Teorema

The delivery of high quality after-sales assistance in the ice cream making machines market is particularly challenging. Ice cream making machines are heavy-duty food processors and, as a result of the heavy operational stress, they require routine on-site maintenance and occasional major assistance interventions for failure recovery from highly qualified technical support personnel.

Unfortunately, in the ice cream making machines market the cost of on-site technical support is very high. In fact, ice cream making machines are often installed in remote areas, and technicians do not have always precise information about the machine location. The problems in gaining physical access to the ice cream machines significantly increase the average duration and cost of maintenance interventions for both Carpigiani and its customers. Because of the high revenue of ice cream making machines, it is of utmost importance to have timely detection of failures and prompt technical support interventions.

As a result, the process of maintenance and repairing interventions is inefficient, leading to high system downtimes. This calls for automated e-maintenance solutions to reduce costs while improving quality of after sales support. However, automating maintenance operations for small manufacturing systems deployed on customers’ premises, such as Carpigiani’s ice cream making machines, is a non trivial effort. In fact, these systems have unique characteristics for both monitoring and communications perspectives, such as limited access to machine status data and low cost constraints, that significantly differentiate them from energy industry and heavy industry applications where real-time e-maintenance systems are usually employed. This effectively prevents the adoption of Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) and/or Machine-to-Machine (M2M) telemetry platforms and calls for the development of ad hoc e-maintenance solutions.

To reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of after-sales assistance operations, Carpigiani launched the highly innovative Teorema project, that enables the integrated management of every aspect related to after-sales assistance. Leveraging on machineinstalled remote control kits and a centralized monitoring station, Teorema realizes a comprehensive after-sales e-maintenance platform that enables the remote assistance of ice cream making machines.

Publications

[1] R. Lazzarini, C. Stefanelli, M. Tortonesi, G. Virgilli, "Teorema: a Comprehensive Solution for the Remote Assistance of Ice Cream Making Machines", in Proceedings of 10th Annual International Conference on The Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises (MITIP 2008), 14-17 November 2008, Prague, Czech Republic.

[2] M. Canato, R. Lazzarini, C. Stefanelli, M. Tortonesi, S. Veronese, G. Virgilli, "Teorema: An Integrated Solution for Effective After-sales Assistance in the Ice Cream Making Machines Market”, in Proceedings of 11th Annual International Conference on The Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises (MITIP 2009), 15-16 October 2009, Bergamo, Italy.