It takes a village: revolutionizing industrial asset management
Martin Scholz
We all know that small things can have a big impact. For the operators of conveyance equipment, those small things include debris that get stuck to the underside of the belts, increasing operating costs and causing damage that increases downtime and unplanned maintenance.
I had the chance to present at Hannover Messe recently, discussing how our customer Flexco was able to address this issue thanks to the work of a robust ecosystem of partners, each bringing their own expertise to address the issue by developing and deploying the Flexco Elevate system.
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Managing industrial assets, especially those operating in remote and harsh environments, is a complicated process. Having the right information and the right time to make the right decision is a challenge. First, you need hardware to generate the data. Flexco worked with our partner Twisthink to customize the i3, a rugged edge device that can be installed onsite in less than 5 minutes and generates the raw data needed to understand conveyer operating conditions and performance.
This is where Cumulocity comes in. There are 3 main pillars of our platform that were especially critical for Flexco in this case:
- Device connectivity and management. By simplifying the connection process, Cumulocity makes it easy to view the live status of devices, update firmware OTA, and offboard devices when it is time for an asset to be retired.
- Data management. Collecting the data is only the first step. Cumulocity DataHub makes data storage more cost-effective and simplifies the process of integrating data from a variety of sources and making it available for advanced analytics, data visualizations, and AI and ML tools.
- Streaming analytics. Domain experts can design rules to monitor live data from the equipment and trigger alarms when operating conditions are out of spec.
The next stage for Flexco was to develop more in-depth analytical solutions that are tailored to the operation of conveyer equipment. This is where our partner AWS and their QuickSight solution came into play. By offloading the data from Cumulocity, they were able to develop robust models that allowed them to optimize the performance of their equipment.
The integration of these different solutions was not just a technology success but also a business success. By implementing Elevate, Flexco was able to provide their operators with real-time insights that:
- Boosted output at one site by over $1 million annually
- Avoided maintenance costs of nearly $150,000
- Saved a site over $50,000 in material and labor costs
There is no one company that can deliver all the capabilities and technology necessary for the smart products revolution. At Cumulocity, we are proud of the Connected Ecosystem of device, solution technology, cloud infrastructure, and implementation partners we have developed to solve these problems.
