20 December 2011
Data will be the key competitive edge for companies in the future, according to global management consultancy, McKinsey & Company.Global Sense, a UK-based business that specialises in taking valuable data relating to sensing and control of electro-mechanical assets and using it to provide operational cost savings.Martin Walder, managing director of Global Sense, said: “A transformation is taking place in the way that we can use current wireless technology to capture event-changing data pushed to us very cheaply and in real-time. We have pioneered the industrialisation of GPRS for use in virtual networks and in combination with open web databases, to effectively monitor and control assets anywhere in the world. Our non-invasive systems, which are also easy to install, save money, save on maintenance and crucially, save on energy.”Walder offers details about one customer who has seen the benefits offered by the technology – an International Airport – where Global Sense was invited to develop a recovery plan on passenger sensitive equipment on lifts, passenger escalators and conveyors. He says that hundreds of thousands of pounds have been saved on preventing catastrophic failure and proportionate savings have been demonstrated on energy savings, in maintenance costs and on material costs, parts renewals, together with significant cost avoidance on unnecessary call-outs and disruption to passenger services.The system is called ‘micro-intelligence’ and it is able to sense changes in the state of a component, such as a bearing, and sends this micro data in real-time, anywhere in the world, on any platform – including to a mobile phone. “We do not burden our clients with large amounts of data in the way that legacy systems do”, explains Roy Saunders, chairman of Global Sense. “Our analytics are precise and allow important decisions to be made on the fly, with the surety of reliable information, inexpensively mined and transferred.”The effective explotation of data requires simple and secure visualisation tools. Global Sense believes it has achieved this with the development of a range of analytical tools which focus on information, which can alert customers to a wide variety of potential issues, even down to a light bulb failure.“The idea of sensors embedded in products obviously leads to offerings such as preventative maintenance, but feed back like this can be used in every corner of a building, a utility like an airport, a train line, or a manufacturing plant, to prevent disruption, improve productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction,” said Saunders.Global Sense claims that their system can do all of this for hundreds and not thousands of pounds, without the need to rely on old or to install new networks.
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