Providing technical support for complex machinery is a difficult challenge, particularly if your customers are located across the ocean and you have no technicians nearby. That was the problem faced by K.R. Komarek, a manufacturer of briquetting and compacting machines for making products ranging from charcoal briquets to road salt.
Occasionally Komarek''s machines have a hiccup that causes slight deformities in the briquet or pellet they are producing. In the past, Komarek frequently had to dispatch an engineer to customers as far away as Europe and Asia, even for simple fixes. That added travel expenses while also delaying repairs.
Now the company uses Guardian Meeting Center, a combined web/audioconferencing service from Milwaukee-based Norlight Telecommunications. With the service, Komarek summons customers to virtual meetings complete with visuals to diagnose and treat machine dysfunctions, eliminating the need to make overseas house calls except in the most complex situations.
During these virtual get-togethers, AutoCAD drawings and/or PDF manuals of the machine in question are shared online to help isolate the source of the breakdown. Participants can not only see the drawings, talk to each other, and communicate via the service''s text-based chat, but can also take control of the screen to point to the impaired part or area of concern with a computer mouse.
Komarek personnel can use the same control feature to show the customer how to repair the problem, essentially using the shared schematic as a road map to returning the machine to top working order.
When Phone/Email Don''t Work
"A lot of equipment issues are too complex or confusing to discuss by phone or email. You need to be able to look at a drawing and talk about it as if you were in the same room," says Komarek project engineer Fredi Dangoy.
"With Norlight''s Guardian Meeting Center, we can do that, eliminate the time and expense of sending a technician to the customer site, and most importantly, speed the process of resolving customers'' production problems," Dangoy says. "People don''t think of using web conferencing to troubleshoot remote equipment problems, but it works just as well as it does for sales webinars and training sessions that use Power Point slides."
Komarek is headquartered just outside Chicago in Elk Grove Village, IL. The manufacturers that use their machines are scattered from China, Malaysia, and Australia to Europe, South America, and Russia. The company has sales representatives in each region but no technicians outside of the U.S., except for a handful from a sister company in Europe.
When a customer reports an equipment glitch like a broken roll or roll seal, Komarek initially attempts to resolve it over the phone or by email. Many problems, however, do not lend themselves to resolution through either medium.
Phone intervention often fails because of the need to consult drawings as well as the language barriers inherent in dealing with international customers. Emailing illustrations can be equally problematic because some customers lack the software to read AutoCAD files, and because the PDFs of Komarek''s operating manuals are frequently too large to be accepted by the customer''s server or to be transmitted over Komarek''s T1 circuit.
In addition, Dangoy notes, discussing a diagram without interactive pointing and highlighting capabilities can cause misunderstandings that stymie problem diagnosis or repairs. "Someone might say they have a problem on the left side of a machine when they really mean the right side. That wastes time and can complicate problem resolution even further."
Setting Up a Meeting
Whenever a malfunction cannot be resolved by phone or email, Komarek turns to the Guardian Meeting Center service. Dangoy or another engineer can schedule a web meeting in advance or arrange it on the fly through the service''s online scheduling wizard. The service automatically issues email invitations to all designated individuals.
At the appointed hour, the host retrieves the appropriate drawing from Komarek''s server for display on his own desktop. Then he activates the service''s "Share" feature from the Guardian Meeting Center''s web interface to enable transmission of the image to participants'' screens.
Once users have entered a meeting via the web, they are instructed to dial into the audio portion of the meeting from their regular telephones. In this way, the web conference becomes an audioconference as well.
The host can switch drawings, monitor the status of each participant, and transfer control to different users from the meeting control panel. While the moderator must download a browser plug-in to enable images to be shared, customers or other remote users need no additional software because they use the version on the presenter''s machine.
Komarek has also used the Guardian Meeting Center service to make minor design modifications to some of its machine drawings when engineers are working off-site. Any changes from a remote PC are automatically saved to the master drawing for use when the engineer returns to the office.
Another fringe benefit: protection of proprietary drawings. Since meeting participants cannot save the CAD files they view during a virtual meeting to their own desktop, they cannot then pass them on to anyone else.
But for Komarek and its customers, the real strength of Norlight''s Guardian Meeting Center service is its ability to be used as a remote troubleshooting tool. It''s not just the next best thing to being there. In many cases, it''s as good as being there.