The digitization of the entire print media industry is enabling most print shops to tap into new efficiency potential. And the innovative Service offering from Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) in the categories “Technical Services” and “Performance Services” are making an important contribution in this respect. With 10,000 connected machines and a further 15,000 software systems, the company boasts an extremely large and solid wealth of data to be able to serve customers according to their precise needs. With “Technical Services”, this knowledge is channeled into scheduled service interventions, while for “Performance Services” the focus is on further increasing productivity and optimizing processes. Visitors to drupa can obtain comprehensive information on the company's service portfolio at the Heidelberg stand in the “Smart Services” area. 

“Thanks to digitization, Big Data becomes Smart Data. Where service is concerned, therefore, the trend is increasingly towards anticipatory services. We want the resulting advantages to benefit our customers. Heidelberg has therefore refined the predictive quality of its anticipatory services, such that unscheduled service interventions are avoided to the greatest possible extent, and even scheduled service interventions can be significantly reduced. This way, the customer enjoys up to ten percent greater availability,” declares Bernhard Steinel, Head of SystemService at Heidelberg.

In order to highlight this approach even more clearly for customers, at drupa 2016 Heidelberg will be presenting its further developed Service portfolio in the “Performance Services” category:

Predictive Monitoring reduces unscheduled service interventions 

Introduced at the last drupa, Heidelberg will be presenting its now further developed, Internet-based service tool for preventive fault detection, which in future will be known as Predictive Monitoring (formerly Remote Monitoring). In this way, the company is underlining the further improvements to precision in the prediction of possible malfunctions. With Predictive Monitoring, there is continuous preventive monitoring and analysis of the technical status of machines. Around 500 million data records a year are generated for each connected machine. These are analyzed by algorithms, with a list of preventive measures as the outcome. The aim is to detect possible malfunctions at an early stage and, as far as possible, to remedy them during the next scheduled service intervention. Customers benefit from maximum machine availability, shorter downtimes and better planning of the production sequence. Initial reports from customers using this further developed tool confirm that Predictive Monitoring can considerably improve machine availability. At Häuser KG based in Cologne, for example, Predictive Monitoring has enabled them to cut back on unscheduled service interventions and therefore greatly improve availability.

New Performance Services aim to improve print shops' overall performance

Now that consulting services such as Performance Plus, Workflow Optimization, Lean Implementation and Investment Consulting, which aim at improving the overall performance of print shops, are becoming more and more important for customers, Heidelberg is bundling all these services in a new category, “Print Shop Optimization”.

With the Performance Plus consulting concept in particular, launched onto the market just 18 months ago, whereby success is shared by Heidelberg and the customer, print shops are achieving outstanding increases in productivity. The latest example is Heidelberg customer and commercial printer W.V. Westfalia Druck GmbH in Paderborn, where this integrated consulting approach together with the experts from Heidelberg delivered notable successes within just a few months: productivity of continuous production on the Speedmaster XL 106 rose by 36 percent. At the same time, makeready times were shortened by 35 percent, and paper stocks fell by 36 percent. Now that a new logistics concept has been elaborated and put into practice, today operations are far more transparent, while throughput times have become shorter and can be planned better. The first impressions of Wilhelm Vockel, Managing Director and owner of Westfalia Druck, are therefore positive: “I was in fact amazed that we could find so many things to optimize with Performance Plus which, when jointly implemented with our employees, resulted in these successes.”