Nokia and Opto 22 are broadly touting the positive impact on one company that made this giant leap. BioLab, a Georgia-based subsidiary of Great Lakes Chemical Corp., distributes water treatment products and equipment for recreational water facilities of all types. To distinguish itself in what is basically a commodity business, the company set up a wireless M2M system at its customers’ pools and water parks to gather real-time data on water quality by measuring pH balance, oxidation reduction potential values, chemical levels and water temperatures.
That information is fed back into a Network Operations Center run by nPhase, where the data is aggregated, analyzed and made available to customers, suppliers and BioLab employees through a secure Web portal.
The immediate benefit is that BioLab can schedule service calls and chemical deliveries on a more timely and efficient basis to control its costs. Perhaps more importantly, however, it is providing a new service to its pool customers, since they have round-the-clock access to information on the performance data of critical equipment and the status of water quality.
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