Rearden's Bar: Streamlining Operations with IoT

Goldcorp is committed to responsible mining practices and maintaining maximum safety for its workers. At the same time, the firm is constantly exploring ways to improve the efficiency of its operations, extend the life of its assets, and control costs. Goldcorp needed technology that can maximize production efficiency by tracking all mining operations, keep employees safe with remote operations and monitoring of hazardous work areas and control production costs through better asset and site management.

For industrial applications such as process and machine control to run smoothly, there is a need to ensure that there is low communication latency and minimal jitter in order to meet closed loop control requirements.

The plant manager and safety teams needed a solution that provided near real-time visibility of gas detection and personnel location, with easy to understand visualization and alerting dashboards. This would enable them to improve productivity through decreasing the time taken to start work, optimize evacuation route planning, and to meet critical staff safety and compliance goals.

Atlanta Grout & Tile, a Tile, Stone & Grout restoration company based in Woodstock, Georgia, was facing challenges with its traditional business model. Despite steady growth over the years, the company was falling behind the web revolution and missing out on the opportunity to tap into a new consumer base. They were using independent software from different vendors for each of their department information and workforce management. This resulted in a lot of manual work on excel and the need to export/import data between different systems. This not only increased overhead costs but also slowed down their response to clients. The company also had to prepare numerous reports manually and lacked access to customer trends for effective business decision-making.

ALPLA, a global leader in packaging solutions, faced several challenges as the complexity of their production machinery increased. The need for highly trained specialists in each factory led to higher personnel costs, difficulties in recruiting experienced talent at each location, and costly personnel turnover. Furthermore, less experienced operators running the machines sub-optimally impacted resource consumption and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). ALPLA also faced the challenge of monitoring visual inspection systems in every line of their plants, which was almost impossible to do manually. In 2016, ALPLA decided to use data from the 900 different types of embedded sensors in each factory to address these issues. However, their initial choice of SQL Server as the data store for the sensor data proved inadequate, as it was unable to cope with their data requirements.

Malvern Panalytical, a UK-based hi-tech electronics company, was grappling with the challenge of decentralized data storage. The company had a vast amount of unstructured data scattered across various platforms, from hard drives to emails and floppy disks. This made the data searching process extremely cumbersome and inefficient. The company's rapid growth, from 200 to over 1,000 employees in a decade, and expansion across three continents further exacerbated the need for a more structured and centralized data system. As a company involved in electronics manufacturing and software development, it was crucial for Malvern Panalytical to find a platform that could structure all their data, track all modifications of documents in real time, and provide clear visibility of the internal information flow across all its facilities.