My father, Stanley, was a practical man who knew that if you wanted to finish on time, one way was to get started earlier. He knew through experience that one of the values of hard work was learning how to work smarter, and perhaps a little less hard. He also reminded me that this was more or less a goal, not to encourage laziness, but to free up some thinking time to taking on more challenges. An Engineer friend of mine validated this with his own personal slogan, “When we run out of problems, Alan, who needs us? Be happy there’s always problems to solve!”
Good advice. Its helped get me through many difficult problems, and helped teach me to be grateful for the work, and hopeful the work would never really “end.”
Industrial IoT, or IIoT, is very much like that: there’s always interesting problems to solve, always ways to put computers and sensors to work making life a little easier so that you can work on other problems. The general need for IIoT can be:
- We need to be smart about how we use our headcount. Sending people around to manually read gauges, meters, dials, and sensors takes a lot of time and is error-prone. We can save a lot of money with a little investment, directly improving our bottom-line profits.
- A lack of safety costs lives, money, time, and can cause unbelievable carnage. We need to step up our safety efforts by remotely monitoring our facilities, our assets. Insurance companies will reduce our premiums if we show a reduction in risk.
- We saw what happened in West, Texas. The FBI says it was a deliberately set fire (arson) that caused the explosion, and that the fertilizer plant had no fences and no security. We’re not paranoid but we need to protect our assets, make sure security is solid, and monitor our facilities.
- Whether you think climate change is man-made or natural, the science says that the weather is changing. Besides, no one wants Houston to be under water more than it already is these days. Implementing environmental monitoring can help us earn greenhouse gas credits, and can keep us in compliance with regulators.
- We keep hearing that “data is the new currency”, and if we can mine that data using analytics, perhaps even machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can use it to make more money for the company.
So – being a smart person, you and your company envision IoT and IIoT helping to make money, save money, and keep y’all out of trouble. You dive in to the literature, the white papers and marketing content and blog postings to learn how IIoT can do this for you, and suddenly – you’re confused. It seems that many vendors make it about as complicated and as expensive as they can.
At Corvalent, our mission is to make IoT and IIoT work for you, and to show you practical results based on your investment. Our recent Press Release announces that we are now accepting reservations for a free, no obligation demonstration of our solutions and a consultation to make sure we’re a fit for your needs – and desires. Let us have a conversation and see if we can help you make money, save you money, and keep you out of trouble.