IOT solutions manufacturing, warehousing, data visualisation

Measure & monitor legacy machines

March 10, 2019ripplesiotData visualisation, IOT in factoriescurrent monitoring, equipment utilisation

IOT for industrial monitoring & cost savings

Legacy plant and machinery in many factories lack the technology to bring machine intelligence on operational factors that govern their performance, utilization and accounting practices to help achieve industrial cost savings. With the advent of wireless sensors, mesh technology and open source data visualization tools, deploying such solutions have become easy and affordable. Let us discuss a few of the factors

Measuring power consumption of critical equipment

Implementing an activity-based costing methodology in a manufacturing or services environment would need to know the cost incurred on each equipment. For this purpose, our modules provide the power consumed by your legacy machines.

Monitor utilisation of high-value equipment to ensure productivity

The hours used by each of the legacy equipment will be helpful for the plant manager schedule proactive maintenance and stock consumables and spares accordingly.

Wear and tear of machines to provide proactive maintenance

Using vibration and other models, data visualization tools can help the shop floor managers detect anomalies in the critical components of plant and machinery.

Environment monitoring in factories

People health, safety play an important role in the productivity of any organization. It is more so in the manufacturing sector, where the air quality – dust, noxious vapors, humidity, etc play a big role.

Inventory management and cost savings

Timely availability of resources, at the right place, can help shave a few cents from the factory operations. Industrial tracking solutions for assets and people will help in improving production workflow and supervision.

Industrial cost savings using IIOT solutions

Wireless mesh networks can be deployed inside factories and warehouses to save on the deployment and maintenance costs. Besides, retrofit solutions ensure quick deployment (in under 30 minutes in most cases). Long battery life of solar-powered solutions further reduces the cost of ownership.

Check out the industrial cost saving, factory equipment monitoring and asset tracking solutions from RipplesIOT

Factory equipment utilisation

March 4, 2019ripplesiotData visualisation, IOT asset tracking, IOT in factories, IOT in manufacturing

IOT for activity based costing

How Condition Monitoring solutions can lead to a higher ROI

Activity Based Costing is widely used in the manufacturing industry. However, it comes with its fair share of criticism because it is difficult to correctly estimate the amount of resources required to perform a task efficiently.

Two of the key performance indicators (KPI) in the manufacturing industry are MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and MTTR (Mean Time To Repair). MTBF is a performance metric that measures the time elapsed between when a failure occurs and the next time it happens. MTTR is the time spent to conduct repairs once a failure occurs. Both these KPI’s are calculated by dividing the total time taken respectively by the number of failures. While these are good indicators of performance, they are flawed. Failures cannot be foreseen as they are not uniform and can occur at any point of time. In the case of repairs, it may take longer for some than others. That is why these metrics lack real-life accuracy.

Industrial automation & equipment utilisation

Using condition monitoring solutions, it is possible to successfully obtain operational information from machines which are variable in nature. The actual operational times of the machines can be analysed and resources can be allocated accurately. Maintenance can be scheduled based on the number of hours used. This eliminates the need to estimate KPIs like Mean Time Between Failures and Mean Time To Repair by providing us actual figures of usage. No excess resources will need to be allocated . This will in turn improve operational efficiency and ultimately lead to a higher Return on Investment (ROI).

IOT solutions can help to improve the audit and scheduling of pro active maintenance schedules by gathering operational data such as hours used, operating environment, power consumed and abnormal handling of equipment by users. Helps to ascertain Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean time Between Repairs (MTBR)

Most of factories and warehouses employ technical staff to conduct periodic check and repairs to ensure the asset equipment are up and running all the time. Unexpected breakdowns can lead to loss in revenue, opportunity costs, unsatisfied customer etc. Using our IOT in maintenance solutions, your own technicians will be able to remotely monitor the fixed assets to help prevent breakdowns.

IOT industrial automation & maintenance

Implementing a retrofit IOT solution with non invasive sensors and integrating data visualisation tools can help businesses to improve equipment uptime, track and trace of critical plant and machinery in factories, shipyards, airports, supply chain environment, warehouses etc, which otherwise takes many man hours of unproductive work.

Anomaly detection solutions for industrial automation can help businesses improve the operational excellence by pro active maintenance, optimising spares inventory and reducing energy consumption of various heavy industry equipment.

Call us at the following numbers to more on how IOT industrial automation sensors and IOT in maintenance management using anomaly detection solutions can help improve asset efficiency and reduce breakdowns.

BLE – 400 meters + 18 year battery life

February 4, 2019ripplesiotData visualisation, IOT sensors, IOT solutionsBLE 200 meters, BLE battery life, BLE sensors, data visualiation, Dell edge gateway, indoor positioning sensors, IoT Asia 2019, Long range BLE sensors

Asset tracking & monitoring sensors

BLE for indoor positioning

Our solutions can be integrated into a mesh system that provides indoor positioning systems for monitoring production workflow in factories. Tracking of high-value assets – cargo, equipment tools, forklifts, etc at a frequency of half an hour. The solution allows understanding people flow at offices and factories which help improve productivity. Access to critical resources at hospitals – wheelchairs, stretchers, etc. Easily locate drills, trolleys and other equipment on the shop floor.

Industrial condition and environment monitoring solutions

Easy to deploy BLE sensors
Up to 18-year battery life
Compact, robust and waterproof sensors
Long range – up to 450 meters
Bundled with gateway & data visualisation tools
RoHS compliant

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was designed and developed by Bluetooth special interest group. This innovative technology is used for short-range communication and can be applied in M2M applications and IoT. Bluetooth is a standard for short-range radio communications, originally developed as a cable replacement to connect portable industrial grade devices. It uses the pre-certified Industrial Scientific Medicine radio band (ISM) 2.45 GHz and Frequency Hopped Spread Spectrum (FHSS) as medium access. The required and nominal range is 10m (transmit power 0dBm) and an external power amplifier can be added to extend the range up to 100m.

Nowadays, BLE sensors with a range of up to 500 meters and a battery life of up to 15 years are available for ready industrial deployment. Mission critical applications in manufacturing and warehouse monitoring environment represent an interesting prospect for the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensors. As a low cost, low power, long-range radio technology, it is particularly suitable for this kind of industrial applications, where the radio link reliability is very important in order to reach high demands on deterministic behavior and real-time performance, providing measurement on temperature, movement, vibration, location, etc.

Applications using BLE sensors

Warehouse environment monitoring & people tracking
Factory equipment condition monitoring including effective utilization
Track unauthorized entry/exit and movement of equipment
Monitor delays in supply-chain environment
Hospital pharmacy, laboratory & operation theater monitoring

BLE gateway programming

Being a DELL seed program partner, Ripples IOT industry 4.0 starter kit consist of DELL edge gateways. The DELL edge gateways are one of the best when it comes to monitoring and managing efficient IoT data.

The Dell Edge gateway running Ubuntu core of a good choice for industrial grade BLE gateway for industrial monitoring. With the help of data visualisation tools, shop floor managers can easily facilitate condition monitoring, track & trace and other functions for Industry 4.0 practices.

Dell Edge 3000 series gateways are intelligent devices designed to aggregate, secure, analyze and relay data from diverse sensors and equipment at the edge of the network. These gateways bridge both legacy systems and modern sensors to the internet, helping you to get business insights from the real-time, pervasive data in your machines and equipment. We integrate sensor devices from leading vendors to provide data management and visualisation solutions. We can also provide API’s for cloud/analytics platform integration. All our solutions are developed in open-source platforms

Call us to know more about our competencies in providing industrial grade asset monitoring and tracking solutions for manufacturing and warehousing industries.