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AN AMERICAN
BULLDOG
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46 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2018 www.dcvelocity.com
when you’re trying to ship a million
boxes.”
REAL-TIME CONNECTIVITY
The Industrial Internet of Things
(IIo T) is driving much of the change
occurring in conveyor system main-
tenance, particularly when it comes
to monitoring the condition of
equipment in the DC. Ruehrdanz
points to advances in warehouse
execution systems (WES)—software
designed to control movement of
products in a facility—as a case in
point.
“In the era of the [IIoT], the WES
can move from not only managing the
operation [to] also optimizing conveyor
system operation, repairs, and mainte-
nance,” he explains, pointing to Internet
connectivity as the conduit for supplying
more extensive, real-time data about the
state of the conveyor system, down to
the component level. “The maintenance
management module of the WES software
continuously assesses every portion of the
conveyor network and then submits alerts
when a threshold has been reached or a
module is underperforming.”
Those alerts allow technicians to sched-
ule routine preventive maintenance—
including automatic ordering of spare
parts, in some cases. Analytics software
records operational data, reporting trends
and predicting future performance.
“Predictive analytics capabilities will
continue to expand as IIot allows us to
know what will happen, when it will
happen, and what we can do about it,”
Ruehrdanz says. “This will allow ware-
house and production operations to
maximize operational excellence and
strengthen the case for automation.”
“It provides us with asset-level data that
helps the customer set operations and
performance limits,” she explains. “We
will see things we wouldn’t normally see,
such as a motor on a line way back in a
system that makes a noise or vibration.
[Technicians] may not see that until it
gets to preventive maintenance—or they
may not see it at all. It allows us to help
them catch those anomalies prior to a
failure, so they can address them before
they become issues.”
VIDEOS, APPS, AND MORE
High-tech connectivity is also helping to
address labor-related concerns stemming
from a dearth of technically trained conveyor maintenance technicians on the
