Cytiva Field Engineer Gianmarco Sassi went to investigate. Our engineers deal with complex issues frequently, but in this case, “the system had intermittent failures I had never faced before, with a different error each time,” says Gianmarco. He knew that Sasha Veretennikov, the Cytiva Field Engineer most familiar with the system, would be able to help. The problem? Sasha was in Moscow, but Gianmarco and the customer were hundreds of miles away, in Italy.

The solution was to take advantage of Cytiva’s OptiRun™ Assist remote service platform. “It challenged me to combine all players’ availability — myself, Sasha, the customer’s GMP manager during an ongoing production campaign, and the customer’s IT manager,” says Gianmarco.

Rising to the challenge to minimize downtime

The team met remotely and made a plan: their first priority was getting the ÄKTA™ pilot system working again, and then they would investigate the root cause of the problem.

Joining remotely from Moscow, says Sasha, “it was like I was on site with Gianmarco — we had only two hands on site, but two brains working on the problem.”

The system was back up and running that same day.

Once the customer’s work was back on track, the engineers consulted with Cytiva’s R&D team in Uppsala, Sweden, to find out the root cause, which turned out to be a faulty connection in the unit.

“This is how we can deliver expertise to get the instrument running without travel delays,” says Sasha.