Heidelberg Celebrates First Decade of Remote Service

Remote Service from Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) can now look back on a decade of success, marking a milestone in online troubleshooting in the print media industry. Heidelberg started rolling out the Web-based platform 10 years ago and has gradually extended the portfolio from the initial Remote Diagnosis function to increase the focus on prevention. The technology has been available for the prepress, press and postpress segments as well as Prinect software from the outset. The Remote Service platform from Heidelberg has undergone several external certification procedures to confirm its reliability and functionality—features that have won the company a whole host of awards. Several of the platform’s functions, such as the remote machine maintenance technology that forms the basis of eCall, have also been patented worldwide.

The latest proactive development is Remote Monitoring. In many cases, this function unveiled in the form of a study at drupa 2012 enables developing machine faults to be detected early—long before they cause a stoppage. Any measures required can then be completed as part of a scheduled service callout. This gives customers the greatest possible certainty in their production planning and significantly boosts machine uptime. The “Semantic Analysis of Complex Events” technology project, which involves Heidelberg and a number of partners and is integrated in Remote Monitoring, won the Innovation Award presented by the German BMWi (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) in fall 2014.

Prinect Productivity Benchmarking, which was launched in 2010, enables print shops to use a Web portal based on the Remote Service platform to anonymously compare their performance with other similarly equipped companies online. Accolades for this solution include the U.S. printing industry’s InterTech Technology Award.

The eCall function has been available since 2007. Combining an automatic error message with a guaranteed response time, it ensures real-time transmission of fault details to the responsible Heidelberg service organization, which can then promptly make a start on sorting out the problem. By 2008, eCall had already won the Service Management Award presented by the KVD (German Customer Service Association). Heidelberg is still the only company in the print media industry to offer eCall and yet a comparable function became compulsory in all new cars in the EU in 2015.

Heidelberg now has some 10,000 systems in 50 countries worldwide connected to its Remote Service platform. Over 2,000 customer inquiries are handled remotely every month and around 70 percent of all electronic faults can be rectified remotely. Based on these impressive figures, Heidelberg has one of the most powerful Web-based service tools for technical production systems in the print media industry and beyond.

“Using Remote Service solutions has revolutionized the process of detecting and rectifying faults in the print media industry," said Bernhard Steinel, head of the Systemservice business area at Heidelberg. "Problems are being identified sooner and sooner, long before a machine stops working. As a result, we’ve been able to significantly increase many customers’ machine availability and give them greater certainty when planning production."

Source: Heidelberg.