8 Essential Features of Field Data Collection Technology

Electronic Field Data Collection: The Bridge to the Connected Plant

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has created immense excitement and promise for industrial facilities. Having connected assets that continuously monitor their own health and feed that information back in a way that is timely and actionable will drive business outcomes and help organizations achieve loftier goals. The challenge today is that many of our assets are not yet “connected” or “intelligent,” meaning that they are not yet outfitted with the health monitoring instrumentation that provides the live, automated data feed directly to a centralized repository of data. Yes, critical assets like turbine generators, boiler feed water pumps, highly critical motors and the like are indeed outfitted with modern instrumentation and fail-safe solutions. However, in most industrial facilities throughout the world, this is a very small population of assets.

A typical industrial facility has thousands of electric motors, gearboxes, pumps, and fans, among others, that have ZERO diagnostic instrumentation. While individually these assets may not be as important as some of the more critical assets mentioned above, collectively they are much more important to the productivity of the site. This leaves us with two choices: either outfit these assets with the required diagnostic instrumentation at incredible expense or – more realistically – collect this important data in another way.

The latter is the method that most industrial facilities are employing today.