Collaboration is a hot topic in the manufacturingandenergy industries for good reason. Efficient collaboration helps workers connect to expert resources faster and speed time to market. In short, it helps lower costs and improve profits.

Noble Drilling, an offshore drilling contractor based in London, wanted to improve uptimeattheir rigs which sparked the idea of remote collaboration.

Using Cisco Spark, Noble can enable better messaging, calling, meeting, and data sharing. Add to this the Librestream Onsight Rugged Smart Camera and Onsight Connect software, Noble had a solution for remote collaboration.

"Remote technical support played a major role in slashing Noble Drilling's downtime from 10% to 4% in about a year."

The platform can serve as a focal point for all online conversations, recorded Onsight sessions, documents, and images relating to a specific problem. All the resources needed are kept in the same virtual place and can help reduce email clutter. The resulting archive for a given troubleshooting ticket is added to the drilling contractor's library, which is available to workers on all the rigs.

As key industry experts retire (the "Silver Tsunami" as some call it) and the knowledge of those experts leaves, this automatic archiving ensures that tribal and deep technical institutional knowledge is captured for less seasoned workers. Similar problems in different locations are solved faster the next time. This process also minimizes the need for re-work.

"Let's not do the same thing time and time and time again. Let's just do it once and learn from that."  -Ron Swan, Worldwide Maintenance Director at Noble Drilling

Using collaboration solutions from Cisco and Librestream, experts no longer have to be physically present. This virtual capability can reduce the amount of machine downtime, minimize travel cost, and avoid personnel disruption. And Cisco Spark uses industry-leading encryption to ensure your data remains confidential, available, and secure at all times.

Drilling down into the solutions

Noble uses Collaboration solutions from Cisco and Librestream to help cut costs, improve uptime, and capture knowledge to help solve future problems.

One powerful tool offered as part of the Librestream Collaboration platform is the Onsight Rugged Smart Camera: a ruggedized, high definition wireless camera proven to operate in the most hazardous environments.

Together with Cisco Factory Wireless Solutions, engineering and maintenance teams can securely stream live HD video and audio to an Onsight Connect software Endpoint or a Cisco video endpoint, like the Cisco DX80:

The smart camera is only part of the Onsight collaboration experience. Onsight Connect- the collaboration software that powers the camera -also powers smartglasses, tablets, smartphones, and computers.  Remote experts can take advantage of the additional functionality like remotely controlling the camera, image sharing, and drawing on the screen to indicate where attention should be focused in the field.  The camera's headphones are designed to wear with a hard hat in industrial environments and provide excellent quality audio, even in noisy environments.

"Manufacturers are facing common challenges from increasingly complex supply chains, high customer demands, and shrinking pools of experts. We see rapid growth in demand for solutions that leverage expertise and drive service level improvements.  A recent Aberdeen study reported that 72% of the top service companies have deployed visual collaboration tools, delivering higher first time fix rates and uptime. We are pleased to work with many of these enterprises alongside Cisco."

Have you started leveraging collaboration solutions to help drive profitability?

Learn more at www.ciscospark.com and www.librestream.com