Manufacturers and service teams are constantly making efforts to reduce costs, while also driving efficiency. Three ways that technology is underpinning massive reductions in labor, assets, parts, and customer costs for industrial enterprises are:
1. Resolution of service issues remotely
2. Equipping technicians with the right tools, parts, information, and skills
3. Enabling customer self-service
Resolve service issues remotely
Organizations are turning to technology to enable digital transformation across the service lifecycle.
Physical service interventions can be solved with digital capabilities. Solving issues remotely can increase safety – as well as drastically decrease truck roll associated labor costs, asset costs (warranty, compliance penalties), customer downtime costs, and more. Remote resolution is also proven to be essential in times like these, where COVID is often preventing physical interaction.
Connecting products to the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is helping service cost structure and introducing innovative use cases. Specifically, remote monitoring is connecting, collecting, and managing real-time asset performance data from out in the field. Remote service provides a method to trigger remote actions.
Equip technicians with the right tools, parts, information, & skills
Although remote monitoring and remote service drive down costs across organizations, numerous service tasks still require physical intervention. In these situations, it’s critical to enable technicians to resolve these service issues efficiently.
However, industrial companies often have heterogenous and dated asset install bases – which sometimes can require increasingly complex or resource-intensive maintenance actions.
There are a few different ways that service teams can better prepare their technicians for service tasks. For example, pre-determining the issue through root cause analysis (FMEA) could give the service team and technician a better idea of the resources they’ll need. Technicians should ideally know the skillset, tools, replacement parts, service information (product manuals, instructions), and additional information prior to dispatch to complete the task efficiently.
IIoT can provide more granular asset health information and more specific component failures, which inform any critical repairs. Service parts management systems can pinpoint part information that the technician would need to know in order to make critical repairs.
Augmented reality (AR) is a crucial service tool to empower technicians to make efficient, timely, and successful repairs. Augmented reality is often utilized to enhance training for junior-level technicians, alleviate skills gaps, and improve the workforce knowledge-base.
On-the-job AR service instructions allow you to virtually overlay step-by-step sequences and procedural guidance, allowing reduced cognitive distance, improved document scalability, and enhanced experience compared to traditional paper-based methods.
Enable customer self-service
Companies that manufacture complex products that operate in mission-critical environments have many performance-intensive considerations regarding downtime. Customers of these products cannot afford to have downtime in their high-stake environments.
By enabling a degree of customer self-service, it can benefit both the OEM and end user. The manufacturer is able to offload numerous service responsibilities and service costs, while simultaneously, customers are provided with more operational control and can increase uptime with minimal assistance. Providing the customer with IIoT-generated operational and service data empowers them to predict failures, minimizing disruption to operations.
Final thoughts
With increasingly powerful technology provoking cutting-edge use cases, the opportunity to create service transformation in your company has never been more attainable than it is today.
