Faster service is one of the advancements in the digital world: Remote Assistance paving the way to faster service
Whether you’re producing cosmetics, oral care products, pharma, or food products, having your machines running at planned capacity is critical to your business. Machine downtime means a decrease in productivity, with consequent increases in operational costs, loss of revenue, and wasted working hours.
Having the right support means that when something goes wrong, diagnosis and troubleshooting are done as quickly as possible to keep downtime to a minimum. As we move into an increasingly digitized world, the possibilities for advanced support are expanding, leading to even faster troubleshooting and quicker resolutions to problems.
Optimal maintenance services make it possible to guarantee machines a long and lasting life, low consumption and maximum efficiency. Nevertheless, when experiencing a downtime, the most important thing is getting the machine up and running again rapidly. The traditional approach to machine troubleshooting has mostly consisted of having your technicians trying to fix the machine by themselves, while alerting the machine equipment manufacturer about the issue. Supportive equipment providers usually try their best to make sure their most suitable technicians, among those available, arrive at your site as soon as possible to give you the assistance you require. Sometimes this takes time, though: time to find the right technician, time to reach your facility, and time to solve the issue. And we know that time goes hand in hand with costs in these cases. In this fast-changing digital world, opportunities to improve service and support are multiplying: remote assistance is one of the greatest advancements in this sense.
Welcome to the world of Remote Assistance
By means of a more efficient collaborative platform that seamlessly bridges the physical and virtual worlds, Remote Assistance is meant to provide faster and more effective diagnosis and troubleshooting.
Through high-quality audio, video, file-sharing, and augmented reality diagnosis and troubleshooting can in fact be performed in real-time with your technicians connecting to your manufacturer’s service specialists, as if they were right beside you, but without the need of a physical presence. This technology is paving the way for a revolution in the the machine industry, with the digital layer provided by augmented reality enabling technicians and experts in the field to visually guide and collaborate with both their own field technicians and yours remotely. The result? Equipment uptime and productivity maximization!
Benefits of receiving assistance remotely
By combining live video and image streaming with augmented reality, remote assistance is changing customer support. Previously, when a customer was facing machine downtime, he/she would often have to send a lot of emails back and forth and rely on images sent to his machine supplier. Now, with this extra digital layer, service specialists can remotely see exactly what is going on in the machine, while also sharing and exchanging information in real time. This ultimately ensures a much better understanding of the situation the customer is facing, and as a result machines are brought back to normal operation faster, saving everyone both time and money.
Being able to see what is happening with the machine from a distance allows your service supplier to send the technician with the right competence. So remote assistance doesn’t just
save time and money, it also saves on manpower.
What is special about augmented reality is the fact that technicians are able to share not just pictures and videos in real time, but also to use ‘hands’ – a digital overlay on the customer’s screen – so that customer technicians can see, for example, which button to push or which tool to use to unscrew a bolt. This type of interaction is extremely helpful in solving a technical issue… or at least it means that when the technician arrives, he/she will be much better prepared – paving the way for a much quicker and more efficient resolution.
This also works for supplier’s technicians sent into the field, who might still be experiencing some difficulties in solving the issue.
The way to Remote Assistance
Norden embraced this service revolution several years ago, with customers taking part in pilot projects reporting high levels of satisfaction, seeing remote assistance as a good tool that offers them the help they need.
No matter which industry you’re playing in – oral care, pharma, cosmetics, food, or industrial products: you can have remote assistance as part of your larger service agreement, so that if you can’t fix a problem remotely a technician will always be available to support.
All the bells and whistles Norden customers have come to expect in regard to customer service are still available. Remote Assistance is a complement to the excellent service that has always been offered customers. What it does is allow even more responsiveness to customer’s needs while also taking advantage of the possibilities that are opening up due to the digital revolution.
Customers who are in the same time zone as Norden’s Headquarters in Sweden will have initial access to Remote Assistance, with plans to roll it out in the United States and Asia starting from 2020.