For decades now, companies in the manufacturing and industrial sector have been searching for a more reliable and cost-efficient way to serve customers while minimising travel costs. Traditionally, providing clients with expert skills and technician knowledge meant physically sending engineers to the locations where machines were located.
Unfortunately, this travel-centric process led to a significant amount of resources wasted for a lot of companies, as well as higher carbon emissions created by consistent travel.
Not to mention, many brands waiting for support from an engineer would have to leave crucial pieces of machinery unused until the right expert arrived. Even more time could often be wasted if the right professional wasn’t sent to the field location first-time around.
As demand for contactless solutions for support and maintenance have increased in the last couple of years, more companies have begun turning to extended reality as a potential solution to their efficiency issues.
Let’s look at how Surepoint and Kognitiv Spark are working together on a new strategy to support field service technicians in manufacturing.
Finding a Cost-Efficient Solution for Service
Surepoint (Surepoint Group) is a leading industrial contractor focusing on the manufacturing, electrical, construction and instrumentation sections, alongside other services. Located in Calgary in Canada, the company operates in a variety of sectors, including industrial construction, energy, oil and gas, and even security.
Along with the headquarters in Calgary, Surepoint is also responsible for a number of field locations throughout the United States and Western Canada.
The company also provides services to client sites directly, spread across an even wider map. To deliver the levels of expertise and support today’s customers need in Surepoint’s diverse roster, the company regularly delivers field technicians to remote job sites to perform various tasks and maintenance.
If a technician encounters an issue during a visit to the site which they can’t solve on their own, they then needed to contact a subject matter expert located at HQ, or in a separate field office.
Field workers would usually access smartphones to call experts and transfer videos and photos to troubleshoot the issue. However, many subject matter experts would take several hours to provide a resolution. What’s more, around 20% of issues were often impossible to diagnose over the phone.
When issues couldn’t be resolved with remote assistance through a smartphone, an expert would need to be driven or flown to a site alongside the first field technician, to complete the task themselves. All of this leads to significant amounts of downtime and travel. According to Surepoint, it previously took experts around 14 to 20 hours to reach each job site. This is a lot of downtime and lost productivity for companies relying on specific manufacturing tools.
Finding a New Way to Support Technicians
In the manufacturing sector, lost productivity and production downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over just a couple of hours. In other industrial landscapes, like the oil and gas industry, the costs of unexpected downtime can range into the millions.
To address these common cost and time efficiency issues, Surepoint decided it was time to explore a new, more innovative solution. Turning to the Kognitiv Spark company, Surepoint discovered the RemoteSpark remote work support tool.
Kognitiv Spark is an innovator in the extended reality space, offering specialist solutions to assist professionals in complex environments, like the industrial and manufacturing sector. The RemoteSpark technology is an industry-leading low-bandwidth mixed reality platform, promising a combination of convenience and security for today’s teams.
As part of Surepoint’s day-to-day processes, the RemoteSpark technology allows field workers and subject matter professionals to connect quickly and seamlessly through a reliable and secure audio-video connection.
Using the hardware, it’s possible for technicians and professionals in the field to deliver high-definition streams of video and pictures to experts wherever they are.
Subject matter experts assisting in the maintenance or repair process can then contribute in a number of ways, making field-of-view annotations, sharing files and photos, and even creating multi-step holograms with animations to assist. All of these assets mixed together leads to a more immersive and effective way to troubleshoot and resolve issues in real-time.
Not only does the Kognitiv Spark RemoteSpark solution give Surepoint’s teams the intuitive information they need to solve problems faster, but the technology also ensures that professionals can remain hands-free on the job site. The technology is also custom-built for remote environments and industrial landscapes.
RemoteSpark proved to be the perfect choice for Surepoint’s diverse range of customers and engineers, as it can perform at bandwidth speeds as low as 256kbps.
Empowering a New Age of Productivity
Surepoint worked with Kognitiv Spark to equip their field technicians with the RemoteSpark ecosystem through HoloLens units provided via Microsoft. The resulting technology, equipped with advanced security features, allows users to achieve real-time support from subject matter experts wherever they are, at any time.
According to the Director of Technology and Innovation at the Surepoint Group, Rod Heitrich, RemoteSpark stands out as a real differentiator for the brand, particularly in an area like the gas and oil industry.
After only 6 months of using the RemoteSpark system, the company was able to achieve a number of positive outcomes, including significant time savings.
Now, more than 60% of support issues in the Surepoint landscape are resolved without having to send a subject matter expert to a field site. According to the team, every successful call handled with RemoteSpark also reduces equipment downtime by around 14-020 hours. Field technicians can immediately deliver service to their clients without having to wait for a subject matter expert.
The comprehensive solution combines low-bandwidth and secure calls with holographic assets and a convenient heads-up experience, to ensure Surepoint can continue to delight its clients, without having to worry about excess travel, or wasted time.
