Senseye forms new steering group

The first meeting in March this year included among others representatives from Alcoa, one of the world’s largest producer of aluminium, Smurfit Kappa, Europe's leading corrugated packaging company and Schneider Electric. It was led by Robert Russell, CTO and co-founder of Senseye, who was recently named as one of the 100 People in Maintenance that you should follow by CMMS experts UpKeep.

“The Senseye User Group is a great opportunity to discuss the future roadmap, challenges and innovations around deploying a Predictive Maintenance solution,” said Steve Parr, Engineering Director at Smurfit Kappa. “We are hoping the skills, knowledge and experience of so many key stakeholders from a diverse base of manufacturing companies can bring new insights and perspectives.

“It’s providing a good opportunity to question current practices, seek new ideas and overcome barriers to success that otherwise may challenge the effective deployment of maintenance improvement solutions. We are really looking forward to being part of the user group and working with all the other members in shaping the future of Senseye support.”

The meetings will be held three times a year and will focus on a different topic each time. Under the heading From Factory to Senseye, the topic of this discussion was how to get the right data from the shop floor to the cloud. It featured Victor Voulgaropoulos from research and advisory firm Verdantix as a guest presenter.

Low-cost sensor technology, the use of smart sensors, edge and local processing, communications between factory and/or site to the Cloud, as well as the eternal question of cost and ROI were just some of the main conversation topics.

“Our group confirmed that the cost of acquiring data from the shop floor is a key barrier to the expansion of industry 4.0 at the moment”, said Robert Russell. “The maturing of low-cost wireless sensor technology will help accelerate the adoption of PdM and ease the way for further digitalisation.”

Simon Kampa, CEO of Senseye said: “Most companies say they listen to their customers. At Senseye we wanted to take this a step further and get experts to come together as a network and community to openly exchange ideas and discuss maintenance problems. Our aim is to break out of the knowledge silos and share information on best practice across different industries and with organisations at different levels of maturity.

“The ongoing discussions in the community will directly inform our product roadmap. They will help to prioritise and fine tune product development in the long term. The views and problems of the group are a very good indicator for the needs of the wider industry.”

Topics for future discussion in the steering group will include spares optimisation, lifecycle management, servitization, root cause analysis, process simulations, and new business models like pay-per-use.

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