The Krones LCS Support – your partner also in times of crises

Maintenance is planned, a spare part has to be replaced or – in the worst case – the line is standing still. In all these cases, the status for Krones Service is: on duty. And thanks to around 2,700 technicians at more than 100 locations worldwide, the service department is ideally equipped to support beverage producers around the globe as quickly as possible.

But at a time when I’m forced to write this article at home, everything is a little different in the service department as well: because even though Krones, with its global service set-up in the various countries of the world, is optimally positioned to be on the spot – always and quickly – to solve problems, our customers and we ourselves are currently facing particularly big challenges due to the Corona pandemic. Exit restrictions and travel and contact bans are currently making it considerably more difficult for customers to carry out service work on site – especially at a time when bottling lines have to run at full blast to ensure that people are supplied with beverages.

Through LCS Support, our customers have a partner they can rely on. And in times like these, this is more important than ever. With over 250 employees worldwide working for the large support centers in Europe, the USA, Brazil, China, Thailand and Russia, plus its subsidiaries and affiliates, Krones is available around the clock as a local contact.

With their expert knowledge and guaranteed availability, our support centers are the central point of contact for all customers with technical questions and provide assistance in troubleshooting and error correction. And the numbers talk for themselves – every day, more than 500 technical support requests are processed and documented in a traceable manner for our customers with a resolution rate of almost 100 percent.

Matthias Hönig works in the first level support 24/7 in the center for Europe and is an expert for inspection technology. “On a typical working day I receive 20 inquiries from our customers all over the world, eight of which are remote service assignments. At the other end of the line we are dealing with all kinds of people. I especially find it exciting to adapt to a new situation with every inquiry, to understand the customer’s problem and to work together to correct the fault so that the machine is running again in the end”.

In addition to the classic support via telephone, the support colleagues also provide assistance via remote support using the Global Remote Service (GRS) platform. This platform has been fundamentally modernized. It naturally complies with the latest security standards in order to guarantee fast and, above all, secure remote monitoring and maintenance of our customers’ plants.

But not only in case of customer service we are counting on remote support. It is also used for the commissioning of new machines or entire lines. Here the service technicians receive on-site support from our Remote Control Center. Especially during the Corona pandemic, we benefit from this teamwork. Because flight cancellations, travel bans or quarantine regulations make it almost impossible to always send the team that would have been deployed there without the current restrictions. The colleagues from the Remote Control Center thus provide support as a supplement to our local service technicians and ensure that the commissioning work at the customer’s premises can continue to be carried out in the best possible and effective manner, even with regard to the current restrictions.

In the past few years, we have already worked intensively on the roll-out of the support in our centers to offer a standardized global support network and its remote functionalities to our customers. In doing so, we have placed particular emphasis on uniformly networked processes and a globally harmonized working method and service provision. In addition to the above-mentioned support centers and our subsidiaries Syskron and System Logistic, branches in Indonesia, Japan and Korea were also integrated into the network. Within this network, Krones support staff can benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience. And thanks to the uniformly utilized IT infrastructure, support enquiries can be processed in a comprehensible, fast and interdisciplinary manner, thus providing our customers with better support. We will integrate further locations into our LCS Support, in order to further expand these synergy effects both in the short and long term, and to offer the customer local contact points. These help to guarantee a high availability of contact persons and to reduce language, cultural and time barriers.

The integration of our subsidiary in Turkey and of the Krones subsidiary Kosme, plus the branches in Mexico and Colombia for our Spanish-speaking clients, are currently the next milestones in our efforts to further expand and strengthen our proximity to clients in a time of global networking – but also crises.

However, classic forms of support like telephone or remote support are not the only type of remote support Krones offers. In the next blog article, I’ll be telling you what other options there are, and how Krones is implementing Augmented Reality in the beverage sector.

Even in a crisis, Krones is your reliable partner, and remains true to its motto – we do more.