How do You Manage Alerts from Your IIoT?

Equipment manufacturers are rapidly adopting IIoT to offer asset health monitoring and predictive maintenance subscriptions for new sources after market revenue (reference IIoT enables New Revenue Sources for Equipment Manufacturers).  This technology adoption started with expensive million dollar plus equipment that is both complex and critical.  Now, those OEMs with equipment costing as low as $50,000 are adopting this approach for obtaining new sources of relatively high margin revenue.  Most of these initiatives apply to new products that will take time for development of an installed base and associated revenue.  However, others like Kaeser Kompressoren sell modules that can be added to existing equipment in its installed base.  This upgrading of existing installations allows for more rapid adoption and growth.

Capturing and Managing Alerts from Multiple Suppliers

Now, view this trend from the user’s perspective. As adoption grows, a large industrial site could have hundreds of suppliers with predictive maintenance services.  Currently, these alerts are often emails going to an individual without established procedures for:

• Assessment and validation to remove false positives


• Business processes to engage maintenance to repair


• Governance for changes in personnel and processes

Communications of issues with maintenance is often ad-hoc. All too commonly, alerts become lost, and the equipment fails as predicted – just the outcome the subscription service is meant to prevent. As IIoT adoption with predictive maintenance services grows among OEMs, managing these alerts will become a significant new role for end-users.

IFS IoT Business Connector Platform

IFS recognized this issue and focused its IIoT initiative on managing alerts.  Please refer to Dick Slansky’s blog posting earlier this month for a description of the new IFS IoT Business Connector Platform.

This new cloud service includes an “IoT Hub” to apply analytics to IIoT data using Microsoft Azure to generate alerts. However, it does not assume all of the alerts will be generated by this analytics platform.  The “IFS IoT Gateway” accepts alerts from other platforms.  The “IFS IoT Controller” helps the user rank, manage and covert chosen alerts into maintenance work orders in the enterprise asset management (EAM) or field service management (FSM) systems.



Recommendations

The adoption of IIoT for predictive maintenance will lower unplanned downtime only if the alerts are acted upon.

• To prevent lost alerts, users should establish business processes and governance


• Suppliers of enterprise software should review their offering to assess the functions and workflows needed for managing alerts and converting the appropriate ones into work orders