Air compressors are used in 97% of industrial manufacturing plants. For Gardner Denver, a maker of air compressors, that's a good statistic to build a new business on. Not to sell the equipment -- they've already done that -- but rather to provide an interactive knowledge-management service for customers that lowers the cost of maintenance, keeps building operations humming and, most importantly, establishes customer trust.
Starting this summer, Gardner Denver's Compressor Division (Quincy, IL) will offer its customers a service that allows the company to remotely tap into an intelligent controller mounted on the equipment. Armed with previously untapped information, it will be able to tell customers exactly when the expendables such as oil will run out (before, not after the fact), as well as provide maintenance and operational trending information for the life of the compressor. For a monthly subscription fee, customers will get the assurance that this vital piece of industrial equipment will not be unexpectedly offline. And for Gardner Denver, the service will add a nice little revenue stream.
The company, like so many other manufacturers struggling to differentiate their products, is eyeballing new ways to build customer loyalty while making money. This predictive-maintenance service is a good opportunity to do just that. And it wouldn't be possible without the new sensor-based wireless networking technology that is now emerging. For the last few years, companies like Millennial Net Inc. (Burlington, MA), Ember Corp. (Boston), Dust Networks Inc. (Berkeley, CA) and Chipcon AS (Oslo, Norway) have been rolling out chips and protocol stacks for radio frequency (RF) communication. What they are selling are the guts to what is called a wireless mesh network -- an ad hoc, self-healing network that uses intelligent sensors to gather data from devices and equipment to be transported back to a central server.
PAVING THE WAY
The technology idea -- based on lowering infrastructure costs and gaining visibility into out-of-reach devices in the field -- has been percolating for a few years. But some of the key ingredients to really allow this technology to proliferate are just now rolling out. Things like an industrial-strength communication standard, the ability to connect the local mesh network with a wireless wide-area network, having a service-broker to manage the communication calls and designing applications that can operate on the wireless network are in the early introduction phase. Once everything comes together -- in about two-to-five years -- it will change the way manufacturers gather information without adding a lot of overhead.
Early adopters, like Gardner Denver, are already embracing the idea of a new business model driven from technology. The company uses technology from nPhase LLC (Chicago), which positions itself as a machine-to-machine (M2M) vendor for wide area networks. Teaming up with sensor provider Opto 22 and Nokia for its communications gateway onto the cellular networks of Sprint and Cingular, nPhase also offers the software program designed to transport digital data across thousands of miles.
FOCUS SHIFT
The two-year-old company has 10 significant customers that use the technology to remotely monitor their products. For instance, BioLab Inc., a subsidiary of Great Lakes Chemical (Indianapolis), has been able to shift its business model from product focused to dealer and customer focused. It uses the nPhase turnkey M2M solution to monitor the chemical levels in swimming pools and spas located at hotels, schools and municipal facilities.
"From the customer side, it is a way to differentiate by getting into services and deploying people smarter," says Steve Pazol, president and CEO of nPhase. "It changes the model."
Indeed, for Gardner Denver, the nPhase technology represents a turning point for the entire market. "I think it is disruptive to our competitors," says Dean Chew, Gardner Denver's director of aftermarket services. "When you show users the result of mining data, it allows proactive action."
In July, Gardner Denver will offer its customers the remote-monitoring service. The rollout will likely happen in phases as controllers need to be augmented for wireless communication, and legacy equipment in the field will need to be upgraded with the installation kit the company has developed. The upgrades don't require much work and are not capital intensive, says Mike Bakalyar, Gardner Denver's sales specialist for air audit systems. And the long-term payoff is worth the effort because it turns data into something meaningful, enabling better operational planning. "It's the basis for a good business decision vs. an emotional or panic reaction," Bakalyar said. "Maintenance is supposed to keep equipment like new, not fix it after it breaks."
