Our client JBT is a global manufacturer of industrial and turn-key solutions for the food industry. The Belgian plant mainly produces fillers, can closers and sterilization equipment. These complex machines are manufactured, assembled and tested in Belgium and shipped to clients worldwide.
Therefore, the JBT field and service engineers have to travel a lot for machine setups, problem-solving and troubleshooting, ensuring the machines are ready to use after installation.
With their remote assistance program Prosight, JBT was looking for a safe and handsfree solution for its customer care team. For the John Bean Technologies customer care team in Belgium (Sint-Niklaas), smart glasses enabling remote assistance or remote collaboration is definitely a creative solution to combine high quality maintenance with the current quarantine restrictions. With the Iristick smart safety glasses on, a local technician can stream in real-time what he sees to a remote JBT expert, who can give instructions and support, enabling remote assistance in real-time.
Moreover, remote assistance with smart glasses will facilitate service and maintenance operations in remote, dangerous conflict zone areas and in countries where time consuming entry visa and vaccination requirements are needed prior to entry.
The deployment of Prosight with smart glasses will also help the JBT Customer Care team accomplish mission-critical goals:
- Reduce the CO2 impact and environmental cost of travel, contributing to reduce the ecological footprint and JBT’s sustainability goals
- Fasten response time and therefore minimize machine downtime
- Offer back-up and support for younger or less experienced technicians
The solution was used for the first time during the first Covid-19 lockdown with a large customer in Northern Italy where a local maintenance team received handsfree remote assistance from experts based in Belgium during the start-up of a 2-shell rotary pressurized sterilizer. Another use case was a virtual Factory Acceptance Test, where the client in Spain was following the whole process via the remote assistance application. The clients could follow the final inspection ‘as if he were there’ and could even ask to zoom in on specific details.
JBT Belgium partnered with Iristick for our smart glasses and with Support Square’s Passerelle software component to enable the remote assistance sessions.