Listening to feedback from the frontlines: The power of prototyping
In the manufacturing industry, various efforts are being made to improve productivity. For example, they are working to identify wasteful work and improve work processes and procedures, and introducing systems to increase efficiency. However, the complexity of recent operations and labor shortages indicate that further changes in factory management are needed.
For example, existing production management systems are predominantly Windows desktop applications and lack perspectives on integration with external services and data utilization. Even if the system does not have an alert e-mail function, it must be requested from the system vendor, which incurs additional costs. Data that needs to be monitored must be checked by opening the application screen each time, leaving a process that is not labor-saving. Information transfer between processes is managed by paper work instructions, and weight and dimensional data may be manually entered into the system.
These issues are user experience (UX) problems, and the first step in improving UX is to address the most difficult issues on the shop floor. By having everyone work on a common problem, it is easier to get a positive response and to move the project forward. At this point, hearing the needs of the field and creating a prototype in about a week using enebular will be greatly appreciated. Recently, cloud services have reduced the cost of system procurement, and small hardware devices such as the Raspberry Pi with a case are beginning to appear that can be used immediately at manufacturing sites. Even those who are not good at programming can easily create applications with low-code tools such as Node-RED, which lowers the hurdle for creating prototypes.
With a prototype, we can correct misunderstandings about needs and move forward with concrete discussions. Seeing and touching the prototype will generate ideas for improvements and facilitate discussions about priorities. By using prototypes, many issues can be solved in a short period of time.
In digital transformation (DX), the most important thing is not the technical issues, but rather the ability of the organization and individuals to embrace change itself.
Citizen Engagement in Smart Cities and the Use of Node-RED
Citizen engagement in smart city development is one of the key elements to its success. Participating citizens do not necessarily have to be developers, and cooperation between citizen developers and professional developers can lead to more efficient and creative solutions.
Node-RED is a tool that allows users to create programs with a visual interface that helps citizen developers give shape to their ideas and communicate with professional developers.
To facilitate this process, project management and resource sharing are important. enebular provides tools for this. enebular’s flow and node sharing features allow citizen developers and professional developers to work together.
Citizen engagement in smart cities is an important way to harness the power of technology to solve urban problems, as well as an important way for citizens themselves to directly improve their lives and their environment. enebular and tools like Node-RED allow citizen developers and professional developers can join forces to create smarter and more efficient cities.
Facility Management – Reducing man power required to perform inspections and prevention of accidents
It has come time to reexamine the way we manage equipment at large-scale facilities. This field has already been optimized to the maximum extent possible, thus relying on the same methods is not likely to yield further efficiency gains. Furthermore, due to labor shortages [in several advanced economies like Japan] makes it harder and harder to secure the man power necessary to confirm equipment status.
Traditional facility management is heavily dependent on people. Because the impact of a failure at large-scale facilities is so serious, the maintenance structure to manage those facilities has to be quite elaborate. For example, after closing, security guards need to go to kitchen areas to physically confirm that fire hazards such as heat sources and gas mains are completely shut off.
These tasks can be replaced by IoT. Gas leaks can be detected with sensors, values from devices like gauges and meters that need to be read can be obtained using image processing. Setting up a LoRaWAN network on site allows the data to be collected and transmitted wireless to the cloud, where a variety of visualization tools can be used to display the entire facility’s status remotely.
However, in this case, the data collecting devices would be located throughout the facility, so managing and operating them is very difficult. Using enebular makes operating them easy.
Asset Tracking – Watching over people and tracking objects
When you’re in charge of someone or something, one of the most important things for you is knowing their condition, even when they’re out of sight. Utilizing IoT technology allows you to know details of their conditions, and also allows for new services to be provided.
For example, in logistics, when we combine Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and cellular Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies, it is now possible to have granular data about individual pallets and containers –not just location, but also information about other in-transit conditions, such as temperature, vibrationand so on. Furthermore, if the measured data goes outside set thresholds, alerts can be sent to prevent damage, thus ensuring quality and improving customer experience.
A monitoring service based on this technology is also applicable to children, the elderly, or other at-risk groups. With the advent of the aforementioned low-power, wide-area transmission protocol, LPWA, combined with efficient battery charging technology like solar cells, it is possible to design devices that users can keep close byand are easy to handle. By applying these technologies, we are able to create long battery life “panic-button alarms” that cansend the user’s location to caregivers.
Using enebular, the same development environment can be used to write applications that run on both the edge devices (installed in containers and such) and in the cloud, where higher level data processing is done on the data collected from the edge devices. Additionally, if the devices are connected to a network, it is possible to remotely modify/change the edge-side processing, making it simple to operate on a large scale.
