Inca Vision is now used by Inca’s service support team to gather information automatically on a daily basis. Data analysed includes that drawn from customer scans on iNozzle mapping to monitor the condition of printheads, data on vacuum zones to monitor the most commonly used sheet sizes and information on UV shutters and machine temperatures.
The Inca service team uses a RAG (red, amber, green) dashboard screen to access this information and prioritise printers most in need of attention.
Inca Digital senior customer support manager Mark Noble said: “We’ve been using remote diagnostics for around two years, but we’ve now made it much more automated.
“It used to take 20 minutes per machine to download the data and then we had to process it. Whereas now this is all downloaded overnight, and the data can be interrogated in minute intervals to watch out for machine alarms and machine status changes.”
He added: “At the beginning of the year we looked at what the key criteria was we should be gathering. There’s been a lot of work looking at which is the critical data to gather and to set software up to most effectively display this to our service support team.”
Inca Vision collects data from all but a few UK customers who opted out, citing data security reasons. Customers don’t have to be signed up to an Inca service support package for Inca to keep an eye out for service issue warning signs, but the company does prioritise customers according to their service package level, according Noble.
He said: “The vast majority are very happy that we are keeping an eye on how their machine is performing. We are very careful about the data we collect. We can’t see file names or any information associated with clients.”
On how useful Inca Vision is, Noble said: “Often we are not waiting for the customer to call in, we are calling them and saying ‘do you realise you have a problem within the machinery?’ They will often say ‘yes but we have got a big job so we were waiting to call you.’ So this avoids the 3.30 on Friday rush, when everyone calls with problems after a busy week. This helps them plan in their maintenance work.”
Noble added: “We can see what’s going wrong with the machine before it completely fails. If we can catch the fact we have print quality issues at an early stage we can recover print heads before they get to the point of no return.”
Inca Vision currently only pulls in UK customer data but Inca plans to roll the service out globally to work with distributors in January.
Inca customers have access to similar but more specific data through ReporterPro, a software service launched in January this year.
