How IoT Creates Better Outcomes with Better Operations
Modern technology like IoT (Internet of Things) surrounds us more and more in our personal and professional lives. As our operations become more “digitally mature”, our facilities, assets and systems can tell us when they need our help – 24/7. IoT enables us to shift from a reactive “firefighting” mode towards predictive thinking and planning. The result is better running assets with less disruptive downtime. This ultimately creates better outcomes for our teams, citizens, students, operation teams – everyone we serve. All while saving us serious money.
Join us as Paul Lachance, IoT expert, lectures on how maintenance and operational professionals can employ IoT solutions to build transparency and visibility into their assets. We will dispel the myth that IoT is confusing and difficult to implement. IoT solutions allow teams to do more with less staff, save money, prevent issues and preserve long-term asset health.
Learning Objectives:
- Defining IoT – in simple, practical terms for the every-day maintenance professional
- Practical IoT examples demonstrating the benefit to your organization
- How to easily get started
- “Better Outcomes”: the benefits/return-on-investment of implementing IoT
Speaker
Paul Lachance has spent his entire career devoted to optimizing maintenance teams by enabling data-driven decisions and actionable insights. He wrote his first CMMS system in 2004 and has since spent his professional career designing and directing CMMS and EAM systems. A regular speaker at national tradeshows, he’s been featured at IMTS, Fabtech, SMRP and within several industry magazines. He currently serves as the Senior Manufacturing Advisor for Brightly Software.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome, everyone, to our webinar on how IoT creates better outcomes with better operations.
I'm Kristen Casey. I am a client marketing manager at Brightly. It's good to see you guys here or not see you, but I'm glad you're here to listen to our wonderful webinar. I have a couple of housekeeping items first. So just a reminder, you are muted. You can make your sandwich and do everything you need to do and still listen and get all the good information, we will have a few polling questions throughout the webinar, so make sure to engage with that because we'd love to get your responses. We are recording today's webinar, so just a heads up that if you do have to step away or if you do want to share it with your team members, I will be sending out the webinar link next week for you guys to watch and share with your other team members. We have a Q&A that's open at the bottom of the screen at any point in the webinar and you're more than welcome to ask questions and we will go through the Q&A at the end of the webinar.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Paul a chance. He is going to be our host today. Paul is breitling's operations technology consultant. He has spent his entire career devoted to optimizing maintenance teams by enabling data driven decisions and actionable insights. Paul wrote his first MSC system in 2004 and has since spent his professional career designing and directing CMM, mass and EM systems. Paul is a regular speaker at national trade shows, and he speaks a lot for us and hosts a lot of webinars for Brightly. And he was also a host at Dude you as well. Several times he's been featured to stab tech Smart p and within several other industry magazines. So I'm going to pass it off to Paul to get us started. Thank you.
Awesome thank you, Kristen. And thank everybody for joining the webinar today. We're going to be talking about the internet of things (IoT) and how it leads to better operations and better outcomes.
So the objectives today, we'll talk about what is the internet of things and probably more importantly, why do we need it? What is Smart asset for asset essentials? We're going to go through a series of examples of how IoT can operate in your environment. And of course, how does it save us money and time? Just one slide on Brightly. You all likely know Brightly. Many of us are clients on this call today Brian Kelly has been around for 20 plus years.
You can see by the data on this screen right here, we have a lot of experience, experience working with our clients, facilities, buildings, the assets processing millions and millions of work orders. That experience matters. It's what shapes our solutions by listening to our clients. And we're honored to have you as clients today. So what is the internet of things? It's kind of a crazy name. It's confusing. I mean, this picture on here is confusing and it's on there on purpose. A lot of times when you see IoT. In websites or in trade publications. It's portrayed with fancy diagrams, with a lot of technical terms. It's often confusing. Iot does not have to be hard. It does not have to be confusing.
