Most of us have experienced significant changes throughout our careers, and life. Some of those changes have certainly gone smoother, and had significantly better outcomes than others - the single constant about life in our world today is change itself. Which makes it crucial to understand all the pieces that are part of any change to have well aligned to make any change a great experience that provides positive outcomes and enable you, and your organization to thrive.

If your production machines could talk, what would they tell you? Would they be annoying and over-dramatic with their problems, or would they be pretty chill, and just tell us what we need to know. I don't think anyone needs, or wants drama from their production machines (or anyone else for that matter). I think a simple "compressor unit 3 in location10, needs bearing size X replaced within the next two days" would be good. No chit-chat about your vacation plans or how your BBQ turned out last weekend; none of that; just straight to the point and clearly tell us what they need and when they need it by would be great.

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.

"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.

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!

You may assume a cloud-based SCADA platform is just another operational system like all the others. After you utilize data visualization tools and cloud applications embedded in Emerson's Zedi Cloud Platform you realize you can turn your data into knowledge for faster and better business decisions.

That is what advanced analytics is all about! It's getting that next level of analytics from your remotely located assets and using that data to help you quickly turn knowledge into wisdom; or actual decision making data, and in some cases, actually driving the decisions to be made autonomously based on the historical data and what the machine can learn from how things were previously corrected so many times before; so you, and your people can focus your day on your core business.

What if we could help you know about production issues instantly—anywhere in the world? 
What if all relevant personnel got that information in an easy-to-read dashboard at the same time? 
What if that same information system helped valves and pumps self-monitor so they required less oversight?

As oil and gas producers look to find efficiencies in their production operations, the first and best solution to discuss is adding automation to their well site operations. Traditionally, some may be hesitant to implement a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, due to the initial capital costs involved and complexity. However, when one is looking at reducing total operational costs and increasing recoverable reserves, the positives from investing in SCADA become clear, especially when one considers the increased affordability brought by modern technology.