EMCO – Strategic development of the service model
EMCO – the company
The mechanical engineering company EMCO, based in Salzburg currently employs around 800 people. It has at a total of six production sites in Austria, Germany, Italy and Russia. The key success factors of the company is the expertise gained from more than 70 years of experience in Service Model Development. As a result, EMCO stands for the best individual, automated complete solutions for turning and milling.
Today, EMCO machines are used in a wide variety of industries – from the automotive industry to medical technology. Its broad range of solutions is unique in Europe: from conventional lathes to highly automated turning and milling machining centres. The company covers a wide range of applications. With EMCONNECT, EMCO also offers a powerful platform for networking the machines and integration into the production field.
Challenges of Service Model Development
EMCO’s motto, “Beyond standard,” highlights the company’s commitment to constantly surpass itself and set higher goals for efficiency, quality, and innovation. This focus extends to customer service. “We aim to detect and fix faults quickly to help our customers achieve the best results with our machines,” says Günter Pumberger, Product Manager for digitization at EMCO. “Today, better customer service relies on the data our machines provide.”
Previously, some control system data could be accessed remotely via VPN, but only current parameters and error messages were available. To give service teams faster access to all relevant data, EMCO sought a powerful and flexible IIoT platform. This platform needed to offer insights into real-time data and data history, along with comprehensive evaluations and visualizations.
“In the short term, our main concern was to solve more customer inquiries remotely,” says Günter Pumberger. “Especially in times of Covid-19, on-site assignments are often still time- and costly. more elaborate than before. However, data-driven models and analytics open up many more opportunities for us and our customers for proactive service and predictive action.
Maintenance. We also wanted to be able to map these long-term goals with the new platform.”
Results of the Service Model Development
Faster fault analysis & fewer on-site visits
The Workheld Sense solution makes remote support much easier for EMCO. In the event of a fault, the service teams can view the entire alarm history online and relate it to all relevant machine data. This accelerates problem resolution and minimizes downtime for EMCO’s customers.
Proactive customer service
By analysing the collected machine data, it is also possible to detect anomalies that indicate imminent faults. In this way, the service technicians can provide support before a failure actually occurs.
On-demand maintenance schedules
With Workheld Sense, EMCO is able to adapt the service intervals to the actual use of the machines. Machines are not checked and maintained according to rigid schedules, but according to the respective intensity of use. This also makes it possible to optimize maintenance costs.
Greater transparency for product owners
With Workheld Sense, EMCO can provide its customers with a wealth of valuable information and metrics on the condition and productivity of their machinery. Low-code tools simplify the preparation of this data in dashboards and data apps.
New insights for the further development of the machines
Workheld Sense’s solution helps the machine builder better understand how their machines are used by customers with different needs. These findings can then be incorporated into the development of the next generation of machines.
Outlook
EMCO is currently working intensively on the topic of predictive maintenance. The Workheld Sense platform provides a solid database for this. With the help of machine learning tools, the machine experts can determine the failure probabilities of heavily stressed components and thus implement predictive maintenance for customers. Workheld Sense also opens up new possibilities for the further development of EMCO’s business model. “We are now talking to customers about machine-as-a-service concepts,” says Günter Pumberger. “We are very well positioned for these usage-based sales models with the features of Paze (now Workheld Sense). The platform helps us to provide tailor-made digital services for our customers and also to bill them in a completely transparent way. It is also important to us that the technology is future-proof and interacts seamlessly with new generations of our control software.”