IoT to every operation, everyday operations professionals is very simply. Our facilities, our buildings, the assets that are within all of those telling us when they need help. Your assets, your facilities have the ability, especially aided with these amazing, inexpensive sensors that are available. To broadcast to us when they are not feeling well, automatically, electronically. 365 days a year. Tell us when they need help. Iag is part of what's called the Fourth Industrial revolution, often today called industry for point out.
Now, I know a lot of you on the call today. You may not be, say, in heavy industrial operations, in industrial revolutions, you're like, what does that matter to me? It doesn't matter whether you're a health care facility or a school district or a municipality or a manufacturing organization represented by all of this. On the webinar today that every one of these industrial revolutions have created shifts in technology, which permeate all of culture, all of our operations.
So we need to give a very, very brief lesson in the late 1700s was the first Industrial revolution, and it was all about mechanization. It's when we started to use things like steam power, where we had no longer use our human muscles or beasts of burden to do the work. We could do it smarter, stronger through this mechanization. In the late 1800s came the second Industrial revolution, and that was about mass production. So the manufacturing world, you think Henry Ford Model T, it was more like the early 1900s, but it's all about mech innovation combined with mass production, but also the introduction of electrical energy. That was a huge technology shift which really started to benefit operations in all areas.
The third Industrial Revolution was about automation, computers in electronics that could aid in our operations. That was in the late 1960s. And today we're in the Fourth Industrial revolution, which is connecting everything our people, our assets, our buildings, our facilities are all connected. You think of that as the internet of things.
In fact, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has a lot of other things, such as 3D printing and artificial intelligence are also components of that. Things are happening faster and faster. This concept of compression of time, you just look at these numbers on this screen here. US Homo sapiens are going on this planet for $200,000 years, give or take. It's been about 10,000 years since we settled down into the agricultural revolution. It's only been about 238 years since the first Industrial Revolution thing. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years, 10 now. We're talking hundreds of years.
Computers have only been around for the personal computer for less than 50 years. The internet less than 40 have the first iPhone is less than 12 years ago. The iPhone 6 is 32,000 times faster than the computers that were on the Apollo spacecraft that put people on the moon. This compression of time, things are happening faster than ever, and you're in an internet of things. It's just one of those things that is super exciting and they're coming fast. The internet of things helps us with this concept called pushing up the curve.
Now, I know this is a bit of an eye chart, but this is a nice representation of what we do as maintenance professionals. When you get an asset and it's installed in your facility, I don't care if it's an AC unit, a pump, a production piece of equipment, whatever it is, when it gets installed in your facility, it's the best that asset is going to run.
Over time, that asset runs. It runs and it hits the p point in the curve. That's the point at which failure starts to be able to be detected. You're not going to be able to see it, smell it or hear it at this point. Subtle but over time, and especially if that asset is not properly maintained, it will eventually degrade till it hits the F the functional failure. That's the point in time where the asset is no longer able to keep up with what it was intended to do. And if you continue to ignore that asset, it's going to actually have catastrophic failure. It's the worst of all situations. We have maintenance professionals. Our job is to push up the P-F curve. We are trying to catch problems as early as we can, when they're minor, when they're small. Before we hit that functional failure. How do we do that? We do that with good maintenance practices and those maintenance practices. There's a spectrum of them run to fail. You never want to run to fail. You don't want to wait till something just fails.
Preventive maintenance. Well, that's doing things on a calendar every month, every week, every year, or maybe every 1,000. Our other run usage based. Data and that's really a significant step forward. Many of you on the caller use Asset Essentials. You're hopefully using the PPM capabilities within that product. It's way better than run fail.
The next step is condition based monitoring. That's when we just monitor the assets watching for impending failure or error. What's leading towards failure? Pressure readings. Temperature vibration. Any of these other metrics that can tell us in advance that a pending problem is coming? If you take that to the next step, predictive maintenance, it's condition based monitoring, but it's aided by the internet of things. That's where when you start to let our assets tell us electronically what those conditions are. And then there's the Holy grail, prescriptive maintenance. That's where we can not only know that an asset is going to have a problem in the future if we don't address it. It can analyze historically what corrections have been made and suggest to you actions to take to fix and improve.
