The stories of budget struggles for municipal water systems seem to grow every week. Overwhelming residential growth on one side, countered by budget-constrained neglect of systems on the other side, plague many small to medium towns. One way to maximize the budgets these communities do have is through efficient remote monitoring and alarming systems that are IIoT based.

The cost of distractions in life is high. What can often seem like a minor distraction can have a giant impact on life; a distracted drive to work could cause a crash, distracted while reading email could cause you to miss an important request from the boss, or being distracted while spending time with family could result in a loved one that doesn’t feel heard anymore, or think you care.

When it comes to your operations distractions can cause just as much havoc and loss. Distractions cause the risk of safety of people; and the environments around you, and the health of the bottom line. Those distractions could be losing your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. Without your eye on the prize you could be risking the sustainability of your organization; here today - gone tomorrow happens all too often these days.

While most oil and gas production is somewhat remote from the office, offshore sites are much more distant. Instead of driving a hundred miles or so in a company truck, your management and production staff are helicoptering across gulfs, seas and oceans to stay at least a couple of days before flying back—at great expense, and safety risk.

There are indeed times when that has to happen. But those times can stay few and far between with reliable, fast, cloud-native production data provided by Emerson in the Zedi IIoT platform that's complete with SaaS and a mobile app.

"There is no life without water."

 - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist

Municipal water utilities have one of the most important—and unappreciated—tasks in civilization. They bring water to citizens located far from rivers or streams; located instead in apartment buildings, houses and businesses along city streets and highways.

There is indeed, “no life without water.” But to be useful, that water has to be stored, distributed when needed, and contained. For most organizations today, whether commercial or municipal, there is no industrial life without data. But that data must be available, understandable and actionable. It’s amazing to learn that more than 50% of businesses (and this could include municipalities as well) have more data than they have the data analytics capacity to handle or analyze effectively.

When you’re watching a great movie it absorbs you into the story, the action and the characters. It's probably not a great movie if you find yourself thinking about other things like; “How did they get that camera angle?” Or “These are really strange sound effects" or even worse "Did I put the laundry in the dryer?" 

There’s a strong correlation between the movie production mechanics and your operations. On your computer or smart device, you want just to see the data from local and remote locations—production, measurements, down time, machine health, maintenance schedules, utility costs—or whatever, as long as it's data you can action upon to help you increase your production, safety, profits or sustainability. You don’t want to fumble around with reporting, why you’re not getting data from the sensors in the compressor, or what happened to last month’s figures. If your current system causes you to do that, you’re ready for a change.

Keeping your operations continuously running smoothly is no small task; but especially if it involves remotely located assets that are hundreds, even thousands of miles from where you work on a daily basis. You don't have the same amount of talented skilled people to be sending them all over the countryside for no good reason anymore. You need to know exactly what's going on, and where before you can even think about scheduling one of your valuable resources to hit the road, jump on a flight or work all that overtime to get to the asset in need.

When the real estate market is booming, home buyers will fight for virtually any house that hits the market. It's nice for sellers while it's happening, but eventually, the buyers who chose the best location will hold the properties with the greatest value. Of course there is much more to factor into your decision before committing yourself to a purchase that large; you probably have poured over the area data to see what the crime rate is, how the schools are, what the resale market holds, how far it is to conveniences, how close the neighbors are (or are not), etc...

Predicting long-term market value of anything isn't easy, but there are some tell-tale things to look for before you sign the dotted line that can help give you insight into the long-range value. The most important is of course all that data you can find today, on just about anything!

Trust can be a giant deal-breaker for any relationship. It doesn't matter if it's who should watch your dog when you go on vacation, who you should marry, who babysits your kids, or who you should trust your company data with; it matters big time to you because it impacts you as a person. Broken trust can quickly turn the relationship into something completely unrecognizable in a heartbeat.

A giant part of building trust with anyone is 'seeing' who they really are after you've known them a long time. A very wise person once told me "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."

We totally understand that addressing who you should entrust your data, SaaS and SCADA system to can be a very difficult decision, and one that should not be taken lightly.

One of the most exciting uses for cloud software, IIoT and automaton technology has been in the mining industry. In recent years the health and safety numbers for mining have greatly improved—and so have costs and efficiencies—by handing machines the dirtiest and most energy-intensive jobs. Mining companies and human health factors have both benefitted greatly.

The challenge, however, is that the machines also have health requirements. With few humans around to watch and listen, how does a mining company keep those big machines getting ores—and profits- to the surface?

Emerson Machine Health Monitoring helps right-time your preventive maintenance program and increase it's effectiveness

You've probably heard awesome stories of how truly great things can happen to people out of the blue; love when you least expect it, strangers paying for your coffee... The list goes on and on forever about how small, unexpected people and the actions they sometimes take can bring us light, love and unmeasurable positive impact to our lives.

Machines however, are not out to sweep us off our feet, cheer us up, or have any desire to pass along some sunny moments into our lives. No, they're famous for breaking down when we need them the MOST. Sometimes, it almost feels like maybe they even conspire together and to all have different (and very time consuming) breakdowns all within days, even hours of each other to cause total havoc on our work, and lives. The surprises machines can deliver don't exactly give anyone the warm fuzzies.