augmented instructions - digitized know-how supports the industry in maintenance and servicing
Maintenance is increasingly becoming a key competitive factor in industry. External services have been indispensable up to now. Through the use of digital instructions companies make themselves independent and crisis-proof in the long term.
The downtime of a single machine can interrupt entire production chains and thus cause massive economic damage. Sample calculations show that even a single hour of downtime can cost a company several hundred thousand euros. The long-term effects on the competitive situation cannot even be reliably calculated. At the same time, a study by the market research institute Vanson Bourne shows that across all sectors, more than 80 percent of the industrial companies surveyed worldwide have experienced an average of two unplanned outages over a period of three years.
Maintenance and servicing are therefore becoming increasingly important, also against the backdrop of ever more complex technologies. Companies use maintenance contracts as part of a manufacturer's warranty and also service contracts concluded with service providers. If a breakdown occurs or a maintenance task is due, the on-site deployment of external service technicians is unavoidable in most cases.
With the augmented instructor , the technology company tepcon from Donaueschingen in the Black Forest is taking a different approach. The digitization solution enables industrial companies to carry out maintenance and servicing tasks independently in the long term, with consistent quality and without external personnel support.
Both in the area of self-maintenance and in cooperation with external service providers, the effects of the shortage of skilled workers have become increasingly noticeable in recent years. In production, companies are increasingly working with unskilled workers who do not have the know-how to repair or maintain machines independently in the event of a malfunction. At the same time, manufacturers and service providers are also complaining about the increasing shortage of qualified workers to meet the growing global demand. For industrial companies, this results in rising costs and, in the worst case, extended waiting times in the event of service, which also has economic consequences.
Not least the aggravated conditions in the wake of the Corona pandemic have shown that even remote service solutions, which are increasingly in demand, can only solve the problem to a limited extent. In addition to the high technical requirements, the qualifications of a specialist are also indispensable here. Although their capacities are optimized in this way, they remain clearly limited.
Companies are already taking advantage of the ability to document common maintenance and servicing procedures and train employees.
"Training employees theoretically and providing analog or, at best, digitalized repair instructions is usually no longer sufficient in practice and generates ongoing high effort and costs," knows Christoph Kluge, Managing Director of tepcon GmbH. "The required know-how is thus anchored in the company, but it cannot be used efficiently or flexibly."
With the augmented instructor, tepcon uses the technological potential of augmented reality to record and document repair and maintenance processes as they are carried out and make them permanently available for retrieval. All work steps are recorded in images, audio files and videos and stored in cloud systems. In this way, easily comprehensible instructions that can be reproduced even by laypersons can be created and made available for every machine and every task with little effort. By means of QR codes attached to equipment, specific AR tutorials can be called up via mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablet PCs or AR glasses, such as the Microsoft HoloLens, and comprehended directly on site, without additional effort. AR technology supports the user with additional elements, such as visual markers and checklists, in the small-scale implementation of all required work steps.
"With the augmented instructor, valuable expert knowledge is permanently anchored in companies and made flexibly available on a mobile basis," explains Christoph Kluge. "In many cases, this makes them independent of external services, significantly accelerates maintenance processes, and thus significantly reduces process costs as well as follow-up costs of production interruptions."