Now, that's not we're not there yet. We're working towards prescriptive maintenance. But I know t and Smart Assets. The right solution is a predictive maintenance solution. All of these help us push up the PEf curve. All of these help us find problems sooner when they're small. Iot leads to a number of other amazing technologies and solutions that will help us in the future. And again, a lot of these are in the future, but when our assets can start in our facilities and our buildings can start to tell us when they're not feeling well.
That leads to prescriptive, prescriptive maintenance and even to concepts like digital twins and what you're thinking. You're having a hard time really comprehending IoT right now. And I'm throwing this concept of digital twins. A digital twin is a living, breathing twin of a physical asset that can be monitored. These are future technologies that will aid you someday. It's off often the future, but you can't get too predictive or prescriptive or digital twins if you don't start that journey towards IoT. So there's this we have to start thinking about your digital transformation journey, and that's simply the concept that it's a step by step process. We all have computers. You would not be on this webinar today if you did not have a computer.
Most of us are connected to the internet. Well, we know everybody on this call is because we're in a Zoom based webinar. But even in our day to day jobs, you know, with our mobile devices, our computers connected to the network into the cloud, you also need to start thinking about your facilities, your buildings and your assets also being connected. You can't get to the data that can come off those assets if you don't have that connectivity. Once you have that connectivity, it opens up visibility.
That's where we can start to analyze the data coming off of those assets in buildings and facilities so we can start to make data driven real time decisions that will lead into new insights and analytics about these assets that historically have been difficult to analyze and to make improvements on that will lead to predictability, catching problems sooner when they're minor and streamlining Revit remedies and ultimately leading to adaptability. That's that prescriptive. That's that Holy Grail.
Most of us are down here, and that's OK because you got to get started. Industry 4.0. Iot is a journey, it's not a destination, but you've got to start somewhere. And so you have to start really thinking about how sensors that can be easily attached to your assets can broadcast that data, leading you further and further along this digital maturity model so you can hit that predictive capabilities and ultimately someday off in the future, prescriptive capabilities. It's OK. Wherever you are, you just need to start thinking about starting this journey. I'm going to go ahead and throw a poll up on the screen.
If you could take a moment to answer the question of where are you in this digital maturity model? So hopefully you'll see a pop up on your screen with the question. If you could just take a moment answer, do you are you at the very beginning. You don't even really understand IoT that's OK. You're here at this webinar to learn or maybe you're actively researching it, but you really haven't started to implement anything quite yet. Or maybe you're already starting to get some IoT type data, but you're unable to do a whole lot with it. Maybe you've actually started some basic implementations in iot, but you want to expand. Or there's probably some of us who are actively using IoT to help with our operations. So if you could take a moment to answer that and just give it another couple of seconds here.
OK hopefully you've had enough time to answer that. We'll see if Kristen can throw the results on the screen, if that's possible. Yes, we actually still have a couple coming in. OK, great. Take some time. All right. Let's share some of the results. What a nice spectrum right there. I love it. Many of us are just getting started. We have some. A lot of us are actively researching. And as you get further down that it's less and less. But that's great. Glad to see some people are starting to get there and everybody on this webinar today has an opportunity to get further along.
Why are we doing this? We're doing this for better outcomes. It's the title of the webinar. We do this for better, safer, more efficient facilities and operating environments. We do this to improve our outcomes of our whoever we serve as maintenance and operations professionals, whether you're an educational environment for your staff and your students or health care organization for your residents and patients as well as staff. If you're a municipality for our citizens and everybody who work in the municipality, if you're a manufacturing and related organization, we're doing this to have better production, better quality products and related. Iot can help optimize our team. It can help us get ahead of backlogged maintenance. It helps us with safety and compliance, asset and system, uptime, preserving the long term health and ultimately saving us money, making us be able to hit our budget and profitable. And we'll have examples later in the webinar around all of those cost savings.
