Remote Diagnostics

With a reported rise in robotics and automation, particularly within the food industry, some might say that there has never been a better time to look at making your facility more efficient and profitable by investing in packing automation. However choosing the right partner to work with is key and your automated solution should enable you to have a system that is best for you and your products by offering not just a good payback period and return on investment but one which has minimal risk attached, and most importantly, a good technical backup facility.

Obviously investing in some of the higher technology may appear daunting for some and they may have concerns if problems occur. A good solution provider should be able to offer you a full remote diagnostics facility and support so that if problems do arise, following a quick phone call to the support team an engineer can connect to the system in question and start diagnosing the issue immediately without having to wait for an engineer to travel to site.

Given that broadband connectivity has never been better some of the more solid suppliers out there will even offer remote systems that connect to this medium giving them the ability to view your machinery using colour motorised cameras, so that they can visually see exactly what position the machine is in – even while it is in operation. Modern systems should also enable support teams to take control of the machine HMI (touch screen), if fitted, so that they can either work with operators on site to help them through some setting issues or to add a new “recipes” remotely should problems be encountered.

Remote diagnostics are mainly a reactive service, but new developments from high end providers will also be able to give you the ability for the equipment itself to alert you or your managers of production statistics or of impending issues upstream or downstream that may lead to loss of production time, this will be of particular importance to those companies who have multiple lines of automated equipment spread over a large area.

Written by Paul Wilkinson, Business Development Manager of Pacepacker Services

www.pacepacker-services.co.uk

t: +44 (0)1371 811544