Machines for mixing and metering adhesives or plastics are mostly customized. That’s why customer service communication is critical. With an IIoT service solution from Kontron AIS, RAMPF Production Systems significantly reduced the effort.
The challenge: Inefficient communication
Customer communication is a decisive factor for the success of providers in special mechanical engineering and production technology. The complex systems must exactly meet the requirements, so that customers and suppliers are in constant exchange. Typically, manufacturers accompany their customers from the initial idea for a new system through to aftersales service, including maintenance.
This is also important to the Baden-Württemberg-based company RAMPF Production Systems. The leading international supplier of customized mixing and dispensing systems for liquid adhesives supplies industrial customers worldwide. For them, effective, location-independent customer communication and long-term customer satisfaction are important.
Therefore, their requirements for a communication solution are high. Thus, customer needs must be the focus and contact should be well organized in both directions. The information about the installation as well as customer feedback should be directly available in the application. The functional areas – from documentation and internal administration to project management and customer service – therefore need access to all processes and data in a central location.
The previous solution for customer communication at RAMPF did not sufficiently support these possibilities. The manufacturer has therefore decided to replace the existing customer communication solution with a modern customer portal.
The solution: A customer portal for communication and project management
With the cloud-based customer and service portal “Project Cockpit”, Kontron AIS has developed an intuitive white-label solution tailored to the customer based on its IIoT service solution EquipmentCloud®. The focus was on better organizing the comprehensive end-to-end service and making available to customers all relevant documents relating to their plant and the respective project. It also allows RAMPF to perform many project management tasks.
The modules of the cockpit replace many Excel forms and bundle all information in the customer portal. They also help with process optimization and milestone planning for projects with integrated digital checklists. This keeps everyone involved up to date, tasks can be assigned and processed step by step. A dashboard shows at a glance changes to documents, open tasks, upcoming deadlines, and direct links to master data.
From the customer’s point of view, the new portal is designed for self-service. Your employees can log in independently and receive appropriate user rights from the administrator, corresponding to their respective role and hierarchical level in the customer company. An important milestone was the migration and data integration.
RAMPF performed the preparation of the documentation for the migration in manual preparatory work. The experts at Kontron AIS then used RESTful API to integrate the extensive project documentation such as assembly instructions, protocols or spare parts lists as HTML web pages, which are also continuously synchronized in an automated manner.
The result: Efficient communication with customers and better project management
With its new customer portal, RAMPF reaches both existing customers and new customers whose plants are still in the planning or construction stage. For existing customers, the portal brings better insight into all documents related to their plant as well as new possibilities for communicating with RAMPF’s service staff and handling customer service.
New customers are supported right from the start, even during the first planning steps via the customer portal. All project communication, as well as project management tasks, run through the portal. Since every customer order also requires extensive documentation and communication internally, the management of RAMPF considers the “Project Cockpit” to be an all-round tool that replaces the majority of the applications previously used.
The entire team of internal and external project staff benefits from the time savings and increased efficiency. For both sides, the portal also means transparency about the progress of the project and later the status of the plant or machine. The customer portal thus becomes a central point of contact that can be accessed flexibly and barrier-free via various mobile devices.
