NCR adds predictive capabilities to managed services offer

Industry first helps companies prevent service disruptions before they happen, ensuring higher availability of critical self-service technologies

LONDON – NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) today announced NCR Predictive Services, a managed service for self-service terminals in the retail and financial services sectors to increase availability and up-time levels. Unlike other offerings that proactively monitor for business disruptions and then react, NCR is taking a new approach by predicting IT failures and dispatching technicians before consumers are impacted.

NCR Predictive Services works by gathering and analysing a wide variety of data from NCR self-service devices.1 This information is then combined with the insights of the NCR Services data warehouse, which maintains operational data from more than 2 million consumer points of service and 12 million annual service actions around the world.

For example, NCR will track component activity, such as receipts printed in a self-checkout terminal or ATM. When the printer nears the end of its lifecycle, or exhibits early signs of failure, the printer can be proactively replaced before the failure occurs. When an anomaly is detected, the predictive system will suggest a resolution, which could include dispatching a service technician or starting a remote diagnostic session with an NCR technical expert.

A major US-based supermarket chain is one of the first adopters of NCR Predictive Services across thousands of self-checkout lanes.

Chris Askew, senior vice president of services, NCR Corporation, said, “This shift from a reactive service model to a predictive one will create new value for our customers by ensuring that their mission-critical self-service devices have the highest levels of availability.”

“The promise of consumer self-service is to enable a successful interaction, every time. This break-through service innovation will help our customers deliver this promise, enabling successful interactions and positive experiences for consumers.”

NCR Predictive Services also provides the opportunity for secured, audit-controlled remote access to self-service terminals for fast resolution or diagnosis of issues. An NCR customer engineer can recover and review logs, and perform problem resolution activities within minutes of an issue being identified. This further reduces the number of extended outages. A wide variety of configuration options are available, depending upon the security levels required.

According to industry analysts Gartner, “Only now are we seeing mainstream vendors beginning to move beyond mere reactive capabilities to develop service offerings that have the potential to deliver tangible business value over and above that of a technical insurance policy.2”

“Gartner end-user customer inquiry trends indicate that many organisations are becoming weary of traditional support services that concentrate on remediation after-the-fact when they would much rather have providers that at least attempt to prevent foreseeable issues becoming problematic.3”

NCR Predictive Services is the next evolution of NCR’s Interactive Insight™ which is a state of-the-art continuous improvement process to provide consistent, enterprise-wide analytics across products, customers, and countries around the world. Leveraging one of the world’s largest databases of services information, NCR can drive quality improvements into new and existing products as well as analyse a customer’s technology environment to proactively optimize their estate.

1The new service is initially available for NCR SelfServ™ Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and NCR SelfServ™ Checkout self-checkout terminals. NCR Predictive Services does not gather, store or analyze data regarding the individual users of self-service devices.

2Gartner (February 2010), “Market Insight: Introducing the Gartner Product Support Maturity Scale”
3Gartner (November 2010), “How Proactive is Your Support Provider”

About NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a global technology company leading how the world connects, interacts and transacts with business. NCR’s assisted- and self-service solutions and comprehensive support services address the needs of retail, financial, travel, healthcare, hospitality, entertainment, gaming and public sector organizations in more than 100 countries. NCR (www.ncr.com) is headquartered in Duluth, Georgia.

NCR is a trademark of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.

News Media Contact
Helen McInnes
NCR Corporation
206 Marylebone Road
London
NW1 6LY
+44(0)7748 761 041
helen.mcinnes@ncr.com

This release was published on openPR.