“For us to maintain low costs and high customer satisfaction while providing improved response times, we need a better, faster way to resolve issues beyond dispatching onsite technicians,” explains Mark Hessinger, Executive Director of Worldwide Service at Gerber Scientific. Gerber faces a continuous need to train new personnel as they are brought into the service organization. A change in strategy for service allows Gerber to build a stronger technical support organization and a more efficient process to bring new field service engineers up to speed. “We have a lot of tenured employees in North America and Europe,” observes Hessinger. “In seven years, the loss of man years will accelerate, so we need to retain product knowledge before it becomes a greater issue and impacts our customers.” Hessinger and his team realized that they needed a solution to remotely connect to their products and identify, diagnose, and resolve issues. Ideally this would happen before their customers even become aware of a problem, reducing the dispatch of onsite technicians or improving first-time fix rates when onsite visits are required. By collecting data from their products deployed in production, the company could begin addressing the aging workforce issue by capturing and retaining information. Collecting information on consumables and parts could automate consumable resupply, optimize spare parts inventory, and enable Gerber to provide true preventive maintenance. “We do not have mean time between failure data because we don’t know how many hours our customers are actually using our products,” says Hessinger. “Some customers use our products a few hours a day, while others use them 24/7. Obtaining actual usage data will help us better plan our spare parts and the consumables required for run times.” Other capabilities identified to help build a business case for their initiative included minimizing product downtime, automating software patch distribution, offering value-added services, providing engineering with product usage data, and delivering remote training on product capabilities for distributors and new technicians.

Specializing in cloud-hosting and cloud recovery services, Bluelock works to mitigate risk and ensure mission-critical applications, such as SAP and SAP HANA, are always available to keep its clients’ businesses running. Bluelock tailors its solutions to meet the unique needs of every client, providing numerous certifications to securely handle Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH), and other sensitive workloads for clients in finance, healthcare, and other industries with sensitive data.

With more than 1,600 employees across six countries, to support workers’ mobile needs, a new remote solution was needed. The old solution depended on phone support was time imprecise and time-consuming. Six NuStar technicians support 300 employee smartphones and 300 servers, so efficiency and speed are essential.