The TID Informatik GmbH from Inning am Ammersee and the Dortmund software house Innosoft GmbH have been working together for many years in the “Service Excellence” initiative. The result of the current joint project, a standard interface between the CATALOGcreator® of TID and the Mobile Field Service of Innosoft, is currently being used with great success at Mosca GmbH from Waldbrunn.
The packaging specialist Mosca GmbH, world market leader in sub-areas of strapping technology, is globally positioned with 18 branches and has produced a total of 2,844 machines in 2018. As for all machine manufacturers, service is extremely important at Mosca. More than 180 service technicians and 20 representatives with about 1,000 employees worldwide speak a clear language. In Germany, 44 employees work in Mosca’s technical service, which is coordinated centrally from the headquarters in Waldbrunn. In addition to 38 technicians, 13 people work in the office, including three dispatchers.
In order to make the processes in the Germany-wide service network as transparent and efficient as possible, those responsible at the manufacturer of semi-automatic and fully automatic high-speed strapping machines and pallet packing presses have relied on Innosoft software solutions for about 20 years. Not only the digital service report and the ticket system are fixed components in the daily business of Mosca’s after-sales service. The software is also an important cornerstone in the “ONE Service” concept, which has been implemented for two years now and which guarantees a uniform service quality for Mosca customers worldwide, for example in preventive maintenance, which ensures the maximum performance of the machines.
Understanding the requirements in service
Gregor Karmowski, head of the CIP project department at Mosca, has been responsible for the continuous development and gradual rollout of the modular Service Management System since he joined the company in 2008 as head of strategic sales development and controlling. He is convinced of the software’s qualities because “in many places you can [feel] the know-how and understanding of the service requirements that the developers have incorporated into the solutions”.
It was Gregor Karmowski who developed the idea at the anniversary cDAY of TID Informatik in Munich’s Allianz Arena in 2017, which has now been so successfully put into practice. The presentation about the Service Excellence initiative did not only arouse his interest to use TID’s CATALOGcreator®, a browser-based standard software for electronic spare parts catalogues and service information systems, at Mosca, but also to integrate it via a new standard interface into the Innosoft software used by the technicians.
Founded in 1966, the company has its own electronic spare parts catalogue for each machine, from which the service technicians identified the relevant parts before the project. However, due to many similar, but not identical parts, the search was often extremely complex. In order to be able to use the innovative spare parts catalogue solution from TID with all its practical features, the old catalogues, including the associated documents, first had to be migrated, which involved considerable effort for over 70,000 machines and therefore also catalogues. But it was worth the effort. With the data transferred from the old system, new catalogues can now be created fully automatically with the TID software.
Integration brings added value for service
The idea to integrate the CATALOGcreator® permanently into the Innosoft system via an interface came from Karmowski, because “this way a deep integration of the electronic catalogue into the Innosoft software system is created, which is of great benefit for us”. At the kick-off meeting with the project managers from Mosca, TID and Innosoft, it was quickly clear that it should not be an individual but a standard solution to ensure future updateability and consistent and secure data maintenance. “By integrating the interface into the standard of our software, we can offer this integration to all customers facing similar challenges”, enthuses TID Managing Director Robert Schäfer. “We know from experience that this interface is of great interest to most of our customers”.
The combined solution has now been in live operation for a year, and the response from users has been consistently positive. Cumbersome searches for the right parts are a thing of the past; service technicians can now jump directly to the appropriate parts catalogue during processing in the digital service reports at the touch of a button, i.e. from a machine data record they can call up the spare parts for the respective machine with the corresponding pictures, drawings and other helpful information by clicking on the button, and also display bills of materials and other parts.
A total of four buttons are now available. In the material section, the corresponding counterpart for each article can be called up and any required spare part can be booked directly for repeat orders. The technician can easily compile a shopping basket in the catalogue and transfer it to the service report with a mouse click. The newly added fourth button supports the technician in preparing a quotation. This button can be used, for example, to easily add the items to be replaced to the quotation in the case of a maintenance offer.
The great acceptance on the part of the technicians, who have been benefiting from the advantages of being able to jump directly from the service report to the parts catalogue including information system and back again with a simple click of the mouse, has convinced those responsible at Mosca GmbH. For this reason, the rollout in the subsidiaries abroad is also planned for the near future. Mosca is strongly represented in Europe, America and Asia. In addition to the locations in Australia, France, Poland and Spain, the Service Management System of Innosoft is also used in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, China and Japan, among others.