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 printing robots in use, HP Support can connect to the device remotely—and, in the vast majority of cases, get it up and running again within just a few minutes. Remote access allows HP to significantly reduce travel related to maintenance and, in line with its sustainability goals, conserve resources. This remote access is made possible by M2M SIM cards from WhereverSIM, which are used in the new construction layout robot. They ensure that the robot can be reached via cellular network at all times.
“Our robotic printer is already operating on construction sites in France, Sweden, Spain, England, and the U.S. More countries will be added as part of the major rollout in 2023. That’s why it’s important for us to have a SIM partner who can provide a reliable connection to our robots at every location, in every country. We’ve found that partner in WhereverSIM. Theoretically, we could have sought out a local SIM provider in every country, but the administrative burden would have been immense and the costs significantly higher. It also wouldn’t have been easily feasible in production,” says Eric Pascual, Product Manager for HP SitePrint at HP Construction Services. Thanks to the national roaming capabilities of the M2M SIM cards, the construction site robots can access different mobile networks even within a single country, thereby minimizing the risk of losing connection. “For our initial trials in Barcelona, we used a standard SIM from a local provider. That was a complete failure—the connection kept dropping. With wherever SIM , despite the rather challenging conditions for cellular service on construction sites. No matter which construction site an HP SitePrint is working on, we no longer have to worry about the connection thanks to these SIM cards.” A stable connection is crucial for the construction layout robot, in part because support for the HP SitePrint is provided centrally from Spain. “If there’s ever a problem with one of the robotic printers, a member of our support team can remotely access the robot in real time. In more than 70 percent of all support cases, the problem is resolved within just 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.
For HP, two other features—in addition to the globally guaranteed network coverage—were decisive in choosing WhereverSIM. One of these is the ability to pause M2M SIM cards at no cost. “After our layout printers have finished production, it’s initially unclear exactly when the printing robot will be deployed on a construction site. That 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 needed, after comprehensive functional tests have been conducted during production. HP can reactivate the SIM card on its own at any time via the WhereverSIM online portal, without causing any delays in the use of the layout printer.
"In addition to the free pause, the booking option of a data pool played an important role for us," Pascual continues. With data pooling does not assign a fixed data quota to each individual M2M SIM card or printer, but simply a data pool. All M2M SIMs assigned to this data pool consume data from this shared data quota as required.
“Some IoT SIM cards use more data, others less—the shared data pool balances out the fluctuating data needs of the M2M SIM cards,” explains Tim Müller, CEO of WhereverSIM. For HP’s use case, the shared data allowance is more cost-effective than a fixed monthly data plan for each individual IoT SIM, which might not be fully utilized or might be exceeded.
