Johnson Controls helps minimise risk

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February 2015 IT in Manufacturing

The refrigeration equipment used to store and preserve perishable goods is a vital component of any food business. Failure of this equipment can be catastrophic, making reliability non-negotiable. This has seen the emergence of new solutions that measure and monitor the performance of refrigeration equipment in real time, alerting business owners to potential malfunction.

“This equipment is typically a high value asset and owners will almost certainly have scheduled maintenance plans in place,” says Neil Cameron of Johnson Building Efficiency. “However, depending on the environment and the application, scheduled maintenance may not be sufficient to prevent failure. Globally, this risk is being addressed by the emergence of new software driven solutions. They leverage the data communications capabilities built into refrigeration equipment to monitor equipment performance and provide early notifications of anomalies. This can avert disaster but also assists owners to proactively plan downtime and maintenance.”

Johnson Controls’ Connected Equipment initiative, which provides 24x7 real-time monitoring and alerts, is a service offered to all its customers. “All you need is an Internet connection to connect the equipment to our server”, notes Cameron.

For older equipment, this may require a simple replacement of controllers. The benefits can be significant, however. “The ability to connect to the Internet (via 3G, Wi-Fi or Ethernet) makes performance data visible, shareable and open to analysis. This unlocks a whole new world of opportunity,” says Cameron.

Continual diagnosis of equipment performance includes measurement of vibration, of temperature deviation, pressure and energy consumption. In addition, with hundreds of thousands of pieces of plant equipment being monitored globally, measurement against industry benchmarks has become possible.

Continual monitoring of equipment is a trend that has become the norm in Europe. With Internet connectivity becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it is expected to become a standard feature of ownership globally. In South Africa, with its hot climate and often harsh environments, it is a welcome opportunity to actively minimise risk.

“Early warning of equipment failure – whether three months or three hours – is invaluable to any business dealing with perishables. Johnson Controls provides regular reports comprising easily comprehended graphs and statistics indicating performance, along with diagnosis of that performance, with alerts where there are deviations or potential areas of concern, or opportunities for tuning and improvements,” concludes Cameron.

For more information contact Neil Cameron, Johnson Controls, +27 (0)11 921 7100, [email protected], www.johnsoncontrols.com

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IT in Manufacturing

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