Actioning on sensor data

More and more we find ourselves sitting there and asking, but what for?

What good is all this data, if once you have it, you then have to work out whether there is anything that you can do with it. To top it off, more often than not, you might have to go and speak with another department or even company to try and make use of this data or take action.

Wouldn’t it be better if this solution automatically notified you of changes or events that are out of the ordinary based on rules you had configured?

Automation and building controls

For years companies have been building automation and buildings systems that work reliably and are completely fit for purpose. However, often a central buildings management team has zero visibility of how these buildings are operating and no ability to change things without visiting every site. Another problem is that most IT focussed companies that are supplying an IOT sensor solution do not even know that this equipment exists. So, the solution they offer was never even intended to do anything other than supply this stream of data to you.

So, consider in a typical office/warehouse you could have a HVAC system that can only talk in BACNET and potentially an additional system that can only receive analogue input. On top of this you may even have some other equipment that talks in SCADA.

This means that for the vast majority of IOT solutions you see, their usefulness ends largely at the dashboard. This might be great for certain use cases, but more and more we are seeing that the real value in the solution comes from being able to talk back to the automation and building controls equipment.

Bridging the IP world with the automation world

Consider you have installed light sensors within one of your environments and you can see from your nice dashboard that beyond normal office hours the lighting is often left on for a couple of hours longer than needs be.

You could potentially contact the local on-site team to ask them to adjust the lighting schedule, or even just ask someone to manually turn the lights off before they leave. Or alternatively wouldn’t it be more useful for you to be able to simply send the new light schedule from your central dashboard to that single building anywhere in the world without using any third party integration or API’s that may even need to be bespoke for every single location?

To top it off you could even use the motion sensing capabilities within your sensors to notify you that occasionally people visit the office after hours and the lights are turning back on so you may need to assess the schedule that you previously made.

Merging multiple systems

In the above very simple example, the initial obvious response is, “but we probably already have a smart lighting system that we can control remotely”. What if you could take it one step further and say that actually, the single central dashboard you now have could do the same thing that it did for your lighting scenario, but also the heating system, any onsite machinery and pretty much anything else you could think of?

And any of these additional scenarios could be accommodated even if they do not talk the same language, or further still are traditional analogue equipment.

Oxspring Network Solutions and Tagscout

Oxspring Network Solutions with their Tagscout platform are able to offer this solution for you.

We do not care which IOT technology is used either, we will advise you on the most appropriate based on your specific circumstance.

We take a consultative approach to all sales and will only suggest something we believe is 100% appropriate for your specific scenario.