How Minipan boosted sales by 35% through digital services with IXON

The benefits of connected machines are increasingly clear to machine builders, but not always to their customers. The experience of Minipan, a manufacturer in the bakery industry, shows positive results in terms of service quality and ROI.

Minipan was founded in 1957 as a company to build machines for bakeries. The turning point came in 1985 with a strong impulse to research and development activities and the inclusion, alongside the artisan machines, of new industrial lines for the production of savory snacks, bread, pizza, cookies and gluten-free products.

Minipan's activity is marked by two main characteristics: high customization and flexibility of machinery, and a predominantly foreign market share (70 percent): the United States, Spain, Great Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand.

^{The headquarters of Minipan in Massa Lombarda, Italy}

Challenge

Geographical distance and the technological particularities of the markets prompted Minipan to seek a new and more high-performance solution for remote support. Previously, remote assistance was done using their customers' software. Customers had to give access to Minipan's engineers by authorizing their public IP. This solution strongly limited testers and service engineers to the presence of a programmer and cumbersome management of IP addresses. 

The demand for technologies and services from distant and diverse markets is a challenge for machine builders. Minipan's experience demonstrates the central role of a digital service proposition in customer relations. 

Franco Fusari, Sales Director at Minipan, explains: “Our most important market is North America, and we are competing with multinationals from all over the world that have headquarters in the United States. The first question in a business negotiation is always, 'and how do you handle after-sales?' Showing a tool that enables us to provide good after-sales service gives more assurance.'' 

This perspective opens up a scenario in which digital services are no longer an optional extra to be used reactively, when the failure has already occurred. Digital services are now an integral part of the machine builder's technology proposition.

Solution

The search for an intuitive tool to manage devices, users and access for maintenance led to the standardization of IXON: “IXON was adopted mainly for two reasons: first, for easier and more dynamic internal use for after-sales service. We created a user group for testers and service engineers so they can independently handle customer issues without being supported by the software department. 

The second reason is the provision of tangible remote service to the customer, because connections to the machine are logged and traceable. The creation of dashboards is intuitive and simple, so a clear machine status can be provided to the customer, such as plant production and monitoring of production kilograms or those fed into the machine.'' says Antonio Ruzza, Automation Engineer & Software Design Manager at Minipan.

Desktop and smartphone dashboards related to plant production and hopper load status

The IXON Cloud platform enables advanced user management, with the creation of groups and permissions, as well as the ability to provide time-based access (used by Minipan for external developers), all visible in the access log (audit trail). The developer can create data visualization dashboards, entering notes about interventions in the Service Logbook and selecting information to share with the customer.

Both us and our customers can connect to the platform and cybersecurity-related maintenance activities are handled by IXON. This solves many problems for us

Enrico Cardinali, IT manager at Minipan

“Our sales engineers can view connected devices in one tool, which becomes interactive: from Italy we can change device settings, and the customer views the updated panel on site. This helps us a lot in a context of high staff turnover at the customer. Often engineers trained by the manufacturer leave the company, and we have to make up for the lack of an experienced engineer on site by training the next one.'' Ruzza adds. ''As programmers we now work considerably less on after-sales. We are involved in far fewer service cases and have more time to devote to software development activities.”

Result

Fusari continues, ''IXON is in line with our sales style. We did formal presentations with our customers' decision makers, doing a real-time demonstration with the machines in our test lab. We got the machine up and running, running a test with their dough and their product, showing operation from a contiguous room, as if remotely. We showed how to connect and what they would see on the portal once the machine was installed.” 

Testing laboratory at the Minipan site

The results since 2023 are also visible in terms of optimization of resources and profits: “We can handle more situations than before, with the same amount of after-sales department resources. We are working and selling much more and have many more customers around the world. Last year, our company increased sales by +35 percent, and the current order book allows us to make an even more positive forecast for this year. IXON is a tool that is helping our growth.”