Bausano has unveiled Bausano-Acty, a new app designed to speed up and simplify remote assistance interventions on its plants. The app was also developed in the light of current regulations introduced to curb the spread of the coronavirus, which restrict travel and on-site interventions, or make these more difficult. Available free of charge to all the customers based in the Italian region of Piedmont, the app consists of a platform developed to suit the needs of industrial concerns operating in the field of plastic processing. Its functions optimise system downtimes and reduce service intervention costs, thereby safeguarding productivity and helping on-site operators. In addition, the new app allows the user to enter into direct audio and visual contact with the Bausano assistance service, the spare parts department and other services. Its different functions and augmented reality feature mean that the precise needs of the customer requesting assistance can be rapidly identified, making for a quicker and more efficient intervention.

Identifying and solving the problem

To be able to take effective and decisive action during maintenance interventions or troubleshooting of any kind on an extrusion plant, it can be necessary to actually view the situation. To allow this, operators on site, using mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, can send the Bausano experts images or videos, or share them remotely in real time, thereby overcoming the distance between them and obtaining an immediate response. Bausano-Acty considerably reduces the times and costs of identifying, intervening on and troubleshooting technical problems that normally require the intervention of Bausano engineers at the customer’s site. The platform, making it possible to store photos and videos recorded during the intervention, also has a historical memory function, which is also useful for engineers.

Numerous functions

The app can be installed on any mobile device and can be used to take photos and videos with the device’s own camera, using its digital zoom to enlarge any detail of the photo or video. It is also possible to freeze individual frames of the video in order to write or draw, on them, information or references useful for the assistance intervention.

Several engineers, contemporaneously using the same functions, can take part in the remote session with the customer needing assistance. The app has a simultaneous translator that can provide written or oral translations in 60 languages and every page containing an application can be shared on the screen of the mobile device. All audio/video exchanges are end-to-end encrypted, to guarantee user privacy and industrial confidentiality.

Photographs and videos of the remote assistance intervention are stored on the platform. They can be retrieved at any time and are always accessible to personnel working on-site. This makes it both quicker and faster to solve similar issues in the future. Thanks to “wearable technology”, engineers and experts working remotely are free to intervene immediately, regardless of where the request for assistance comes from. This reduces travel time and costs, as well as the time to completion of the intervention.

“We are focusing very much on increasing our flexibility and technology is a huge help in this regard. In fact, we are introducing an app that will allow us to do perform the majority of our technical interventions remotely, thanks to the possibilities offered by augmented reality”, says Clemente Bausano.