Challenges

The printing industry has been facing increased competition and the general decline of printed media for years. This development has led to a rapid rise in expectations for printing systems. Reliability and precision are particularly important for printing companies. manroland presses are at the heart of many printing plants. Downtimes are all the more expensive and should therefore be minimized as far as possible.

Project

manroland has been working with symmedia for more than 15 years to position itself digitally and professionally in the field of service and maintenance management. At the beginning, the Remote Service was completely revised and reorganized with symmedia SP/1. Based on the symmedia SP/1 Remote Service tool, manroland and symmedia jointly developed a new service product: TelePresence. The Remote Service function gives manroland access to the connected presses that can be found in printing plants all over the world. Over time, further digital service products have been developed on the basis of this secure networking:

• Digital machine-related information and documents directly at the machine
• Digital maintenance manager symmedia SP/1 Maintenance for maintenance planning and documentation including notification to manroland about upcoming manufacturer expectations and thus proactive scheduling with the customer.
• Remote check-up: once a quarter, data is retrieved from the machines and prepared and analysed in a detailed report for the customers. The customer can use the report to increase productivity or initiate maintenance and optimization measures at an early stage.

The risk of production downtime is thus further minimized.

Result

manroland started very early to position itself beyond the press business. Today the printing press manufacturer is networked with around 1,700 machines in the field. In Europe alone, there are now 220 current service contracts - in addition to the machines that are already connected during the warranty phase.

manroland now offers its customers a response time promise of a maximum of 20 minutes. Every newly delivered machine is networked by default. In the warranty phase, manroland customers receive the digital service free of charge.

Approximately 4,300 Service Requests are processed via the system each year. The number gives an approximate insight into the savings potential. Because without Remote Service, manroland technicians would have to travel significantly more.