbers of manufacturing customers, including Stella & Chewy’s, Darigold, Hanes, and Howard Industries, select Walt Smart Radio System because it’s purpose-built for manufacturing environments.

First, ensure your solution deploys easily. Trust communication equipment manufacturers proven by well-known enterprises in your space. Many solutions attempting complex IoT connections or workflows create more problems than they solve, leading to “Pilot Purgatory.”

The ideal communication solution for the manufacturing industry must provide unlimited channels so workers can contact anyone for guidance, plus permission-based administrator controls. Walt Smart Radio System delivers optimal flexibility and security balance for clear on-site communication.

What are the advantages of using Walt as a manufacturing plant communication system?

Walt Smart Radio System advantages as a manufacturing plant communication system include simplicity, usability, and quick scalable deployment with minimal training. Our shared model means any worker can grab any Walt device, log in with tap ‘n’ go, and work immediately.

Another advantage is Walt’s System of Record. As a communication solution for manufacturing, Walt never forgets conversations, even missed ones. Workers can scroll back to previous messages to stay informed and catch up.

Walt is the safest, smartest solution through AI translation and transcription benefits. Removing language barriers keeps everyone informed, allowing any team member to help others resolve problems regardless of spoken language. Major automotive brands are deploying the Walt manufacturing plant communication system at scale.

Unlike traditional communication solutions for manufacturing, Walt uses smart technology to deliver real-time updates, searchable records, and seamless collaboration, all in one device.

How can teams use Walt to improve communication between shifts in manufacturing?

Communication between shifts in manufacturing is incredibly challenging without the right tools. Everybody clocking out wants to get home fast and go about their day. Everybody clocking in wants to understand what the tasks are quickly, what the safety concerns are, and what they need to do. Minimizing downtime is always top of mind, but there isn’t always a set routine, so communication is essential.

The Walt manufacturing communications system by weavix is a top-rated solution because of its ability to balance advanced features with usability and simplicity. The Walt Smart Radio System is a lightweight, rugged device which offers unlimited channels (1:1 and groups) while also providing permissions and control so administrators can ensure safety and compliance.

One of the greatest challenges during shift changes is the speed of the turnover. With Walt’s tap ‘n go functionality, users can grab a device, log in quickly, and head to their station with minimal downtime.

Communication between manufacturing shifts is challenging without proper tools. Outgoing workers want to leave quickly, while incoming workers need to understand tasks, safety concerns, and priorities rapidly while minimizing downtime.

Walt manufacturing communications systems by weavix is the top-rated solution for manufacturers because it balances advanced features with usability and simplicity. The lightweight, rugged device offers unlimited channels with permissions and control for administrator safety and compliance management.

One of the greatest shift change challenges is turnover speed. Walt’s tap ‘n’ go functionality lets users grab devices, log in quickly, and head to stations with minimal downtime, ensuring smooth transitions.

How do you communicate effectively in a manufacturing environment?

Effective communication in the manufacturing industry requires outstanding trust and teamwork through clear, concise messages. Avoid long-winded explanations that create confusion and misunderstanding whenever possible.

Send photos with Walt Smart Radio instead of speaking when explaining situations. For example, photograph spills and send them to the appropriate safety channels rather than describing them verbally.

Walt’s manufacturing communication systems are designed for frontline worker situations. You can playback any message audio or read transcribed messages at your convenience for complete understanding.

Your top priority for clear communication is reporting safety concerns. This is often overlooked as communication, but customers like Kraft, Hanes, and Panasonic chose Walt’s communications solution for manufacturers because they understand communication is safety.

SMART RADIO PRICE

See Walt in Action and Boost Efficiency with the Right Manufacturing Communication Platform.

With more than 2.7 billion messages transmitted across the Walt Smart Radio System by some of the largest manufacturing brands in the world, it is no surprise that among all the manufacturing communication systems to choose from, Walt has quickly become the #1 most-trusted and powerful system in the industry.

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