So what is Smart Assets for asset essentials? Well, it's all about taking the data off of our facilities and the way that the strategy with Asset Essentials is sensors. And this is a simple example right here. This is a sensor that literally is on a magnet and attaches. This is a pump right here. It attaches to a pump and can start monitoring that pump for vibration and other metrics.
Any type of sensors and I'll show you a little later, there's lots of sensors can broadcast data into the Smart Assets platform. That Smart Assets platform will analyze those incoming metrics figure. Is it worthy? Is it out of tolerance? Is it worthy of creating a work order? If so, it ends up inside of asset assumptions, your managed maintenance management system, and through there it can go through all normal workflow in Asset essentials, ultimately ending up in the hands of our technicians, contractors.
Anybody who needs to be alerted to perform that work automatically. Electronically streamlined like you could never do as just straight humans. Often when we talk about iot, there's other types of data. Some of you may be using status systems, building automation, PLCs or HMO, AIs. You may have assets that may already be able to broadcast data and other sensors. That's great. It's possible that data may be able to come in and go through the platform. Brightly solution is centered around sensors and we'll get into the sensors in more detail in a few minutes. This other of these other sources of data are candidates. It's also possible to augment, say, skater. I know skating historically is a challenging building automation as well, or challenging systems to have to tap into to get data out of them for maintenance operations purposes.
You can easily just drop a sensor on a pump that might already be monitoring skater model of that pump for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. Move that sensor to another pump. It's a great way to look at problem areas of your system. When the data comes in to the Smart Assets platform, you can visualize it. You can see historically all of the readings, trends, what's been going on with those readings. Probably more importantly, that data as it comes in, I the screens are a little bit hard to read here.
Every one of the sensors that are throughout your facility that you drop in the different buildings, facilities, assets, you can monitor those sensors, you can see physically where they are on a picture and know what their status is. And you can add intelligence. You can set thresholds. What is an acceptable vibration? What is an acceptable pressure? What is an acceptable temperature and set different rules? How long did it have to be outside that tolerance? The Smart Assets platform will not allow those problematic work orders. There's a lot of people who have say tried to use scatter systems and such. They get so many alarms that they just shut them off. You get that fatigue. There's a lot of intelligence in here that will prevent that from happening. So the appropriate alarms that are conditions that come in will end up inside of Asset Essentials in a good old work order. So any time something is truly out of tolerance, the rules within the Smart Assets system say, yup, create a work order. They automatically show up.
It's like any other work order in the system. You get the notifications, it'll be in your mobile device. And you can handle that. And it's completely streamlined. You don't have to walk over and see, take a reading off of something or wait. And fortunately, until it has failure and you have to go over, it happens electronically, automatically. Bright leads IoT strategy is heavily censored, heavily set up around sensors. There are all kinds of sensors. There is a catalog we're going to show on the screen here. There are literally hundreds. There might even be more than 1,000 sensors that are in the catalog that you can look through. And they monitor all kinds of data, all kinds of conditions for all kinds of assets. You're broadly representative, can go through different scenarios with you to talk about what are the right sensors for the different type of assets you might need to monitor.
And I'm going to go through a handful of examples today, but it just goes on and on and on. The different types of sensors for reading, different types of data that will help monitor those conditions and ultimately tell all of you if that asset needs help. So what we'll do is we'll go through a couple of examples. So go through a couple of these cases. And these are a broad range of use cases that really go across all the different types of organizations that Breitling serves. Pumps pumps are an excellent example. So pumps obviously when they fail, they're very disruptive to operations. You can see some extreme examples here for pumping failure that led to back up with significant flooding and then flooding, sewer backups, poor water pressure, flooding in buildings. I mean, there's all kinds of examples.
