Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SMILE (Smart Measuring and Inspection for industrial Legacy Equipment)
Berichtszeitraum: 2016-12-01 bis 2017-05-31
Inspection and maintenance of technical installations is labor- and knowledge intensive and therefor costly. In many cases inspections turned out to have been done improperly of even not been done at all. This causes enormous risks for people and environment. To cope with that, organizations react with more rules and thus more paperwork. This leads to higher operational costs and a higher administrative burden, without an improvement of the quality and safety.
Proper maintained technical installations perform better, have lower operational costs and have a smaller footprint. Many legacy installations are hard to maintain due to the lack of data. When service crews have the right data, maintenance can be done at the right moment. By doing so, the operational cost can be kept as low as possible, undesired emissions be kept lowest and parts can be used as long as possible. This saves money and materials. (Chemical) plants can operate more competitive, compared on a global scale. This helps saving employment in Europe and thus ultimately R&D capacities.
Our overall goal is to design a good series of clever hard- and software that helps crews and management to perform their tasks easier, with higher quality and with higher efficiency.
Proper maintained technical installations perform better, have lower operational costs and have a smaller footprint. Many legacy installations are hard to maintain due to the lack of data. When service crews have the right data, maintenance can be done at the right moment. By doing so, the operational cost can be kept as low as possible, undesired emissions be kept lowest and parts can be used as long as possible. This saves money and materials. (Chemical) plants can operate more competitive, compared on a global scale. This helps saving employment in Europe and thus ultimately R&D capacities.
Our overall goal is to design a good series of clever hard- and software that helps crews and management to perform their tasks easier, with higher quality and with higher efficiency.
We performed an EU wide market survey. Therefor a total of 7 different scenario’s, with corresponding (both quantitative and qualitative) questions, have been draw up. Desk research was done to find the answers for all EU countries. At the same time we visited all relevant major trade shows in Europe held in the first half of 2017. This provide useful insights as well. The information thus obtained was used to sketch our new exporting strategy.
During our research we still haven’t found any real competitors yet. However we did found a surprisingly large number, in comparison to the last years, of small companies that come up with interesting new sensors. We have decided to put more effort in making it possible to connect some of these sensors to our system instead of developing our own sensors. Besides that, we’ll put more emphasis on the business side of the issue. In our opinion, this part is overlooked by too many companies. By offering clever systems, we can help local SME’s to bring their services to a competitive level, reduce administrative burden and improve the quality of inspections and maintenance. In that way both owner and service provider will benefit.