Industry 4.0, IIoT, digitalization, big data, AI, all these themes are in the news in the specialized industrial press or on the Internet. But in the end, how do we concretely improve productivity and profitability?
For an industrial installation, digitalization is often considered from the point of view of connectivity, computing, networks, protocols. However, according to Wika, to generate a real profitability of digitalization, it is necessary to start from the fundamental: the industrial application itself; its characteristics, operation, constraints and problems, which are most often associated with parameters monitored using measuring instruments.
This is the challenge that the company is taking up with its new global IIoT monitoring offer. With 70 years of experience in industrial instrumentation, particularly in pressure, temperature and level measurement worldwide, Wika has extensive application expertise and thus a real ability to implement an efficient digitalization strategy in a coordinated manner with an operator.
Taking for example the case of fluid storage tanks and tanks as different as fuels, food liquids, gas, which is also stored on multiple sites scattered over a territory and whose filling must be monitored and renewed, Wika will use its knowledge of these applications to offer monitoring allowing the operator to work very concretely on cost reduction and therefore increase profitability: by the logistical optimization of the rounds according to the anticipated analysis of the filling needs and by the implementation of commercial offers related to the opportunities for organizing the filling rounds.
The cornerstone of the system remains the instrumentation by the restitution it provides of the state and behavior of the application. Wireless instruments are by far the most advantageous solution according to Wika: autonomous in energy (battery) to operate and communicate, they are installed in an extremely flexible and simple way and are inexpensive compared to the installation of wired instruments.
Wika has started phasing out a range of measuring instruments and/or connected modules. This is for example the case of the PGW23 which is a connected process pressure gauge communicating according to the LoRaWAN protocol. In addition to wireless transmission of pressure values, it also transmits ambient temperature values and manages freely adjustable alarm thresholds all with a battery life of more than five years.
In addition to instrumentation, Wika is positioned as a global offeror to provide the operator with the ultimate information it needs to optimize its process: this involves connectivity, cloud storage of data, their exploitation and ultimately the provision of consultation tools and decision-making schemes in the form of a visualization platform to which algorithms and why not artificial intelligence can be backed.
Finally, in terms of communication, if Wika is part of the LoRa Alliance and is a founding member of the mioty Alliance, it is quite possible to exploit other connectivity solutions such as Bluetooth or 5G.
Wika has high hopes for the mioty technology, which seems to be able to become, in the long term, essential for digitalization in instrumentation, particularly because of its effectiveness when it comes to connecting a large number of instruments on the same site.
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www.wika.fr