With over 40 years of field engineering and conveyor maintenance expertise, Mighty Lube Systematic Lubrication delivers technologically advanced equipment and lubricants to manufacturers in diverse markets, including Automotive, Agricultural Equipment, and Food Processing. Manufacturers around the globe utilize Mighty Lube’s conveyor monitoring systems, chain lubrication equipment, power brush cleaners, and other products to help ensure their conveyor chains stay up and running as scheduled.
By pinpointing maintenance needs and identifying problems before they become costly, Mighty Lube’s state-of-the-art conveyor monitoring systems help manufacturers eliminate downtime due to conveyor failure. Customers may have dozens or even hundreds of chain-based conveyor systems and if a single conveyor chain breaks, it can cost them up to $20,000 to repair, as well as the cost of the system being down until a new chain is installed. Maintaining and lubricating the conveyor chains can save customers hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
The Challenge
Mighty Lube provides customers with a printed installation manual for every product purchased. Eventually, the manuals may get lost, damaged, or otherwise separated from the unit. As a result, Mighty Lube sales representatives — who hold degrees in mechanical engineering — would often get phone calls and emails from customers with routine questions, taking them away from selling. Mighty Lube is known for being an innovator in the market and its Vice President, Anthony Brown, wanted to adopt an advanced digital solution for producing and sharing instructional content to provide customers with 24x7 access to highly visual interactive online documentation for an enhanced learning experience, empowering them to be more self-sufficient. At the same time, they wanted to control production and document management expenses given the vast number of products on offer.
Brown and Marketing Manager, Mikayla Boucher, discovered Canvas Envision while attending a manufacturing industry conference. The Envision platform delivers value across the manufacturing organization by connecting front-line workers — including assembly technicians, installation technicians, field service technicians, and others — to the latest design engineering and product information in a highly visual and interactive way that’s ideally suited for today’s diverse workforce.
Brown was immediately impressed by Envision and adopted it for several reasons, most notably Envision’s support for QR codes and its inherent ability to provide persistent links to help Mighty Lube store and manage its vast collection of manuals. In addition, Brown wanted a solution that offered support for 3D CAD files and Envision ticked this box as well. While all Mighty Lube manuals include images, some manuals now include interactive 3D models thanks to Envision, meaning plant technicians and other workers can click on models in order to zoom in on or rotate a part, for example, to gain greater clarity. This is especially helpful for customers who haven’t had training or for those who prefer visuals.
Brown’s vision for a new solution included the ability to place QR code stickers on each unit it sold so customers could open a camera on a smartphone, tablet, or other device and point it at the sticker to see instructions on demand. In Brown’s search for a solution, he couldn’t find anything like Envision on the market that provided all the functionality he desired.
Since adopting Envision in mid-2023, Boucher has converted approximately 30 Mighty Lube installation manuals to Envision for equipment that has already been installed at customer sites. The shift to interactive content has dramatically cut down on the number of phone calls and emails from customers, enabling sales reps to stay focused on business development activities. She notes that moving to Envision has cut the amount of time she spends managing the vast number of Mighty Lube documents. “I'm saving about 2 days a month on editing existing manuals and creating new ones because Envision can handle everything we need to work with in one place.”
In addition to using Envision to create and share interactive installation manuals, Boucher has also used it to convert a 500-slide PowerPoint used in its Mighty Lube OPCO Certified Specialist (MOCS) course, which is held throughout the year to train its customers in how to establish a highly effective conveyor chain lubrication and monitoring program. The specialized course uses interactive content and encompasses hands-on training to ensure a thorough understanding and proficient maintenance of the equipment lines from Mighty Lube and its alliance partner OPCO.
In the past, because many course attendees didn’t have a software license for Microsoft Office or even a PDF viewer, they couldn’t easily access the presentation file when they returned to their plant and needed to refer to the instructional content. Now, course attendees are sent a link to the instructional content and can access the material from any browser, whenever they need to. When customers attend the MOCS course, they become familiar with how the content can be accessed because the equipment used in the hands-on training course features QR code stickers that the instructor clicks on to launch the training material. Brown and Boucher expect this to further reduce the amount of time Mighty Lube sales reps need to spend fielding questions from customers about routine matters that are easily addressed by the training content.
Looking Ahead
Moving forward, when new equipment, such as Mighty Lube’s next-generation monitoring system, is delivered to customers, the team will add QR code stickers directing technicians and other plant workers to point a camera at the code to launch on-demand instructions. Because many of Mighty Lube’s customers are food processors, food grade-ready QR codes for manuals in this market will be etched on metal plates that are screwed onto the Mighty Lube equipment so there’s no risk of stickers becoming damaged or detached during the manufacturing process.
The team at Mighty Lube continues to rely on Canvas Envision to make it easier for their staff and customers to get the most from the company’s product portfolio. By making it easy to access interactive information in Envision from a QR code, to updating manuals and training materials, the company has positioned itself as an innovator in a very competitive sector.
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