Microsoft Teams is being used by Siemens Energy to enable remote acceptance testing for its energy solutions.
As a result, it can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the company and its customers, who would have otherwise had to make a long journey to get to its transformer plant in Nuremberg.
Now, the long journey can be replaced by a simple dial-in link to a Teams meeting, in which Siemens Energy can run through all the necessary acceptance tests with customers remotely.
Carsten Niggeschulze, Global Head of Collaboration & Voice IT Services at Siemens Energy, said:
“Microsoft Teams makes long journeys for acceptance testing superfluous.
Our customers, for instance in China, can simply dial in and see everything they would have seen had they traveled all the way to Nuremberg.
“The virtual customer acceptance process is a new service with real added value.”
Previously, delegations would have been collected and prepared for visiting the test beds with safety briefings, followed by needing to walk from one measurement station to the next.
By using Microsoft Teams, along with HoloLens 2, the entire process takes place on a single big screen, including measurements, inspections, and discussions.
Not only does it reduce carbon emissions, but it also makes the measurement process run faster, according to Johannes Geidl, Chief Test Bed Technician at Siemens Energy in Nuremberg.
Siemens turned to Teams during the pandemic as a workaround to travel restrictions.
Virtual customer acceptance testing was such a success that when travel bans were lifted, it decided to continue the remote testing process alongside in-person tests.
In the future, Siemens Energy has said it plans to further expand Teams testing by adding a variety of cameras to film its transformers from every angle and pass the footage across to Teams Rooms.
This will enable it to remotely host more complex inspections, such as providing a view of the top of a transformer.
‘120 delegations per year’
Siemens Energy’s creates tailored energy solutions to the needs of its customers, such as giant transformers, weighing up to 950 metric tonnes.
Every year, up to 120 customer delegations come to Nuremberg for a full week each to inspect these transformers, take part in tests, and discuss the results.
Niggeschulze commented on the impact of these visits:
“A single customer acceptance visit for a four-person delegation from China translated into approximately 13 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Then there were the high travel costs.
“Finding a suitable time for a large customer group to visit, planning the trip, procuring visas—we’d put a lot of effort into organizing all this, and so would the customer.
“But there was simply no option other than to have the customer there in person.
“Siemens Energy wanted to find a sustainable way of improving this process for its customers.”
Microsoft Teams is currently caught up in an EU antitrust probe into Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office, due to their failure to make an agreement.
Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud points out, in a discussion with UC Today, that this is not Microsoft’s first rodeo when it comes to antitrust controversy and also these sorts of investigations take place incredibly slowly, so don’t hold your breath for the results!
from UC Today https://ift.tt/hE6JX5F
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