If machines could talk

Last month ana­lysts at glob­al IT research firm Gart­ner pre­dict­ed a 30 per cent year-on-year increase in “con­nect­ed things”. No sur­prise then that an increas­ing num­ber of busi­ness­es are look­ing to har­ness the pow­er of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments in a grow­ing world of con­nect­ed devices.

This explo­sion in con­nec­tiv­i­ty is a trend that ener­gy and ser­vices com­pa­ny Cen­tri­ca has already grasped firm­ly in their hands, using the inter­net of things to enhance their offer to busi­ness cus­tomers across a wide range of indus­tries.

The company’s Dis­trib­uted Ener­gy & Pow­er busi­ness uses their Panoram­ic Pow­er wire­less sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy to turn vir­tu­al­ly any ener­gy-con­sum­ing device into a smart device. Their approach is to give users real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty of their ener­gy use and insights to help them boost per­for­mance. Panoram­ic Pow­er man­ag­ing direc­tor Yaniv Var­di believes their offer is about more than just under­stand­ing how much ener­gy busi­ness­es are using.

Mr Var­di says: “We’re mak­ing it pos­si­ble for devices and machin­ery to tell our cus­tomers how they’re doing: whether they’re per­form­ing bad­ly, about to break or putting way too much ener­gy into sim­ple tasks. We do this by gath­er­ing device-lev­el ener­gy data in real time and that’s where the val­ue real­ly comes.”

Panoram­ic Pow­er is a glob­al pio­neer in ener­gy man­age­ment and has rolled out wire­less sen­sors across 1,000 sites world­wide. It’s a tech­nol­o­gy that’s already being applied to a grow­ing num­ber of indus­tries from restau­rants and retail­ers to man­u­fac­tur­ers and uni­ver­si­ties.

Self-pow­ered and wire­less, the tiny orange sen­sors “snap and fit” on to the out­go­ing elec­tri­cal wire at the cir­cuit break­er, track­ing ener­gy con­sump­tion and send­ing it to a cloud-based ana­lyt­ics sys­tem every 15 sec­onds.

From here data is sent to an easy-to-use app that can be accessed from both smart devices and com­put­ers, bring­ing action­able insights straight to the customer’s fin­ger­tips. At a frac­tion of the price of a tra­di­tion­al ener­gy man­age­ment sys­tem, the sys­tem can also report on and send real-time alerts on anom­alies, help­ing users to avoid break­downs.

Man­u­fac­tur­ers have been reap­ing the rewards of this approach, call­ing on Panoram­ic to bring down main­te­nance costs and pre­vent down­time, often see­ing sav­ings upwards of 50 per cent.

One of Mr Vardi’s stand-out exam­ples of this approach in action is among the world’s largest build­ing mate­ri­als sup­pli­ers and cement pro­duc­ers. The com­pa­ny approached the team as they were look­ing to track, man­age and report on asset per­for­mance at the equip­ment lev­el.

Self-pow­ered and wire­less, the tiny orange sen­sors ‘snap and fit’ on to the out­go­ing elec­tri­cal wire at the cir­cuit break­er, track­ing ener­gy con­sump­tion and send­ing it to a cloud-based ana­lyt­ics sys­tem every 15 sec­onds

“They were look­ing for some­thing user friend­ly that their plant man­agers could use to track their crit­i­cal machines at remote quar­ries and iden­ti­fy sys­tem per­for­mance issues in real time,” he says.

Six­ty Panoram­ic Pow­er sen­sors were installed on mon­i­tor­ing pumps, con­vey­ers and crush­ers at three loca­tions with­in one of the company’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sites. Using data from indi­vid­ual devices, the team was able quick­ly to iden­ti­fy inef­fi­cien­cies in sys­tem per­for­mance and make rec­om­men­da­tions to improve main­te­nance sched­ules and oper­a­tions.

Mr Var­di adds: “Their invest­ment paid off in just one month and result­ed in a mas­sive sav­ing of over £200k that year, just by iden­ti­fy­ing issues with one of their con­vey­or motors and some out-of-hours demand from some of their build­ings and plant.”

The busi­ness has now deployed sen­sors across 70 glob­al sites includ­ing a num­ber of UK quar­ries.

“By mon­i­tor­ing their assets at a device lev­el, we’re giv­ing cus­tomers the tools that put them in real, proac­tive con­trol of their facil­i­ties with a lev­el of vis­i­bil­i­ty that sim­ply couldn’t have been achieved before. That vis­i­bil­i­ty gives insights that will pos­i­tive­ly impact the whole organ­i­sa­tion, inspir­ing bet­ter ways of work­ing and inform­ing fast, con­fi­dent, busi­ness-build­ing deci­sions,” Mr Var­di con­cludes.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.centrica.com/takecontrol