Industrial Automation Saves Time and Money With Multifaceted AirLink Raven XE
Based in Perth, Australia, Industrial Automation (IA) provides customers in mining, manufacturing, utility, agriculture, irrigation, and shipping industries with innovative solutions to meet their automation and control needs.
Challenges
Digging in the vicinity of groundwater can be challenging for mining companies. Massive dewatering pipes are used to extract water from open cut mine pits, with the equipment rented at a daily rate. Unfortunately for mining companies, they never know when they might hit groundwater, so the expensive dewatering pipes are kept on-site – often sitting idle. Industrial Automation was approached by one of its mining equipment customers to create a solution that would enable equipment usage tracking, which would allow the equipment provider to charge a premium while also providing its mining customers with the satisfaction of paying only for time the rented equipment was actually in use.
Solution
IA developed a remote equipment monitoring solution powered by the Sierra Wireless AirLink® Raven XE intelligent 3G Ethernet gateway. The solution is installed on each piece of field equipment to allow transfer of usage data back to a central location for accurate hourly – instead of daily – charges.
“It’s a breeze to integrate Sierra Wireless AirLink products with third party equipment,” explained Henk de Graaf, managing director at Industrial Automation Group. “We use Ethernet as the backbone, so it’s just a matter of plugging things in; it’s so easy.”
The Raven XE allows remote data collection, with its compact form factor enabling integration within existing infrastructure and enclosures. The rugged design of the Raven XE, as well as the wide temperature ranges in which it can operate, ensures the gateway is strong enough to perform in the harsh field environments where industrial vehicles regularly operate.
The Raven XE gateway is powered by ALEOS™ embedded intelligence for reliable and feature-rich operation, enabling remote configuration of over 500 parameters, packet-level diagnostics, and network session persistence. In addition, AirLink management software enables provisioning, managing, and troubleshooting of remote equipment from one central location.
Because of the remote usage monitoring enabled by IA’s wireless solution, its mining equipment customer has been able to move from a daily rental fee model to a sophisticated new accounting system that allows them to track actual machine usage. This not only allows the customer to accurately charge for usage, but it also allows them to track wear and tear on machines to better plan for service and maintenance.
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