Developing and maintaining homegrown remote monitoring and diagnostics software that delivers on customersā expectations also requires expertise and lots of time. It is also expensive. Furthermore, abandoning and writing off the sunk costs of homegrown systems affects peopleās pride and, in some cases, peopleās livelihood. All in all, itās not an easy decision to make.
Ā
These recent conversations left me wondering: Why do OEMs bother with trying to deliver homegrown remote monitoring and diagnostics solutions themselves? OEMs are, by nature, engineering organizations, not software and IT domain experts. And yet these companies frequently acquire and retain an HMI engineer, a software engineer (or two or three), and an IT team to figure out how to make software applications work on top of their machines, when instead they could go the āapplianceā route and save themselves tons of time at work.
The type of appliance Iām referring to here is a pre-engineered and pre-built solution for a specific problem that significantly reduces the engineering costs and risks for customers. To provide an idea of how such an appliance works, consider GE Intelligent Platformsā new Equipment Insight solution. This appliance, powered by GEās Proficy software and RXi industrial PCs, enables OEMs to securely collect data from connected machines, analyze that data, and get actionable information to people to deliver better service levels and optimize equipment performance, leading to new revenue streams and improved customer satisfaction.
Alarms, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and key performance indicator (KPI) data can be viewed in a single, accessible screen on an OEMās mobile device using Equipment Insight. Plus, a customized risk index provides advanced analytics and predictive detection, allowing OEMs to contact customers before their process goes down.
When it comes to keeping tabs on an OEMās machinery once itās deployed in the field, the appliance route to remote monitoring and diagnostics can effectively reduce costsāin terms of money, resources and timeāby leveraging a small number of experts to monitor and troubleshoot an entire fleet of assets.
Learn more about Equipment Insight at the GE Intelligent Platforms site.