Ubiquitous Monitoring
reproduced, with permission, from Boston Business Journal, Dec. 12, 2003
By W. David Stephenson
I’m conflicted.
On one hand, I love the new — new technologies, new strategies, new gizmos.
On the other hand, I’m a cheap Scot, drive a 14 yr. old car, and live by the old Yankee credo of “use it up, wear it out, make do, or do with out.”
Two local startups have teamed up to reconcile my conflicts. In the process, they promise to revolutionize one of the last areas that could dramatically reduce corporate costs while simultaneously optimizing performance: maintenance.
Millennial Net makes “i-Bean” ultralow-power self-organizing sensor devices. They connect monitoring and control appliances over low-data-rate wireless networks. Recently, it completed a proof-of-concept demonstration with Ferro Solutions, in which the latter company’s devices, which convert vibrations (even ones so small that they’re barely detectable by human touch) into minute amounts of electricity, were sufficient to power the”I-Beans.”
By combining these technologies, monitoring gauges can now be installed where there’s no electricity and where a person can’t physically inspect them. Data are relayed wirelessly, and on a real-time basis.
Potentially, this combination can lead to what I’d call ubiquitous monitoring: deployed everywhere, and always on.
Ubiquitous monitoring’s potential applications include industrial, medical, and consumer ones, such as pipeline flow, remote monitoring of patient conditions, and home automation.
Equally as interesting as this technology is the management innovation it will require. Fully capitalizing on the new technology will require a fundamental rethinking of maintenance policies and how they can be elevated from a low-priority tactic to competitive strategy.
Historically, maintenance’s low relative priority was almost inevitable because of technological limits. The image that comes to mind is of someone schlepping from gauge to gauge in a factory recording readings, then taking them back to a supervisor. Unless the readings were dangerously out of whack, they probably were only analyzed long after, if at all.
By contrast, getting data on a continuous, real-time basis will allow a wide range of benefits:
- Preventive maintenance will cut repair and replacement costs. For example, being able to deploy many sensors and gauges throughout a process will allow pinpointing emerging problems within a complex system so that only the problem component will have to be replaced, reducing the chance of catastrophic failure.
- Insurance costs can be cut: companies that show they monitor equipment continuously and can respond rapidly to problems are less likely to encounter costly failures, so their premiums should be reduced.
- Users may be able to create new services for their clients: a building management company, for example, may be able to offer tenants time-of-day pricing for utilities that would cut their monthly costs if they can know and control energy use on a real-time basis.
- Processes such as chemical production can be optimized because management will be able to control every portion of the process on a real-time basis, adjusting flows in response to minute variations in demand.
- It could be a boon to homeland security, improving security by spotlighting possible intrusions at high-risk facilities (while the economic benefits and low deployment and operating costs would make the investment more palatable to corporate management).
- Companies could gain competitive advantage through real-time pricing. At least one natural gas pipeline CEO now has a real-time readout of pipeline flow on his browser, allowing his company to continuously adjust its prices in response to the 24 x 7 auction systems to which regional utility pools have switched.
I suspect, given the range of potential applications and payback, that Millennial Net and Ferro Solutions will quickly commercialize the self-powered wireless monitoring technology. Then the challenge will shift to corporate managers.
Ubiquitous monitoring will only realize its full potential if maintaining the old become as much a corporate priority as investing in the radically new.
We must start visualizing operations as a never-ending loop in which feedback from the shop floor or external sources is used to continually, and on a real-time basis, optimize operations. That requires that cyclical thinking replace the traditional linear approach that was mandated by technology limits, in which operational data were hard to gather and could only be reported after the fact.
One key to the transformation may come if, counter-intuitively, bright young managers choose maintenance as a career. Their advancement may accelerate if they capitalize on ubiquitous monitoring to turn what’s always been an overhead item and headache into new services and new revenues With ubiquitous monitoring and smart people who appreciate its potential, maintenance will finally get its due, as an integral part of the operations cycle.
Technorati tags: homeland security Ferro Solutions Millennial Net mesh network location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0 preventative maintenance smart dust mesh
