It is not much help for an operator to look at a machine that just stands there, with a red light flashing on the CPU.
The easy part is to make a machine work.
The hard part is to make it work or at least behave satisfactorily in "abnormal" situations, such as when a part is stuck inside, the operator make "stupid" decisions, or some part is defective.
For us it means that we have detailed error messages for any concievalbe and any unconcievable situation (as many as we can think of). If the error is technically difficult for a local operator to solve, then the error message can at least help with narrowing down the cause, and with forwardng the information to an expert.
In addition to the online error messages, there is a more detailed troubleshooting in the manual.
Remote access is a nice additional help. Hmmm .... since you didnt know how to figure out a simple profibus problem, how would you have helped your endcustomer over VPN ? (maybe I was a little harsh there).