Heidelberg has sold its information management arm Docufy to Elvaston Capital Management. The move will raise some €20 million for the press manufacturer. At the same time Xerox is creating CareAR, a business in the same sector of technical documentation creation and management, both in print and increasingly in digital formats.
CareAR will encompass XMPie, DocuShare content management, an artificial intelligence engine developed at Xerox’s Parc research centre and CareAR’s service experience platform. This is in essence an augmented reality system to enable remote service and online collaboration.
Docufy’s customers are centred on the German speaking world with software to ensure that the documentation needed by service engineers is consistently up to date. Currently most are provided on paper, but digital delivery via a display unit in a truck or bus, for example, or a mobile app, is coming.
Heidelberg CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer explains that the shift into augmented reality and digital delivery is a different direction to that which Heidelberg wishes to go.
“As part of our portfolio analysis and concentration on our core activities, we have come to the conclusion that Docufy’s planned strategy for the future can be supported in a more targeted manner by a new partner,” he says. That includes creation of an Industry 4.0 InfoHub and a move into more international markets.
That could bring it into competition with the new Xerox business. This has received a $10 million equity investment from Service Now whose field service management tools are integrated with CareAR’s augmented reality platform.
As well as reducing the number of service calls needed, this style of software addresses the need to replace the highly skilled and experienced technicians as they retire and enables greater access to the data which will improve customer service and minimise down time.
“Xerox has positioned CareAR to deliver capabilities that service intensive industries need, with real time instruction, visual tools and access to data at the tip of any user’s fingertips, all driven by predictive artificial intelligence,” says Xerox vice chairman and CEO John Visentin. “By creating a platform that is intuitive to a digitally native workforce, and with investment from ServiceNow, we believe CareAR will define and grow the service experience management category, disrupting industries at a time when it’s needed most.”
The sale by Heidelberg continues the strategy of focusing on what CFO Marcus Wassenberg calls “core growth areas”, adding: “This creates further financial scope for Heidelberg.” And it enables the company to raise Ebitda forecasts from 6-7% on revenue to 7-7.5%.