Even industrial operations for pumps theory worked in manufacturing operations to move fluids and such around your production process. It just goes on and on. You can just take one of these sensors and this one is literally attached by a magnet. And the way these sensors work, it's awesome because they're wireless. You power it up there because they're wireless, they'll automatically start broadcasting data. You do not need to get involved, say with your IT department or your controls, engineer your scale to people if you don't need to or don't want to because these are very easy to set up. You're powered up, you scan it, it's automatically going to wirelessly, electronically broadcast that data. It's connecting to your Smart Assets and ultimately your Asset Essentials automatically so that you can just start to Mark later and see if a work order is justified. You can set those parameters. These are ISO 10816.
A typical readings for different types of pumping operations. Obviously, you would tailor this for your own operations, but if this sensor is starting to read vibrations that are at a tolerance, you'll get that work order. So again, know, these are. It's great for maintenance operations. It's also great for the reliability, how well these assets are functioning and even things like regulatory compliance, some of these conditions that can be read that might lead to regulatory issues, you'll in advance. Another use case is water level monitoring, storm water basins. There's even industrial operations where you need to watch tank levels. You can set a sensor to detect water level rising. Catch it if it gets over a certain level. Yeah, that's classic.
One is safe for a municipality where there's storm basins and outlets for drainage that get blocked by debris that you'll now because this sensor is going to read that hey, the water levels are too high. So that condition comes in, creates a work order, alerts an appropriate technician or our crew who will then go over and clear that debris well before flooding, well before property damage, whether it be for residents or for the municipality itself. Again, you can apply that to whatever type of operation you're in. But water level monitoring is another excellent example where these sensors can benefit leak detection and other, you know, whether it's water or other forms of fluids and water is and it's not just water. It can be big flooding events. It can just humidity, it can be drips. There's all kinds of different sensors. This is a rope sensor. It's coiled up right here. But you could drape a rope sensor in a larger area. And if water comes in contact with that sensor bay, it's going to send an alert and it's going to end up in Smart Assets ultimately, if it's warranted, create a work order. These two different types of sensors, whether it's in sub flooring, which obviously it's incredibly expensive, that water gets in a lot months, all these electrical and computer related cables, plumbing, whatever it may be. You can put a sensor wirelessly. It's going to automatically broadcast and let when there's a problem.
Electrical panel monitoring. If you've ever had an electrical panel fire, that is obviously a major safety issue. It's also incredibly disruptive because it Cascades to wherever that electrical panel was in front of through all the other assets on the downstream from that panel. And so there's a variety of sensors that can monitor for this, whether it be temperature oriented. This is a cool sensor here called the hot drop that can also monitor electrical usage. So it's checking things like amperage. And not only is it going to tell you if you're spiking, it's also very helpful to know maybe there's other electrical consumption challenges. We all know how expensive power is these days.
So just another way to look at it, both from a maintenance and from an energy consumption standpoint. Refrigeration, commercial refrigeration, refrigerators, freezers and other types of assets that are affected in temperature fluctuations. And yeah, there's a lot of different uses of this, whether it be medicines or food or. Or industrial type operations where refrigeration is needed. We all know, like a school district, what happens when you lose a freezer. It's very expensive to replace and disruptive to our operations to replace the contents of that freezer or of that fridge. Well, you can just drop in. This is a druggy, you know, sensor, and they're really easy to attach, just zip tied in to a rack inside of this commercial fridge. If this thing is up of up or down in monitoring of temperature. Send an alert. Somebody has got to go check that and catch the problem very early. Whether you need to shift the contents while you get a repair on the fridge or you get the refrigerator, get the fridge repaired, whatever you're going to do.
But catch it early. Don't wait until you have ruined items inside that commercial fridge. Indoor air quality. So we know that and this is valuable in all operations, maybe a little bit more specifically in schools. We hear about volatile organic compounds, CO2 measurements, other metrics that can indicate poor air quality that are affected in that room. So this is a cool sensor by our site. This one actually physically in the room visible, but it can also electronically and automatically send sensor in from the metrics into Smart Assets. And if your velocities are outside of an acceptable tolerance, maybe you send an investigation type work order that somebody should go check and find out what's going on in that situation. So indoor air quality monitoring can be used in all types of operations, but in particular, we know especially have COVID in school districts. So another very cool use case industrial filter monitoring.
