There is no doubt that you already have some very talented people working in your organization. They've been working hard to help increase production and profits in your operation, and now it's time to help them. Added stress from fewer skilled workers in the workforce can escalate to burn out, safety risks, and lost production that can all quickly add up to lost time, lost profits and serious risk factors to people everywhere.

Upskill your people (help people increase their skills) and optimize their own performance with a few easy to implement ideas that can take your operations to the next level of performance in a very short amount of time - all while increasing your people's abilities, confidence and produce positive short and long term outcomes.

You may have oil and gas production sites scattered from the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans and offshore in the beautiful, but super remote seas around the globe. Collecting and consolidating that remotely located data is one thing—pushing it back out to your varied end-users in an actionable and analyzed format may be a whole, more complicated other story.

Maybe your company is still hesitating on adding automation for remote monitoring and diagnostics for your onshore or offshore oil and gas production. 

I get it, change can be a giant challenge and going from paper reports and driving to wellsite locations may seem like lightyears from how you do things today. But making simple, step by step tech changes can quickly pay off in multiples. In truth, the more assets you have, and the more distant they are, the faster a cloud-native SCADA system will pay off and create wild returns.

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.

You and your amazing employees have worked hard to build your OEM business, and it shows in your long-term success and happy end customers. Now that you have created processes that are tried and true to your business model and fully support your company sustainability, you may be thinking it's a good time to think about how you can take it all to the next level through building out stronger efficiencies and better work-flows that will simplify day-to-day operations and also present your people with the right data they need to make better, faster decisions while being much more focused on what really matters (your end customers).

You and your dedicated staff have all worked very hard to get your production levels to exactly where you want them to be and that's not an easy task, and certainly not an easy one to keep rolling without loads of serious challenges. Sure, every company has obstacles and set-backs here and there; but when it comes to production; one tiny hiccup can result in several factors of safety, profitability and even your organizations long-standing sustainability.

It's no secret that production downtime can be significant and negatively impact your operations very quickly.

These challenges happen with the blink of an eye - and cause long-standing downtime, lost profits and serious safety impacts. Here are five keys to prevent production downtime to help you remain up and running while keeping your people safer, profit margins up and maintaining your operations for a life-time of strong returns for generations.

When someone mentions something like 'cloud-native IIoT' do your teeth start to clench in stress and you immediately begin to search for your antacids to ward off the quickly approaching heartburn that comes with the topic? I hear you, understand your anxiety and totally feel your pain because I've been there many times before.

That's until I started thinking of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) differently; what it really 'means' to us, the humans of the world. How it can actually help makes our lives better in several ways; like increasing the safety of many very dangerous situations, how it can even prevent terrible problems before they even happen and how it can make companies be more profitable so more people keep their jobs and prices don't over-inflate for the end buyers.

I think it's safe to safe that many of us have experienced different times in our lives that we knew we didn't have all the information; times when we simply knew there was more to the story, or something missing that we should know in order to make an informed decision. Some people call it intuition, others say it's a 'hunch' - call it whatever you like, but either way having that feeling is certainly frustrating at best; potentially even life-threatening at worst.

When it comes to your operations, I hope you don't get that feeling very often - But if you do then we can help.

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.

Compressed air is a key component of today’s factory production. Because massive, power-demanding compressors are required to keep this key resource flowing it is important for factories to carefully manage how they use it—and to prevent leaks that could waste significant amounts of power.

Take for example a plant that combines the stretch blow molding (SBM) process for making plastic bottles with bottling in a single location. This provides great efficiencies while demanding a lot of pneumatics, both for blowing/bottling and for operating valves and machinery.