Manufacturing Magazine August 2018 | Page 14

LEADERSHIP SHOWCASE
CASE STUDY
14
The proactive service challenge Successful businesses deliver customer services proactively . For ABB , the challenge was to progress beyond reactively responding to a customer call when there was an issue with a robot , as was previously the case . When this happened , a technician had to be dispatched , sometimes to remote site locations , to perform an onsite diagnosis because it was challenging to get precise information over the phone about what was happening at the device level . ABB required a solution for proactively ensuring real-time reliability for its robots .
“ Proactive service means enhanced reliability and higher productivity ,” says Jean Christophe Alt , Project Manager at ABB Robotics Division in France . “ If we have precise and reliable information about what ’ s going on with a robot , our customers benefit from less downtime and higher productivity .” To improve service efficiency worldwide , increase overall equipment effectiveness and maximise uptime , ABB needed to automate 24 / 7 monitoring and remote diagnostics across its hundreds of thousands of devices in the field .
Predictive service with automated IoT connectivity management Today , IoT helps ABB deliver reliable service and enables it to streamline operations for its industrial robots . By automating real-time IoT device monitoring , remote diagnostics and maintenance with the Cisco Jasper Control Center connectivity management platform , ABB ’ s robotics team is able to manage thousands of connected devices and constantly monitor all the connections to its customers ’ industrial robots for potential issues . If conditions change on any device , automatic alerts are triggered enabling remedial action to be taken swiftly .
“ We can also anticipate problems by constantly analysing the information that we receive from the devices .
AUGUST 2018