So this can analyze pressure, differential pressure on either side of a filter. You see there are two probes here. You typically will think of this in HPC related filters, but differential pressure is good for monitoring a lot of different types of industrial assets where filters are involved. So, you know, the old days you go around and well, hopefully you didn't wait till the filter was so clogged that actually caused damage to the asset. That would be obviously the wrong end of how to approach this. If you're checking it on a predefined schedule, great. That's preventive maintenance. But even better is let that asset let that sensor tell you that, hey, this filter is 75% clogged, create a work order, even if it's to an outside contractor who monitors some of these assets. But monitoring differential pressure is a valuable use of a sensor to preserve assets.
The use cases go on and on and on. Really, there's all kinds of sensors that can monitor really any type of asset vibration, temperature, pressure. And all of these sensors are designed to be either duct taped magnets, zip tied. However you need to attach it easily, wirelessly broadcasts the data and automatically delivering it for the purposes of generating those workers. So next they will talk about is how can it save us time and how can it save us more importantly, money? So IoT and implementing sensors and Smart Assets isn't in that aspect. IT costs money to do it. But like all good investments, these investments will pay for themselves. Many times over. I know you're going to want to ask the question.
Well, what does it cost me? It varies. It varies for how many sensors. I mean, some of these sensors are as cheap as $50. That vibration sensors, those are in the 3 to $400 range. And of course, you have the cost of the Smart Assets. But if you look at what does it help you with in terms of a cost? So analyzing through Brightly clients and other sources of information, if you're able to catch remember the curve we talked about earlier? If you push up that RF curve and get higher and higher, you catch problems earlier that will cost you less money to maintain than if you catch problems down. Here are an analysis shows us it's a five time factor. Very few of us are way up here. Hopefully not many of us are way down here, but if you can push up that off curve and start to catch problems earlier and earlier, what was a $5 work order can be a $2 work order and can be a $1 work order.
Think about that. That's a five time increase in cost or, you know, one fifth reduction in costs. And if you're budgets, it turns into real dollars. If if you're near the end of the spectrum and you got a $2 million budget, you can see it doesn't take a rocket science. The math to do what it costs to implement Smart Assets is a small, small, small fraction of what it will bring you in results of catching that by pushing up that curve and catching those problems early. If you're more look at things from an uptime downtime perspective, the average annual cost of downtime nationally is $260,000 per hour. That's unplanned downtime. That takes into account all industries, all types of operations. And it includes things like, say, automobile manufacturers where they measure it in the millions of per hour when those assets go down.
A more realistic example is here. If you're able to know what does downtime cost us per hour? And again, manufacturing organism nations and other industrial organizations that know what does it. And that's the cost of the maintenance, the cost of the lost production, you know, all the auxiliary costs that go along with that. Hopefully you can measure what your downtime cost. Hopefully, you know how many hours per year of unplanned downtime you have. Asset Essentials will give you that ability if you're tracking it. If you don't know how to do that or you're not sure, reach out to a Brightly representative to know more about that because it's a natural part of Asset Essentials. You can look and see on average or a rough guess is worth spending $250,000, or it's costing us $250,000 per year. It does not take much effort to pay back an investment in Smart Assets in an IoT even a very small 10% shaving 2 and 1/2 hours per year of downtime. You ought to be able to do that. You ought to be able to shave 50 even more of that unplanned downtime.
How eye catching problems earlier and earlier, pushing up that P-F curve. And remember, IoT and those sensors tell us what those little problems are small before they become big. Valerie do set on plan downtime and the math is very straightforward. So start to think about that iota journey and start to think about how you get there. There are other ways that Asset essentiels IoT can really help pay for itself. You know, just in sheer shaving, the amount of time you're spending on your work orders, this client on average was spending three hours in charge per work order. These are corrective maintenance work orders now. And over that, over the course of implementing Asset essentials, they were able to get that to under an hour.
