Take a look around your current collision centre workplace and have a guess at some of the innovations that might appear in the next five, ten or, even, twenty years. Let your mind run to the wildest, ‘out there’ ideas you can think of. How about drone deliveries of parts and consumables, automatic scanning and estimating of accident damage or, perhaps, onsite 3D printed parts. Whatever you come up with, chances are PPG’s global refinish Digital Customer Experience team has already considered it and, in many cases, is on the way to making it happen.
Does all this sound too farfetched? Go back 20 years or so and consider how painters felt when PPG introduced the first portable, mass-market spectrophotometer. Paired with PPG PaintManager® software, it was a breakthrough technology that brought incredible speed and accuracy to the colour matching process. After joining PPG in 1995, it was Beppe Casalini, along with his team, who were responsible for these innovations, as well as the further enhancements that have come with the latest PaintManager XI® and RapidMatch® GO tools. Today, Beppe operates from PPG Italy Business Support Srl, in Milan, and is responsible for what is called the ‘digital customer experience’ that PPG refinish offers. We caught up with him recently when he visited Melbourne.
Digital customer experience
We all seem to have embraced the technology revolution in our everyday life (think smart phones, WiFi connectivity, tablet computers, streaming your favourite programs, etc.), so Beppe’s Digital Customer Experience team says, why not make use of it in the collision centre?
“The Digital Customer Experience is a global PPG function that was created to answer the demand to be more digitally oriented in the refinish sector. As a main goal, we look after all the customer facing software applications. In parallel with developing new technology, such as MoonWalk®, we are also gathering requirements for what we call the new ‘digital eco-system’ that PPG is in the process of preparing for customers. The concept of a digital eco-system is to create an immersive experience for customers. It’s about building an overall solution for customers which is more tailored and easier to be used. The key drivers for our work are to avoid waste and save time which helps make a shop more profitable.”
The power of many
Rather than go to customers with what it believed were the solutions to improve profitability, Beppe’s team actually asked for input from customers, as well as distributors and PPG internal staff. Given PPG’s vast footprint in refinish markets right around the globe, this involved feedback from literally thousands of collision repairers.
“In Europe, more than four years ago, we started a kind of customer-centric approach to discovering problems they had in doing their day-to-day jobs. From this, we could look for technologies to release those pains. The biggest source of ideas is found with talking to people – PPG staff, customers and distributors. For example, this is the fourth week in a row where I am travelling around the world running workshops where we talk to our people and ask what they think we need to build for the future. Very often, we forget that technology already exists in our life, however it may be at home but not at work. We get people to think about these various technologies and how they might be used to make life easier for our customers or within PPG.”
“We listen to everybody’s opinions and ideas – when you sit down with people who really want to innovate, there is so many creative things to work with. There is a whole spectrum of ideas – from straightforward requirements to the more ‘crazy’ ideas. Even if 30% of the ideas are not possible because the technology doesn’t enable it today, that means the other 70% can still be put in the mix to create the disruptive features for PPG’s digital eco-system and that is pretty impressive.”
MoonWalk leads the way
While Beppe’s team has already put the runs on the board with the powerful and intuitive PaintManager XI software and easy to use RapidMatch GO spectro, it’s the spectacular new MoonWalk automated mixing system which is grabbing the latest headlines. As well as effectively reducing waste in multiple areas (in product, in labour time and in productivity), Moonwalk also frees up painters to do what they are trained for – painting!
“We appreciate that mixing paint is an extremely important task but what MoonWalk does is remove this non-value-added activity from the painter to release pressure on them. I’m certain it will help them focus on more productive activities. With MoonWalk becoming a colour identification and dispensing station, the shop can have a less skilled person taking care of it. Precision is the key to getting the correct colour mixed in the exact volume but that is not easy when a tinter must be added in a tiny volume. Being extremely precise over a long and busy workday is not easy. Say you add a drop too much of a tinter. If you are very diligent, you will recalculate to mix a larger volume – which is more wastage – but some people might also be tempted to take a shortcut and that could end up as an inaccurate colour match. The MoonWalk project started with analysing this problem and then coming up with an effective technical solution to solve it.”
Positive image maker
Whilst interviewing customers during the MoonWalk project, Beppe says the team stumbled onto a very positive side effect.
“We asked customers, ‘do you like your job’ and the answer was generally, yes. Then we asked, would you recommend your children did the same job – they said, no, they don’t want to work in this environment because it’s messy. Therefore, the concept of MoonWalk is not only to save time and convert it into profit, it’s also to keep the work environment cleaner and more professional. In fact, we believe MoonWalk will be a talent retention or talent enabler tool. It’s simple and effective but people also like the way it looks and feels. When we first showed the prototype to customers, we told them we had designed it to be small enough to install in almost any mixing room. It was a real eye-opener when they said, no, it’s too nice to be hidden in the mixing room. They thought it looked so good, they wanted it in the front office where they could show it off to their customers. They could even ask the car owner if they wanted to make their own colour!”
What’s next in the digital eco-system?
“PPG is looking to invest even more in the digital area and we have quite an interesting pipeline of new products. I have to keep a little bit quiet about the next big thing but it’s a platform of solutions which are all interconnected and it will be a much more immersive experience than the current arrangement. Because PPG refinish is such a global organisation, we are able to make an impact with a wide audience right across the world. That is really rewarding!”