The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

106 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om P RODUC T FOCU S : M I C ROSOF T HOLOL ENS Thermo Fisher Scientific used Altoura spatial computing software to battle Covid-19 Spatial collaboration saves lives Surepoint used Kognitiv Spark’s HoloLens-based technology to solve technical issues remotely Remote troubleshooting Thermo Fisher Scientific is a Fortune 500 company and global provider of analytical instruments, equipment, software and services for the scientific research industry. Over the past year, the company has invested in spatial computing solutions from Altoura to enable their customers to solve some of the most complex problems facing humanity, including Covid-19. Thermo Fisher Scientific deployed Altoura to business units across the company to accelerate time to market by improving remote collaboration, task simulations and workforce training so it can in turn empower customers with the technologies, tools and pharmaceuticals required in their life-saving work. Thermo Fisher Scientific used Altoura spatial collaboration software to enable employees to work together remotely within a photorealistic digital twin of their physical work environments, including shop floors, laboratories and testing sites, so it can educate, train and empower its workforce faster in a simulated virtual environment. “With Altoura, we’ve cut training time by up to 60 per cent while improving employee productivity, increasing knowledge retention and reducing training costs,” said Chris Binion, director of innovation at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “Those improvements lead to better customer care and faster delivery of products that our customers need for critical research.” Surepoint Group is an industrial contractor that specialises in electrical and instrumentation services, mechanical, and equipment fabrication, with clients worldwide. When customers experience issues with equipment, the team at Surepoint would send a field technician to fix the issue. If the technician arrived on site and didn’t know how to solve the issue, they would begin troubleshooting via phone calls, photos and videos. The process was cumbersome and frequently forced Surepoint to send a senior technician to support the task. Realising that it stood to gain both a competitive advantage and significant return on investment, Surepoint implemented Kognitiv Spark’s RemoteSpark solution. RemoteSpark is an industrial-grade remote support tool built on top of Microsoft HoloLens. It enables field technicians to establish a secure, low-bandwidth call with a subject matter expert to help facilitate complex troubleshooting. The system allows experts to guide remote technicians via live voice and video, and by dragging and dropping supporting content (images, PDFs and screen captures) which appear as holograms in the end user ’s real-world environment. After six months of using RemoteSpark, Surepoint was able to solve 60 per cent of remote issues without sending an expert to site. This led to an average equipment downtime reduction of 14 – 20 hours per call.