UpKeep Edge | Accelerate Maturity, Improve Decision Making

Asset-intensive organizations face numerous challenges when it comes to maintenance, operations, and reliability (MOR). Some of these challenges include:

• Staying on top of asset management in a sustainable way.

• Creating a cohesive and unified view of asset performance.

• Becoming less reactive and adopting a more preventive approach to maintenance.

• Creating a data-driven decision making culture to inform maintenance and asset management decisions. 

In addition to those hurdles, MOR teams are viewed as cost centers and often operate with small budgets and teams. It can be challenging to manage all the work that needs to be done to ensure optimal asset maintenance and management.  

That’s why we’re proud to present UpKeep Edge—a system of action designed to provide continuous access to the performance and condition of key assets and facilities. Edge combines IoT sensors, analytics dashboards, and alerts to help teams monitor, manage, and maintain assets in a more intelligent and effective manner. 

Connecting Edge to the Approaches of Today

At UpKeep, we’ve never seen ourselves as just a software provider. Our goal is to help asset management teams organize, oversee, and optimize their asset and maintenance management, with the ultimate aim of driving business performance. To capitalize on that goal, we knew we had to additionally provide an analytical platform for asset data management, analysis, visualization, and decision making. 

Edge is a shining example of our commitment to asset operations management by providing maintenance, operations, and reliability teams with a central repository of information across the asset life cycle. By allowing organizations to continuously and passively monitor assets or facilities, Edge provides a steady stream of data for further analysis that, in turn, can drive preventive maintenance strategies and asset lifecycle management.

What sets Edge apart is it’s an affordable, user-friendly solution built into the UpKeep platform; it’s not just an add-on. This means Edge can be the foundation for any condition-based maintenance, preventive maintenance, or predictive maintenance program. Furthermore, Edge can help:

• Scale your team without adding headcount.

• Centralize asset data and maintenance management in a single system.

• Capture and analyze data to create/optimize condition-based maintenance programs.

• Create early-warning detection to reduce costly failures or breakdowns.

In order to migrate from reactive, manual asset maintenance and management, MOR teams must leverage more modern approaches to asset management, and more importantly, to gather the intelligence they need to fuel preventive and/or predictive maintenance approaches.

UpKeep Edge is the way forward to build a lightweight, condition-based monitoring or preventive maintenance program.

How Does Edge Work?

Edge captures data by leveraging three key components: wireless sensors capture readings from the environment or equipment, transmit the readings to a 4G LTE Cellular Gateway, and from there they are relayed to the web application so users can see the data in a visual format. 

As of today, we offer four sensors (with more coming soon based on customer feedback): 

• Temperature: monitor ambient temperature to proactively prevent spoilage, damage, or unsafe conditions.

• Single phase current (up to 150 amps): monitor the electricity flowing to equipment or systems to proactively manage power consumption and safeguard vital systems.

• Water detection: monitor vital facilities for the presence of water to respond quickly to water leaks and protect critical assets and inventory from damage.

• Humidity: Monitor humidity surrounding mission-critical systems, sensitive inventory, and valuable assets in real time.

Edge’s ability to capture data remotely and alert teams to performance below or beyond acceptable thresholds has been a game changer for customers.

“UpKeep sensors have changed the entire way we monitor the health of our facility. No more clipboards and no more needless facility walkthroughs. Now we can monitor the state of our facilities hundreds of miles away from a mobile device anywhere we are.” -Ung Ho, Maintenance Manager, HMSHost - Los Angeles Airport

In the past, smaller organizations were priced out of being able to build programs that leveraged IoT, analytics, and a CMMS/EAM. With Edge, the barrier to entry has been lowered, and now, any company can accelerate their maintenance maturity. 

Why Is Edge Relevant?

The future of operations must be more data-driven, flexible, and collaborative. Why? For starters, a global pandemic, massive supply chain shocks, and decades of frustration with data silos, resource constraints, and coordination issues our customers have told us about. 

Edge supports this way forward by taking a more extensible approach to asset monitoring to help drive maintenance strategy. Extensibility is the key aspect here since a convergence of market factors and technological advancement demand that asset maintenance and management teams take a new technology-driven approach.

“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel and go backwards to understand our data. It’s just right there. Right now, I can go back and forth just looking at the reports personally. I’m starting to see which machines I’m servicing more, and I can follow that. I can also manage preventive maintenance a little better, knowing what is causing more problems.” -Greg McGill, Facilities Manager, Icon Entertainment

Edge is well-suited to the current trends and issues affecting customers and the global marketplace, particularly these four trends:

Increasing integration: the most sophisticated EAM solutions can only impact revenue by integrating data from asset maintenance, performance, and reliability.

Greater access to technology: improvements in technology have made data more accessible than ever, and it’s cheaper and easier for companies of any size to implement advanced IoT techniques previously reserved for larger companies.

Increasing competition: rapid advancements have made bleeding edge technology like artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance, and IIoT accessible. Companies that don’t adopt new technologies risk getting left behind.

Remote maintenance management: labor shortages and the ongoing skills gap have accelerated the need for remote collaboration tools, better remote condition monitoring, smaller teams, and better foresight. 

Edge Prepares Teams for the Future

Data is critical for not only managing assets in a proactive manner, but also utilizing human resources effectively. But most organizations rely heavily on reactive, manual approaches to stay abreast of asset performance. While these methods may work for very small teams with an equally small number of assets, they don’t work for larger organizations, dispersed teams/assets, or complex asset hierarchies.

This is especially true at a time when workforce shifts have created a dearth of talent and have forced MOR teams to do more with less. According to a study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the manufacturing skills gap in the U.S. could result in 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030. Edge provides greater effectiveness and efficiency by allowing customers to use valuable human resources for higher-value activities.

Consolidating asset intelligence has also been difficult because disjointed systems and practices across teams has led to siloed, inaccessible data, which in turn, prevents teams from getting accurate, real-time data into asset operations and management. Edge supports robust asset intelligence by:

1. Continuously capturing data from assets.

2. Providing real-time data to teams.

3. Centralizing asset and maintenance data.

4. Visualizing data to illustrate trends

5. Alerting team to anomalies in real-time.

We’re living in an intelligence revolution. Organizations must keep up in order to not be left behind by competitors. But luckily these technological advancements are more accessible than ever before. Ready to start monitoring your assets and facilities? To demo Edge today, click here!