We ran the Industrial IoT session a second time

We ran the Industrial IoT session a second time on Wednesday 29 November 2023, four weeks after the first. Same two presenters, same hour, more room for questions.

Why twice

The first session ran out of time in the Q&A, which is usually a sign that the questions were better than the slides. Enough people asked for a second date that it was easier to run it again than to reply individually.

What got more time the second time

• “Do we have to run new wiring?” Almost always no. The sensors are wireless and battery-powered, the base station needs one power outlet, and the readings leave the building over the cellular network rather than over your IT infrastructure.
• “Will this work on a machine with no PLC?” Yes, and those machines are frequently where the money is. A press with no controls at all still draws current, still consumes air, and still runs hot — all three are measurable from outside it.
• “What happens to the data?” It goes to one dashboard your team logs into. Nothing we install can write a command back to your equipment; the system reads, it does not control.
• “How long before we see anything?” The first surprise usually arrives inside a week, and it is usually overnight consumption on something everybody believed was switched off.

The part that stuck

Somebody asked, more or less, whether all of this was worth the trouble for a factory that already “knows where its problems are”. Our answer then is our answer now: every factory knows where its problems are believed to be. The meter is how you find out which of those beliefs is correct — and, more often, which expensive problem nobody had a belief about at all.