Solvay relying on AMA’s remote assistance for Application Development Lab
1. Challenges
The Application Development Lab at Solvay Materials Italy is part of a Lab network (comprising North America, Greater China, and Asia Pacific areas) whose mission is bonding the world of Specialty Materials with Solvay’s Customers Applications, ensuring a collaborative and open-minded environment, providing top-notch labs and expertise to assess the performance of Specialty Materials in the application and accelerating the translation of material properties into value for the end-users in markets such as transportation, healthcare, water purification, Semiconductors, and Electronic.
Before the COVID-19 period, many customers, researchers, and marketing were hosted on-site to see how materials were being used and to get familiarized with their properties and transformation techniques. Due to travel restrictions, Solvay Italy was looking for new ways of communicating effectively without the need of being physically present at the site. Solvay Corporate initiated a remote collaboration project based on smart glasses and included Italy from the early stage of this project. Some of the following use cases have been implemented:
2. Solutions
• Remote collaboration
Belgian colleagues were not allowed to travel and assist the trials of injection molding live on site, instead they attended remotely. This allowed them to work with lab technicians on the best conditions to apply in the use of a new product and which parameters to subsequently play with at customers.
• Virtual tour of the Development Lab with Asian colleagues
The point of view of the person wearing the smart glasses gives a much better user experience than moving around with a mobile phone. On top of that, for safety and data protection reasons an approved, handsfree solution is often required.
This new way of working is here to stay.
Stefano Mortara, EMEA Application Development Labs Manager at Solvay
3. Results
• Efficiency & productivity gains: better planning, reduced traveling, avoid site visits in case the production line has a last-minute problem. At steady-state, hard savings for around 30k€/year and at least 5t/year of CO2 emissions are expected, on top of efficiency improvements and faster delivery on projects.
• Chat functionality and annotations allow communicating clearly in a noisy environment
• User friendly, easy to use
• Quick and effective remote troubleshooting and collaboration
• Positive environmental impact
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