That frees up two hours of valuable technician contractor time to do more important and fruitful things. They were also able to save serious dollars as they started to shift for every 1% increase in their preventive maintenance corrective maintenance ratio as they started to get more and more preventive and leading towards predictive. You're saving a lot of money. Why? corrective maintenance work orders are expensive for your per preventive maintenance. Predictive maintenance work orders are far less expensive. And in fact, this organization was able to shave more than $1,000,000 off their overall maintenance spend just by implementing see them amassed. I will take that to the next level. There's a lot of other data here you can look through that show why and how this pays off. So as we get to the end of the presentation here, let's do a recap. So some key takeaways.
Predictive and prescriptive maintenance is the future. We used to talk about preventive maintenance and automating that as the future. Well, you guys are already brightening clients. Most of you on the calls here already seeing the benefits of what Asset Essentials can do for you. You're seeing seems can do for you and you're already hopefully implementing preventive maintenance on a calendar. If you're not, you have the tools to do it. I recommend you push forward on doing that. But moving towards predictive. Pushing up that curve. Letting your assets and facilities tell you when they need help. You can't do that without embracing the concepts of the internet of things. And it doesn't have to be hard.
Forget those confusing charts, those technical diagrams that you see in trade journal publications, those fancy phrases. Smart assets, especially through the use of those easy to implement sensors. It's a simple way to do it. It's affordable. And it's very impactful for how it can push up that P-F curve and catch those small problems before they become big problems. Also, remember, start your digital transformation journey. You have got to start thinking about moving past while we got computers and we're connected to the cloud. We have to really start thinking about connecting our buildings, our facilities, our assets, even our vehicles to us humans through those sensors and into Smart Assets and into Asset Essentials. You do that. You have to start that transformation journey.
Remember that compression of time. Things were happening faster than they ever have in the past. Take advantage of these technologies. They're becoming easier to implement and less expensive than ever. And why are we doing this? More uptime. Your assets will be running better than they have. They'll be less downtime. You will be able to do more with less. Your team will be optimized. You will have more of a preventive maintenance culture. You will be able to reduce those backlogs so you can get to those work orders that you just never really able to get to in the past.
When you free up being stuck working on corrective maintenance work order so that firefighting culture that we say you will have better running, safer, longer lasting assets, facilities and buildings and a predictive maintenance culture aided through IoT and especially with Smart Assets. It's going to save you money. It's going to help you be able to hit your budget. It's going to make you control your costs and make you a more profitable organization. If you are for profit organization. And ultimately, it comes back to the better outcomes for your students, your teachers, your citizens, your production team and your factory, your health care staff, residents and everybody related to it. So ultimately, we are trying to serve our customers with all up to all of our customers that will lead to better outcomes aided with IoT.
So that brings me to my last slide. And now we're at a point where if you have questions and hopefully you're typing them into that Q&A area while you're putting your questions in, if you want to if you will, please take a look, there's going to be another poll's going to pop up on the screen. If you could take a moment to answer that question, why you might be adding some questions. I'll give everybody a couple of moments to do that. So I think we can actually leave that poll while, Christine. We can leave it out for another minute or two while Christine will address and see if there's any questions that have come in. Yeah, definitely. I'd say that the first question we have here. You touched on this a little bit, but I think this viewer would like for you to go a little bit more in depth. Paul, when you say this, these sensors are wireless.
