This week is that time of year again for the 32nd annual International Maintenance Conference (IMC) where practitioners, other experts and your peers are here talking and sharing reliability and maintenance stories. Not to imply your peers aren’t experts; depending on how you read that first sentence. This isn’t just about CMMS systems like Maximo, although there are a lot of those users here today too.
I just finished listening to a great presentation about how they cut costs and increased efficiency within their water treatment plant. Water consumption and usage is down (think of the reduced flow toilets, etc), but they figured out how to do more with it and save time, which results in saved money.
There are many track on IoT and the Industrial Internet of Things. One earlier today showed many examples of where sensors can be placed to help gather data and identify potential areas of failure. The communication and notifications are key pieces to such a solution. It’s not good enough to only gather the information; rather what you do with it and the decisions and automations performed from it.
Think of the situation where something is vibrating too much. Sometimes we humans can’t hear the noises created, or we’re too far away to gather the information ourselves. In come sensors and their built in communication and alerts. Industrial sensors are different than the items you can buy for your home or other personal space; same concept and yet much more durable for the extreme conditions.
It’s exciting to hear about how much the world is moving towards and how much more machine information is able to help us make decisions. More and more equipment will have smart sensors on them very soon and it’s a matter of time before nearly everyone will pay attention. Several statistics were presented and so much it’s hard to write them all down. I look forward to the presentations after the conference is over!
Vendor Booths start tomorrow and have open hours the rest of the week. Perficient is center on the back wall – follow the big booths straight back and we hope to see you. Let’s chat about what you’re learning, what you hope to learn and network; if you can spare a few minutes, please…
