Take full advantage of your IoT infra with Preventive Maintenance

Blog / Take full advantage of your IoT infra with Preventive Maintenance

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.”- Albert Einstein

As per recorded history, any technology or revolution that connected people, objects, or places has created a disruption, mostly for the greater good. Inventions like airplanes, cellphones, and the internet are a great example. Organizations like Facebook, Uber, Skype are real-world examples of revolutionary companies. In the middle of all these organizations and technologies which have joined the list of household names, there is one concept which is lesser-known by the general public: IoT (Internet of things).

An environment where devices, objects, humans, or animals are assigned a UID with the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring any “human-to-human” or “human-to-computer” interaction. Without a doubt, IoT is connecting the dots and making systems more efficient. As a consequence, there is increased adoption of IoT across industries, especially in the manufacturing industry with a 300% increase in adoption in the past five years.

If you are involved with a manufacturing business in any capacity, chances are high that either you are already leveraging IoT or are about to. The invention of the wheel was quite a revolution and today we see it everywhere from a moving toy car to a 640 tons Antonov An-225. Similarly, the internet came as another revolution, and applications like IoT are creative manifestations of that revolution.

Now there is a new concept in manufacturing and logistics which is leveraging IoT to transform the way these two industries improve their efficiency: Preventive Maintenance. According to ITIC, an hour of downtime is costing 81% of enterprises an average of $300k. Often miss-calculations are made while marking maintenance dates on the calendar leading to either over or under maintenance of the machine. If your setup is not given the required care at the correct time, it comes back demanding the replacement of an expensive part of files for retirement altogether, in both cases, drilling a deep hole in your pocket.

Preventive maintenance is an AI-based solution built by Pluto7 that leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to determine the remaining useful life of a machine or equipment and predicts when it is going to fail. Working along with Google IoT Core, the solution takes your IoT infrastructure to a whole new level. Here are some of the reasons to start using Preventive Maintenance:

Seamless device management:

This is a coarse-grain way of device management. All the devices are given a unique identity and are supported with an authentication mechanism when the connection is attempted. All devices can be remotely controlled with the cloud.

A robust protocol connection:

Protocols are provided with endpoint connections using a protocol bridge which also enables automatic load balancing for all the connected devices. It uploads all the device telemetry to Cloud which can be accessed by downstream analytics systems.

Enhanced end to end security:

It enables end-to-end security using asymmetric key authentication over TLS 1.2; CA signed certificates can be used to verify device ownership. Devices supporting the IoT structure security requirements can deliver full-stack security.

Your global kingdom of devices:

All your devices around the globe can be connected to the cloud environment which can be managed from one place. The solution uses Pub/Sub underneath, which retains data for seven days.

Unmatched data analytics:

Gathering data is one thing and deriving meaningful insights from it is another. Preventive Maintenance solution leverages machine learning technologies like Google BigQuery to deliver downstream real-time analysis of your equipment’s conditions.

Horizontal and vertical scaling:

Once you deploy the solution on a smaller set of devices, Preventive Maintenance can become essential for your entire setup. This solution is powered by Google Cloud, it scales up easily for any number of devices and can serve the demand for performance enhancements.

Governance:

The solution ensures data security and relevancy by applying IAM roles to device registries to control user access across the infrastructure.

Bring ML to the edge:

Preventive maintenance solution connects the devices with Google Cloud IoT edge and leverages Edge TPU to run the trained model on edge devices to deliver unprecedented speed for real-time response.

High frequency with lower latency:

Preventive Maintenance is about avoiding downtime and keeping your machines healthy. Keeping that mind, we built this solution where commands are fast, frequent, with one-time directives sent to devices.

Caters offline operations and resource-constrained devices:

It gives your resource-constrained devices offline capabilities by connecting them with a gateway, which performs tasks on behalf of devices like communicating with the cloud, connecting to the internet, and authenticating credentials.

Gain real-time metrics:

Using Stackdriver monitoring, the solution creates dashboards to provide real-time metrics and also sets up alerts based on metrics thresholds making your infrastructure immune to unforeseen situations.

Reality check:

All these words might look theoretical or at times even fiction to some readers. Here is a real-world example of a manufacturer who makes our weekends memorable: ABInBev.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) makes some of the world’s oldest and most popular beer brands — including Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois. Before process transformation, they used meters to monitor and react to adverse conditions, such as a change in pressure. A top priority at AB InBev was optimizing the K Filter that kicks in at the end of beer brewing, right before packaging.

The challenge they faced was regulating the pressure in and across the filter, which is a complicated process, involving many unpredictable variables. All these tasks being manually checked, brought in human errors which influenced the taste of the beer. The AI solutions built by Pluto7 Consulting Inc, helped AbinBev increase in the filter run length by 40%-50%. Our smart solutions not only helped AbinBev cut their manufacturing costs but also brought higher consistency in the taste of beer produced. Here is the entire case study.

Here is a detailed interview with ABInBev leadership explaining their experience with Preventive Maintenance: Cheers!

Getting your hands dirty:

With all your IoT data being processed appropriately, our Preventive Maintenance ML solution can help you transform your manufacturing centers into factories of the future.

At Pluto7, we know it is important that structural components of your core functional aspect do not break down without any prior warning, and that is what makes Preventive Maintenance essential for you. You can get started by launching the solution on the GCP marketplace or reach out to us for a free trial.