What is the most common protocol? Do these connect to a base station you would need in each building? And I'm going to be very careful and say extremely high level on this because it is a very standard process. But the technical details are better served to be answered by a Brightly more technical representative. But yes, they're wirelessly broadcast and there's a couple each sensor uses different protocols such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or there's others in there. And I'm sorry, I don't have more the technical details. They do go to a gateway, which then makes its way into Smart Assets. But that whole process is highly automated. It is very simple. This this whole process was designed that you do not need to be a Bluetooth expert or understand the different protocols and how they work. You really I mean, I'm going to be a bit oversimplifying here, but you physically power up the unit, the base station that is also powered up. It will electronically start to go through that and connect into the Smart Assets platform. There's not a lot of technical configuration or technical expertise that is required by whoever is putting those sensors on these assets. Again, you're Brightly representative. We'll go through a little bit more detail on how easy it is to set up. But the whole point, Smart Assets and the sensors that they have was to make it easy essentially for everyday I'll say everyday maintenance people. I mean, you might have to, you know, screw some things in and be able to get to the asset safely. And so forth. But you do not need to be some electronic controls engineer protocol tech savvy person to make this happen again. Me your Brightly representative to get more detail about that great.
Here's another one. I understand your presentation, but it will be difficult to explain to my management team any advice. Yeah, well, being on this webinar today was the first step in that journey that hopefully you've got a better baseline understanding. You also will be able to share the. This this presentation today. And there's other documents that will, in a simple way, describe how this works. I0t has been a confusing topic for a while. I mean, ever, ever since I first started hearing the phrase diety didn't make any sense to me. The internet of things and how does that apply to real world? So, yes, everybody across the board has some level of confusion about that, especially as you get further away from, say, non-technical people, closer to, say, financial oriented, those people that are approving budgets and so forth. It can get more confusing. You got to continue, get educated, utilize resources such as your bright Brightly representative to help clarify. Ultimately, coming back to the benefits it gives you use things like this webinar or a recording of this webinar and let us help you make it clear to whoever is involved in that decision making process. Because, you know, as an evangelist around what AOTA and industry 4.0 technologies can do for all of our operations across all industries, my goal is to try to make these things easier to understand and enable you, the great people who take the time to come to a webinar like this. So that you can then evangelize to your decision makers. I hope that makes sense, definitely. And I think just to reiterate the point that you made about our team helping, we would even like speak to those people in your team who you're trying to educate and help and educating them ourselves, you know, and ensuring that they really understand what AOTA is and Smart Assets.
Definitely definitely. Let's see here. Oh, here's one about skater. We skater is older and found it difficult to connect with other systems. Can we connect with your system? Yeah you know, it's, you know, in certain types of industries skater and I'm going to put building automation in that same bucket because many Brightly clients will have some version of skater or building management systems, building automation systems within their operations. It's pretty common. What we have found in our research and it seems to be across the industry, is you've got a wide variety of different skater systems. Some are new, some are old, most of them are extremely difficult to get into. I mean, maybe they're great at doing that control for for, say, Comp operations, but to try to get data out of them to say do something as simple as driving a maintenance work order can be a real challenge. Yes, it is possible to get data out of those systems into Brightly Smart Assets.
That's a conversation you'd have to have with your right representative. I also am really happy about using these sensors to augment skater. So, you know, some examples that we have seen is have a skate skater system, maybe it's an old one that you just really have no chance of getting any data out of that. Drop a sensor on one of those pumps. It's already being monitored. Let it, you know, like you find that problem pulse house or problem aspect of your operations with HPC drop a sensor on there, even if it's temporary to monitor it for a period of time. You can move that sensor somewhere else later to monitor another asset yet at the heart of what the problem is.
So we like to think that Brightly's Smart Asset solution is a great way to extend what skater can do, and it's typically going to be a heck of a lot easier and even less expensive than trying to deal with skater, even to the point where and I hope I'm not a lot of people, a lot of customers will say, you know, we don't even want to really talk to the it's been such a challenge to get into these skater systems. We prefer to like, you know, can we do it without going there without talking? I would say I'm not I'm not advocating go around anybody behind anybody's back. But it makes it a heck of a lot easier to use Smart Assets and sensors to do those types of tasks. Awesome all right, that is it, Paul, for today. I don't have any more questions right now.
Awesome well, I guess in closing, concluding here, look for a follow up email. I know there'll be a video of this and other stuff. I want to thank everybody for joining the webinar today and have a great day. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
