The abilities of your car, in your industrial crane

If you do crane maintenance work, you might not always know what to expect when you arrive at the facility. When conducting inspection maintenance, the routine is much like the vehicle safety and roadworthiness test for cars. The world of automobiles, though, is very advanced in terms of technology. Now the same thing is happening in material handling through industrial internet, which brings real-time monitoring to the equation. Let’s look at a few similarities, using cars as an example.

When you know how many kilometers a car has been driven, you’re able to determine the condition of the tires. But the car doesn’t automatically tell you the condition. Using a tire tread depth gauge, you’ll get a much more accurate assessment of it. When a person drives a taxi, hundreds of kilometers a day, the need to change these specific components comes up pretty quickly. But if a car is driven a thousand kilometers in a year, there is no need to hurry. The same applies for industrial cranes. The task of the crane, its use and importance in a process determine when a specific component needs to be changed.

You’re able to determine a cars fuel need when you know when the car was last refueled and how much it has been run since. But if you’re able to build a fuel tank gauge, it tells you immediately how much fuel is left. An integrated tire tread gauge, on the other hand, isn’t that easy. You have to stop the car, pick up a coin and check how much surface there is left on the tire.

For industrial cranes, the fuel tank gauge sorts of metrics are the best kind, and the technology enabling them is constantly evolving. Now, collecting basic usage information helps determine when certain contactors or brakes need to be changed. Soon remote monitoring can give very precise reports on the current status and condition of the crane, which leads to the information on when a certain component needs to be changed. When a component will be changed at the right moment, there won’t be any unplanned downtime. There is also the ability to predict and plan the necessary maintenances for years to come.

Everyone, who has had a car and has driven it for a long time, knows that the cam belt needs to be changed at some point. The mileage varies in different cars, but it’s always an expensive operation. Let’s imagine a situation, where nobody would know about this beforehand and after maintenance, they would get a bill worth of thousands of euros – because of the cam belt exchange. Luckily, nowadays this is included in the maintenance plan. When you purchase a new car, you’ll already know that the cam belt needs to be changed after 60 000 kilometers or 120 000 kilometers. If you already know how much you’ll be driving with your new car, you can estimate when the exchange will become topical.

Let’s take another example – If your car has GPS, it can be tracked if it’s stolen. Or if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, you can give precise coordinates when dialing for help. These are certain hidden benefits, which you won’t think of at first. In a similar fashion, the industrial internet in material handling yields more benefits than just preventive maintenance. When you have a fleet of hundreds of cranes, all equipped with sensors sending information, combining and analyzing that data makes the information very valuable. Then you can utilize the intelligence of the crane in many other functions. At some point they will start to communicate with machine tools and lift trucks. That will then bring efficiency benefits in production, which are many-fold when compared to just preventive maintenance.

The first integrated automotive navigation systems were only found in the most expensive, luxury cars. Then came the retrofittable devices in large volumes, which brought down the manufacturing costs. Nowadays new cars have integrated navigational systems and even mobile phones have GPS. Devices have evolved and all systems are real-time based. Cars have big screens in the dashboard and a navigation system is just one function among many others in the interface. The next step would be SIM-cards for automobiles. When you step in to your car, all the functionalities of a smart phone and more would be at your hands reach, on your steering wheel. This would also enable your car to communicate with various different systems, update its software by itself and even enable remote maintenance.

In material handling, it is likely that we will see this kind of transition phase, where intelligence is first attached to existing systems. And the next generation cranes and machine tools with integrated sensor technologies will be much more intelligent than the retrofittable sensors of today.
Just like we’ve seen the many technical advancements in the auto industry, the industrial internet will bring the smart technologies into the world of material handling.

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