Agramkow sets a new standard in manufacturing industry with VSight

My name is Ademilson dos Santos. I am Brazilian. I work for Agramkow for the last 24 years. I have always been working in the service department. About two and a half years ago, I moved from Brazil to Denmark where we started developing the service business here.

Here in Agramkow, we produce process equipment for the refrigeration industry. Those equipments, they are installed all over the world, even though we have a few customers here in Denmark, but we have about 1600 customers around the globe. And that’s why it’s so important to have remote connection to our equipment.

One of the biggest challenges we have here, or we had, was to have hands on remotely to our equipment. We have equipments that are controlled by computers or PLCs. And those equipments, sometimes they need a remote connection or they fail and we need to access remotely and that’s why VSight came in hand for us as a solution to be remotely on site.

VSight was the right solution for us because with the features we have in the software, the sharing function, the remote indication in the HMI where we can easily guide our technicians, and our customers to go to the right spot in our equipment or to adjust the right valve or where we can go through our software and indicate each icon they should push. That was a very important feature for us.

Before VSight, we have been using WhatsApp or Teams. Both WhatsApp and Teams, they have limited access to the equipment. For example, I miss how to indicate to the technician on the equipment side that he needs to push, let’s say that I have ten buttons in the station, that he needs to push exactly the reset button, for instance. And with VSight, I can go directly where I need the technician to go. So this function cannot be replaced by Teams or WhatsApp. And also, it’s easy to connect with the site technician by using the ID function we have in the application itself, we can easily connect to the meeting room. We have virtual meeting rooms and it’s very, very easy to have more technicians on the same meeting or in the same case. So some other technicians, they can watch what we are doing and they can learn together.

VSight, it’s a very important tool for us because it’s easy to access, it’s easy to get in contact with the technician on site. And we can easily guide the technician through the solution. I can share on the technician’s screen on site my drawings and my electrical diagrams from here, so they can easily find components in my equipment. So it’s easy to guide the technician through a solution.

We also used VSight for remote commissioning, where the customer was at the equipment or in the factory floor, and from here we could guide the customer to install, make all the connections and commission the equipment until it was up and running. After installation we also had remote training where we could go through mechanical devices, electrical devices, software and remote training was successful by using VSight tool.

Remote services can be cost efficient because we can easily and fast solve customers issues. When they have machine breakdown or a specific problem that we can solve remotely in minutes, we can have the installation up and running again. So talking about cost, it’s much cheaper and faster to our customers. For instance, we have customers where one hour of a production stop can cost them €20,000. And if we can solve their issue in 10-15 minutes, they can save a lot of money.

For instance, we had, some days ago, one customer with a machine stopped in France, and to send one technician from here was going to take one or two days to be on site and this production was stopped. So by using VSight we could remotely connect to the equipment, go through all the menus in the equipment and find the best solution for this case. So his machine was back working in a matter of minutes instead of waiting hours or days to be on site and solve the problem.

We got used to the tool and it’s very important for us. It makes our life easier. Our customers, they get a very good impression of how fast we can act on site. Even though we don’t have a site technician, we can use one operator or one maintenance technician and we can exactly show where to go, what to do, what kind of adjustment to be done. So yes, we will not stop using the tool because it’s really relevant for us.