February 4, 2021
Octave, IIoT, Predictive Maintenance
The need for industrial purifiers to perform these and other tasks has created a multi-billion dollar market. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global water purifier market size will grow from $25.71 billion to $45 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 7.2% during its forecast period.
Though markets for industrial air and water purifiers are growing, these technologies are mature. This makes it difficult for industrial purifier Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to find new ways to reduce their equipment’s downtime, lower its maintenance costs, and otherwise differentiate their products. However, the emergence of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) changes this situation. Using the IIoT, these OEMs can quickly and securely connect their equipment to the cloud, allowing them to collect the data they need for IIoT applications that provide them with a competitive edge.
IIoT applications enable OEMs to extract data from their purifiers and orchestrate its transmission to the cloud, where it can be reviewed, analyzed, and acted upon. The insights delivered by IIoT applications able to collect and analyze data from connected industrial purifiers allow OEMs to:
• Improve Their Decision Making: With connected industrial purifiers OEMs no longer need to make assumptions about their equipment’s performance based on the results of manual audits. Rather, they can move from a best-guess approach to one that uses real-time and historical data. Such a data-driven approach helps them and their customers make more informed, better decisions about when to change filters, how to minimize energy consumption costs, and how to reduce downtime.
• Optimize Equipment Maintenance: The IIoT also allows OEMs to move away from scheduled maintenance visits and towards a more informed, just-in-time model for maintaining their equipment. By reviewing real-time data on their connected industrial purifiers’ status and performance, OEMs can cut costs by only sending personnel to a site when a visit is truly warranted. At the same time, when personnel do make a site visit, they come to the site with a more complete understanding of what equipment maintenance or repairs are necessary, helping them fix problems faster and reduce time spent at the site.
• Launch New Services and Business Models: The IIoT provides industrial purifier OEMs with an opportunity to introduce new services and business models. For example, since they can now monitor how much and how often their customers use their equipment, rather than selling purifiers to customers, OEMs can deploy them as-a-service and charge customers based on how much they use them. This gives their customers the ability to turn capital expenditures into operational expenses, while also creating new long-term revenue streams for the OEM. OEMs can also charge customers for new premium services – such as cloud-based dashboards and reports for continuous, real-time water or air quality monitoring and analysis. With these dashboards and reports customers can improve employee safety, product quality and regulatory compliance.
Industrial purifiers OEMs are not just thinking about deploying IIoT applications to realize these benefits – they are doing it. A major water treatment equipment OEM is currently using Octave, Sierra Wireless’s edge-to-cloud IIoT solution, to deploy a new remote monitoring application. By extracting usage data from equipment using a legacy industrial communications protocol, Octave has allowed the OEM to track filter usage, enabling them and their customers to replace these filters right before they wear out. This application has not only reduced equipment downtime – it also helped the OEM and its customers lower maintenance costs, as the OEM can schedule its maintenance visits for right before its connected industrial water purifiers’ filters need to be replaced.
Meanwhile, an industrial air cleaner OEM is using Octave to obtain real-time power consumption, fan speed, temperature, particle level and other data from its equipment. With this data the company was able to deploy an application that alerts it if there is a problem with its equipment, reducing downtime and improving performance. In addition, by analyzing this data the company can better understand its customers’ industry-specific needs, such as how often its connected industrial air purifiers’ filters are likely to need to be changed in a particular environment. This knowledge has helped the OEM develop more accurate business proposals for customers – a significant competitive advantage.
These two industrial purifier OEMs have been able to quickly develop and widely deploy new IIoT applications thanks to the arrival of new IIoT solutions and services that make it easy for them to build these applications, and then scale them across many pieces of equipment and geographies.
Sierra Wireless has been among the leaders in developing and delivering OEMs these types of solutions. For OEMs seeking an all-in-one edge-to-cloud solution consisting of edge devices, wireless connectivity and cloud-based network management and cloud APIs, it has Octave.
For other OEMs who want to assemble their IIoT infrastructure, Sierra Wireless offers a variety of edge device and wireless connectivity solutions and services. For example, for OEMs that want to integrate the IIoT into their existing products, Sierra Wireless offers:
• Rugged 3G, 4G, LTE-Advanced and 5G routers and gateways.
• Its Smart Connectivity service, which provides secure and resilient global wireless coverage across more than 190 countries.
OEMs that want to use the IIoT to embed connectivity into their industrial air and water purifiers can use the above solutions and services, as well as its:
• Embedded module solutions, which featuring 5G, 4G, LPWA, 3G, 2G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GNSS technologies for wireless connectivity
• Ready-to-Connect modules, routers and gateways, which come with pre-integrated embedded SIMs (eSIMs) and instant access to the Sierra Wireless Smart Connectivity service.
Many of the world’s leading industrial companies -- such as Atlas Copco, MANN+HUMMELL, and Girbau – are using the Sierra Wireless solutions and services described above to remotely monitor their products, extract vital data on their performance, predict maintenance needs and offer value added services on top of their products. Increasingly, industrial air and water purifier OEMs are joining them to enhance their offerings and acquire a competitive advantage.
With a variety of Sierra Wireless solutions and services available that both simplify IIoT development and allow OEMs to scale these applications across the world, the question left for those industrial purifier OEMs who are not connecting their equipment to the cloud is simple. What are you waiting for?
Read the Sierra Wireless white paper, Connected Industrial Purifiers: How the Industrial IoT is Enhancing Air and Water Purification, its industrial purifier case studies, and Start with Sierra to learn more about how Sierra Wireless can help you use the IIoT to accelerate your data-driven transformation.
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