Service 4.0 for pharmacists

BD Rowa automates warehousing and medication dispensing for pharmacies, hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Digital systems for customer contact and advice as well as service terminals in pharmacy dispensaries complete the product portfolio. With more than 7,000 systems worldwide, the Rowa brand stands for quality and reliability "Made in Germany". All Rowa systems are developed and manufactured in Kelberg (Eifel), the company's headquarters. Since 2015, there has been another office in Frankfurt am Main. A total of 700 employees work for the Rowa brand at ten locations in Europe. BD Rowa is part of Becton Dickinson, a global medical technology company that advances healthcare by improving research, diagnostics and care. BD employs approximately 50,000 people in 50 countries. www.rowa.de

Management Summary

The IT-HAUS GmbH supports BD Rowa in the area of Predicitve Service, an extended service offering for Rowa customers around the world. This is a proactive maintenance model that helps to prevent failures or malfunctions and thus ensures greater availability of system components. This requires an IT infrastructure that meets the highest security requirements - a challenge that BD Rowa masters together with IT-HAUS and Cisco 880 series routers.

Starting position

As a trigger for so-called convergent technology developments, the internet has become one of the most important drivers of innovation for the economy. While uniform communication standards for technical systems and devices used to be a foreign concept, the trend today is in the opposite direction. IP capability is increasing rapidly and new communication channels are emerging between previously separate industries and product areas. Systems, machines and products interact, exchange data and correspond constantly. It makes no difference whether they are communicating with a machine on the same factory floor or with a system in a plant on the other side of the world. Entire value creation networks can be monitored and optimally controlled in a matter of seconds. However, the business potential of this paradigm shift known as "Industry 4.0" lies not only in process optimization, but also in its products and services for a wide range of applications. BD Rowa, market leader for automated warehouses and picking systems in pharmacies and other healthcare facilities, has also recognized this. For some years now, digital systems for customer contact and advice as well as service terminals in pharmacy dispensaries have been added to the portfolio of this forward-looking company. With more than 7,000 systems worldwide, the Rowa brand stands for innovation, quality and reliability "Made in Germany". To enable communication with the computer-controlled systems, a Cisco router is installed in every Rowa vending machine. This means that the Rowa support team based in Kelberg, for example, can connect to the system's control PC remotely and help the pharmacist quickly in the event of a fault. For this purpose, all systems worldwide are connected via VPN tunnel to a data center set up specifically for this purpose in Frankfurt am Main, which in turn is connected to the helpdesk. A VPN cluster is used here to ensure a redundant connection. If the first gateway in the data center fails, the VPN connection to
first-level support is established on a second gateway, which has its own WAN connection.

Requirements

The global exchange of data between individual assets in the sense of Industry 4.0 places high demands on IT security, but also
on communication with regard to automation tasks. Secure, trustworthy technical processes and protocol structures will play a key role in future connected services made possible by networking (e.g. predictive maintenance). While the IT sector is primarily concerned with the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data, the focus at the automation level is on real-time capability as well as the availability and integrity of services.

Goals

Back in September 2016, BD Rowa launched an extended range of services for its customers: Rowa Predictive Service was introduced to prevent breakdowns or malfunctions and thus ensure greater availability of system components. Predictive Service means that potential system problems are detected and rectified in advance through data evaluation and analysis, so that there is no need for an error message from the customer. Any downtime that could lead to an impairment of the pharmacy's operational processes,
is thus avoided or reduced to a minimum.

Solution

How does this work in practice? As part of the Rowa Predictive Service, a wide range of data from the Rowa picking systems is collected and analyzed. For example, the movements of the gripper are tracked and temperatures or voltage are measured. If certain threshold values are exceeded or not reached, service activities are initiated before a fault even occurs in the pharmacy. In most cases, faults are rectified remotely by a technical expert from BD Rowa or, if a component needs to be replaced, by an on-site visit. The collected data is transmitted around the clock via the routers located in Frankfurt to Kelberg, where it is processed and evaluated. The VPN-supporting Cisco 880 series devices ensure highly secure connections to all company resources. As the transmission via the VPN tunnel is encrypted, the data is also protected from third-party access.

Advantages

Rowa Predictive Service adds a proactive service module to the maintenance service for Rowa systems. To ensure that the system runs even more reliably, Predictive Service analyzes the electro-mechanical component information and automatically generates service activities in the event of irregularities with the aim of detecting and avoiding potential system failures in advance. Rowa Predictive Service offers Rowa customers a range of benefits: 24/7 monitoring of their system and early replacement of wearing parts can increase the availability of the system and thus increase its efficiency. Technician visits are now only perceived by the customer as conventional, plannable maintenance appointments.

Benefit

Thanks to the Cisco equipment provided and supplied by IT-HAUS GmbH , BD Rowa is able to set up and expand Rowa Predicitive Service and thus offer its customers maximum added value. The company also maintains an extensive spare parts pool so that faulty devices can be replaced directly on site anywhere in the world. The defective hardware is sent to Kelberg and collected there, where IT-HAUS has it picked up by a forwarding agent. As a certified Cisco partner, IT-HAUS takes care of complaints processing, repairs the devices at Föhren and sends them back to BD Rowa, where they are kept in stock for possible bottleneck situations. In addition to logistical processing, IT-HAUS also handles communication with the manufacturer and image refueling of the devices for the customer. As a long-standing IT-HAUS partner, BD Rowa also benefits from additional services such as stockpiling at Föhren and comprehensive lifecycle management, which guarantees the customer the availability of the latest hardware at all times.

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