Hewlett Packard (HP) is one of the largest printer manufacturers in the world. In addition to traditional printers for the home office or office, the technology company also develops innovative printing solutions for industrial applications, such as the construction industry. One of these solutions: The new HP SitePrint, an autonomous robot printer with wheels that prints the floor plan of a construction site directly onto the floor slab. With the smart HP SitePrint, the entire surveying process on the construction site is shortened from several weeks to just a few days, despite the lines being applied with millimeter precision. The layout printing robot works with absolute precision even on uneven or damp surfaces.
If there is a problem with one of the print robots in use, HP Support can connect to the device remotely - and in the vast majority of cases get the device up and running again within just a few minutes. Remote access enables HP to significantly reduce maintenance-related travel and thus conserve resources in line with its sustainability goals. Remote access is made possible by M2M SIM cards from wherever SIM, which are used in the new construction layout robot. They ensure that the robot can be contacted at any time via mobile communications.
"Our robot printer is already rolling across construction sites in France, Sweden, Spain, the UK and the USA. More countries will be added with the major rollout in 2023. It is therefore important for us to have a SIM partner who can offer us a reliable connection to our robots at every location, in every country. We have found this partner in wherever SIM . Theoretically, we could have looked for a local SIM provider in every country, but the administrative effort would have been immense and the costs significantly higher. It would also not have been so easy to implement in production," says Eric Pascual, Product Manager for HP SitePrint at HP Construction Services. Thanks to the national roaming of the M2M SIM cards, the construction site robots can also access different mobile networks within a country, thus minimizing the risk of losing a connection. "For our first trials in Barcelona, we used a normal SIM from a local provider. That was a complete failure, the connection kept dropping out. This changed with wherever SIM , despite the rather difficult conditions for mobile communications on construction sites. No matter which construction site an HP SitePrint is on, we no longer have to worry about the connection thanks to the SIM cards." A stable connection for the construction layout robot is important, partly because support for the HP SitePrint is provided centrally from Spain. "If there is a problem with one of the robot printers, a member of our support team can access the robot remotely in real time. In more than 70 percent of all support cases, the problem is solved within a few minutes," adds Pascual.
"Remote access to the robot printers is advantageous for our customers in many ways. The fact that our support can connect directly to the printer if necessary and read out the problem speeds up troubleshooting. This significantly reduces any downtime of a robot printer, as well as service and maintenance costs," adds Pascual. Nobody has to travel to find out what the problem is any more. Even if on-site intervention is required to rectify the problem: Remote access provides support with information about the device and cause of the fault in advance. Information that the team would otherwise only have received at a much later stage and which helps them to prepare for troubleshooting. "Our printer speeds up the surveying process on a construction site enormously. Even if there is a fault, thanks to remote access we can usually rectify it so quickly that the printer can still apply the lines to the construction site much faster than would be possible with a manual process," concludes Pascual.
In addition to the globally secured network coverage, two other features were decisive for HP when choosing wherever SIM. One of these is the free pausing of M2M SIM cards. "After the production of our layout printers, it is initially unclear when exactly the printing robot will be used on a construction site. This can happen very quickly, but it can also take some time," explains Pascual. For this reason, HP deactivates the M2M SIM card in the robot until it is used, after comprehensive functional tests have been carried out in production. The SIM can be reactivated independently by HP at any time via the wherever SIM online portal without any delays in the use of the layout printer.
"In addition to free pausing, the ability to book a data pool played an important role for us," continues Pascual. With data pooling, a fixed data quota is not allocated to each individual M2M SIM card or printer, but only to a data pool. All M2M SIMs assigned to this data pool consume data from this shared data quota as required. "Some IoT SIM cards consume more data, others less - the shared data pool balances out the fluctuating data requirements of the M2M SIM cards," explains Tim Müller, Managing Director of wherever SIM. The shared data quota is more cost-effective for HP's use case than a fixed monthly data package for each individual IoT SIM, which may not be fully used or may be exceeded.
