Hannecard improves customers' roller operations with roller-as-service offering

To be able provide its customers with better industrial roller covers, with longer lifetimes and less utilisation of materials and energy, Hannecard sees a future in offering its rollers as a service. The supplier's roller monitoring and management solution 'countroll' allows customers to optimise their roller operations and achieve higher roller performance.

Hannecard is one of Europe’s leading suppliers of industrial roller coverings in rubber, polyurethane, composite and carbide, to various sectors. The company also offers a wide range of other services, from roller maintenance to roller repair and roller optimisation.

Why this product

Hannecard aims to be the most reliable roller coverer in the world, improving their clients’ process efficiency and/or product quality in a measurable way. The company strives for better roller covers, with longer lifetimes and less utilization of materials and energy. Capitalizing on this extra product performance through a higher pricing is not that straightforward. Therefore, Hannecard, sees a future in offering its rollers as a service. 

Value for the customer

Hannecard’s roller monitoring and management solution allows its customers to optimise their roller operations. The follow-up of roller rotations and vibrations allows to anticipate on maintenance interventions and achieve higher roller performance. Besides these real-time roller data, the solution also provides an overview of all technical data, such as technical drawings, roller location, maintenance history and reports. This improves the operational efficiency of their customers.  

Technology behind smart product countroll

The countroll rotating sensor attached to a roller is a custom designed battery-powered add-on module that transfers roller data via Bluetooth to the countroll app on a smartphone. In the app the digital passport and all underlying technical data of each roller, uniquely identified through a QR-code, can be consulted. The countroll web portal gives an overview of the regrinding & recovering history of the rollers. It allows to set the location of rollers (in stock, mounted in machine, at manufacturer), link rollers with packaging, link rollers to logical locations (ex. warehouse, ...), add documents (inspection documents, regrinding reports,…), add pictures for quality purposes and create events. The raw data is also made available through an API for specific analyses by the customer.

Capturing revenue

Hannecard gets a direct return on their countroll offering through the sales of sensors and subscription fees for the access to the software platform, depending on the package the customer requires. Besides that Hannecard’s operational efficiency (OEE) has improved thanks to the real-time availability of information, the automated reception of rollers and easy, paperless exchange of documents with customers. On the longer term, the available information supports the development of a roller-as-service offering.

Next steps

The roller management platform will enable operators to anticipate product quality issues based on roller recovering history of a specific roller in a machine section and based on machine position, number of rotations, vibrations caused by bearing house failures, and misalignment or unbalance. A roller management dashboard will show for all critical roller positions which rollers are in good health and which rollers might produce quality issues.

The roller management platform will also grow in terms of the number of roller recoverer companies, that use the same platform towards their customers. In the next years, the company will expand its independent ecosystem across markets and geographies. The goal is that end-customers can manage 100% of their rollers with countroll, independent of the supplier of their rollers.  An end-customer typically has 2-3 key suppliers of rubber rollers per production facility.

Finally, the company sees new markets to address with countroll, such as anilox print rollers and rotating cutting tools, and also new applications arise, such as asset management for industrial equipment (e.g. QR label supports chemical cleaning products).

Smart Product Scenarios

To enhance your chances of success and guide your smart product innovation, Sirris offers you practical tools and guidelines. Our Smart Product Inspirator provides you with a framework for identifying valuable smart product ideas based on the 5  most common scenarios and 15 smart product examples illustrating these scenarios. With these carefully analysed scenarios we help you uncover the potential for success . The key scenarios for Hannecard's countroll are: ‘Smart maintenance' and ‘Digital platform'.