Posts Tagged internetofthings
Driving Decisions on Buying Electric Vehicles
Last month’s article on electric vehicles elicited responses ranging from “hippy, coombyah, PC, Greenie horse poo” through to “Where can I get one of these gosh darn, new-fangled, electric buggies?”. Thanks to you all for your feedback.
Rather than take sides in the debate about whether or not we should be buying electric vehicles, let’s examine the drivers that inform the decisions we will all make around which vehicles our companies buy.
Price
Electric vehicles are expensive. Buying electric vehicles today, we can expect to pay BMW prices for Corolla performance. As...
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Infusing New Operational Intelligence into Old Equipment
A client of ours recently installed energy sensors across two areas of their facility. One area is significantly old using good practice equipment for the time, the other brand new and utilising advancements in equipment technology. Both areas are similarly sized and perform the same operation, however, measuring energy performance between the old and new will provide our client with real insights when making future strategic decisions.
While our client operates a large portfolio of facilities around the North Island, they are using this specific site as a sandbox environment, a...
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Is New Zealand business ready for Artificial Intelligence?
A decade or more ago I used to defeat chess playing computers for a small wager. It was simple stuff really – just find a weakness and ruthlessly exploit it – in my mind computers were basically binary and thus “stupid”. Today chess masters are fair game for computers. My party trick is ancient history and I am frankly a little scared about what happens when computers can outsmart humankind. Terminator anyone?
Some would argue that we have nothing to fear. Others feel exactly the opposite.
Stephen Hawking recently wrote “The full development of AI could spell the end for...
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The Corporate Power Perspective: Evaluating Strategic Energy
The focus of the recent Energy Management Association of New Zealand (EMANZ) conference held in Wellington centered on disruptive technologies and how this would impact the traditional models of the energy supply chain. While presentations focused mainly on generators, distributors and retailers, customers also need to consider how emerging technology can drive strategic decision making when it comes to the consumption of energy.
The installation of smart metering over the last few years throughout New Zealand has assisted mainly companies that generate, distribute and retail...
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Improve Operations in 3 Steps
Effective energy management is the foundation of operational excellence. As businesses strive to reduce product costs, improve processes and optimise asset reliability; the missing link is often energy data and visibility into energy usage at the system level. Leading companies are realising that effective energy management can lead to better understanding of productivity losses in production, predictive analytics for asset failures and data analysis in energy consumption at the system level.
Historically obtaining useful energy data has been extremely...
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Production Management and the Industrial IoT
In the first two parts of this series I looked at what the internet of things (IoT) actually is and then at the Energy Management possibilities for businesses competing on the world stage.
In this, part three, of the series we get down to the nitty gritty of Manufacturing Production Management and how measuring energy flows and consumption can inform critical decisions.
I could make this complicated but if we really get down to the basics there are three main categories that require constant attention in a production environment: People, Processes and Technology.
People –...
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How the Internet of Things is transforming Business
Over Christmas 2015 I spent a lot of my beach time getting sun burnt and considering the threat of global warming to my kids and to their kids.
I eventually decided that, to save the planet, I could start by measuring the energy consumption of every electrical device in the world. This would help people understand how to use these devices more efficiently, they would use less energy and “voila” world saved!
The only problem is – how the heck do I talk to every electrical device in the world? More importantly – how do I get them to talk back to me?
Welcome to the emerging...
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