Asset monitoring, wireless sensors, IOT in factories, dashboard monitoring

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, utilisation and accounting practices to help achieve industrial cost savings. With the advent of wireless sensors, mesh technology and open source data visualisation 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 visualisation 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 organisation. It is more so in the manufacturing sector, where the air quality – dust, noxious vapours, 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

Indoor positioning systems

February 5, 2019ripplesiotIOT in factories, IOT in logistics, IOT solutions

Inventory tracking on shop floor

Indoor indoor positioning can be realised easily with Ripples IoT technology. The combination of our various sensors allows accuracy of appx five feet. Ripples uses Bluetooth sensors for indoor positioning apart from detection of magnetic fields, compass, air pressure, barometer, accelerometer, gyroscope and combines them with external sensor data from Wi-Fi and Zigbee access points.

Indoor positioning depicts the localisation of persons and objects within shop floor and warehouses. This indoor localization is a technical challenge because GPS devices does not work within interior spaces, besides the need to frequently charge the batteries.

Factories and warehouses have many high value objects such as machinery, tools, spares, raw material, finished good inventory etc that need to be located easily and accounted for.

Bluetooth Low Energy mesh enabled sensors provide the right solution to accurately locate the position of these objects in a shop floor area that spans vast areas.

The benefits of deployment of indoor positioning systems are many. They include increase in productivity, anti-theft, servicing etc.

In industrial warehouses, indoor navigation and Pick-to-Light systems can make picking processes more efficient to reduce the cost of production.

Indoor navigation can help trace key resources, their deployment on the shop floor and enable knowledge transfer process.

Air quality & productivity

January 8, 2019ripplesiotIOT in factories, IOT in manufacturing, IOT solutionsair quality monitors, air quality sensors

Factories, warehouses & productivity

Most factories and warehouses these days are trying to provide a clean, healthy and safe environment for their employees with the intention of maximizing their productivity. It’s an era where we just cannot overlook the health hazards that a polluted environment brings in. The primary focus should be on improving the air quality of the office space and surroundings to ensure that all the employees spend their valuable time in a healthy environment.

Like most people believe or think, air quality is not just about the visible pollutants like smoke or smog. Volatile Organic Compounds popularly abbreviated as VOC is difficult to trace and are extremely dangerous to human health. If exposed to on a daily basis, it can compound to long-term health effects and can even hamper day to day activities. Hence it is important to monitor VOC and other harmful pollutants on a regular basis in order to ensure a productive industrial work environment.

How air quality affects overall productivity

It is an alarming fact that the quality of the air has a large influence on the industrial worker productivity. Studies and researches conducted worldwide affirms the fact that worse the air quality, the productivity was directly proportional. Be it ozone levels at outdoor or particulate matter (PM) in indoors, both had a direct impact on the worker efficiency and productivity. Maintaining good indoor air quality should be a priority across industries or verticals and I am sure you also might have felt uneasy while working in an environment with high levels of particulate matter.

Though PM concentration level increase is a concern outdoors as well, the effect is much worse indoors due to poor ventilations. The particulate matter compounds are generally undetectable to human eye but can have an adverse effect on the health when inhaled. Most modern buildings are centrally air conditioned and have generally a sealed environment.

This lack of ventilation will allow the particulate matter to settle inside the space which may be initially unharmful but can be harmful if risen to alarming levels. In most of the countries, this is becoming a major concern across each industry and vertical. The productivity issue is more so evident in the factory shop floor where the workers move around a lot, sometimes in a very confined area or space. As a result, they are constantly exposed to the pollutant matters and thus hampering their productivity.

Benefits of air quality monitoring

Most companies still feel that anything related to air quality improvement would cost them a fortune and refrain themselves from implementing the same. Sometimes even at the expense of a slightly decreased productivity. But the reality is vastly different, studies suggest that the manufacturing companies that opted to implement methods to improve indoor air quality has saved close to $20 billion annually due to increase in productivity. The situation is somewhat similar, if not better for smaller industries as well.

Ways to improve air quality monitoring

The primary aim of any company should be to curb the pollutants in any which way possible. But no matter how much you try to clean your indoors and even HVAC units, there would be a residual particulate matter that affects the air quality. Especially in a factory floor, where there would be work going on 24*7, it is extremely important to know the level of particulate matter at a given point of time. Proper ventilation is extremely important, and one must ensure that there should be a constant flow of air inside the premises.

We believe that air quality monitoring technology can play a big part in improving the air quality of an indoor space. But for that, organisation must be aware of the particulate matter or VOC level at industrial premises. The earlier one gets informed about the same, the better.

Wireless environment monitoring solutions can help you get important air quality data which in turn can aid in optimizing your workspace environment. To summarize, the greater the quality of air, greater is the workforce productivity.