Once the wireless infrastructure is in place, the application opportunities are extendable beyond just maintenance. It could, in fact, have a dramatic impact on every manufacturer of industrial automation technology, with a ripple effect on customers. "When things are not measured they can't be controlled, and that's a hindrance to the advancement of control systems," says Rob Conant, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Dust Networks.
Dust makes the chip that is embedded in the sensor. That chip becomes the foundation of the network system as it establishes the communication capabilities and the software that enables the sensor to be recognized within the smart mesh. Dust, which just launched its product in September, is currently working with sensor-maker Honeywell to develop an energy-monitoring application for SUPERVALU grocery stores to gauge if a freezer is malfunctioning and using more power than necessary. A similar initiative is underway at the Department of Energy (DOE), which is seeking by 2010 to have reduced the amount of energy consumed in the U.S. by 50%.
Honeywell, which understands the mesh network opportunity for manufacturers, is currently working closely with some of the other major mesh vendors -- including Millennial Net and Ember -- to figure out how each can be applied in industrial applications. Reliability and power management are key criteria for manufacturers, and once those issues are firmed up within a smart-sensor network it will really make an impact in the industry.
"Over time, we expect the number of valuable sensing points will skyrocket. In a typical plant today there are maybe 20,000 points measured. That will go to 100,000 points or more, and systems that use that information will continuously improve efficiency. That ultimately is the game changer," Dust's Conant says.
SETTING STANDARDS
As the number of measurable sensor points increases, there needs to be a way to manage all of the information flowing across the network. More importantly, there needs to be a common communication mode. To that end, an organization called the ZigBee Alliance has been developing a wireless communication protocol for the IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radio frequency layer.
Release 1.0 of the ZigBee standard, delivered late last year, enables interoperability that proprietary stacks can't do, much like what TCP/IP does over 802.11 Ethernet-based networks. Companies like Chipcon, a maker of RF transceivers, which acquired protocol stack provider Figure 8 Wireless Inc. (San Diego) in January, fully support ZigBee. Others, like Millennial Net and Ember Corp., which have a proprietary protocol stack, are also aggressively backing the ZigBee standard as they ultimately realize the value of a truly interoperable ad hoc network.
But ZigBee is still immature and, therefore, it will take a few more years before it will make its mark on manufacturing. The ZigBee alliance "took on a massive effort to define a deep and broad specification," says Mark Pacelle, vice president of marketing at Millennial Net. "ZigBee picked a certain market segment to base the initial release on home automation and lighting. Industrial automation has challenges that are different." Specifically, industrial environments require reliability and security, Pacelle says.
While those issues get worked out, companies are continuing to build the mesh networking foundation -- and the next step is developing the applications that will turn the wireless infrastructure into valuable operational information. That's where a nine-month-old company called Tendril Networks Inc. (Lafayette, CO) comes in. Tendril is developing the industry's first Web services-based technology for ZigBee networks. In February the company announced a partnership with Ember, which makes the wireless chips and the software stack, to provide an all-in-one ZigBee-enabled platform. Using Java and Web service calls as its building blocks, Tendril offers the service broker network discovery, extraction, commissioning, configuration, management, security, rule logic and data management.
"Tendril becomes an important factor because when you get all of this data, the question is what to do with it," says Venkat Bahl, Ember's vice president of marketing. "We enable all of the sensors, lighting systems and different devices ... we look at ourselves as a super plumber feeding to a gateway device. From there you have to do something with it and Tendril provides the middleware, or the services broker, to present it in a format for end users to create applications that are event driven."
The Tendril technology is still in beta, but some of the applications it will enable include energy management, building and manufacturing servicing, monitoring agricultural products to limit decay, bio-detection to keep public spaces safe and even healthcare -- monitoring patients' vital signs.
Overall, what Tendril is doing, together with the ZigBee alliance and key chip companies, will be the cornerstone of what will eventually make sensor-based mesh networks a disruptive technology. "If systems are hard to program now and we make that easy -- it will lead to entire industry acceleration," says Tim Enwall, Tendril's founder and CEO.