Production Challenges

Many industrial customers are forced into a nightmarish choice of deploying some change, enhancement or new technology into Production without adequate upfront testing.  Even configuration changes are stressful events given the inability to work through unintended impacts.  The underlying problem is the lack of a reference system.

Because reference systems are historically too expensive.

Prohibitive Costs

The main reasons why these systems do not exist are cost and space & cost.  Building a reference system can be incredibly expensive both to purchase equipment and interact with the system over time.  Further compounding these issues, traditionally at least, is the reality that these systems needed to be stood up in the same facility running Production.  There is simply no space in the factory for these deployments nor space in wallets to run such a system.

Bear’s VDM solution changes the game.

Bear’s VDM solution enables cloud-based management of systems at scale and instantly removes the geographic restrictions of reference systems.  Bear also fully controls the configuration of devices and those devices’ connections and it is here that Bear can provide a true value-add for its customers.

Bear can create secure System Profiles that enable a given customer to instantly emulate their production facility, run the tests they want to run and verify results – all remote and secure through the Bear VDM solution.  Then another customer can come in and instantly configuration the same general equipment to quickly run their own tests.

In this manner, the costs for a reference system can be shared amongst numerous companies.  Bear’s advanced protective measures will ensure that no unwanted data sharing can ever occur which frees competitive organizations to defray test environment costs.

Value Added Pilots

The goal for Bear is to start building these reference systems from Day 1.  The intent is to provide value for our customers throughout the implementation cycle.

A Bear pilot would start by providing an overall reference system design which includes numerous suggested phases.  Each phase would include a set of devices – the most critical added first – in a configuration that emulates production.  Standard industry tests would be applied to the test to mimic the scale of Production and any third party certification/validation would be completed.  Thus, as a customer obtains secure systems, they are also gaining a test system to run configuration options without impacting Production.

If you would like to discuss how Bear can help your company, please contact us today!

Virtual Industrial Control

The main promise of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) industry in a more rapid, streamlined transition from one manufacturing configuration to another.  This promise attempts to leverage wireless communications over wired and intelligent devices over dumb endpoints but the dream has yet to be fully realized.

The main challenge to date has been an inability to work effectively across vendors and to properly integrate legacy systems into these configuration matrices.  Since none of these IIoT vendors provide a cross-platform, inclusive, management platform, operators are still forced to manually reconfigure floor setups and utilize separate processes (i.e. paper and pencil) to store prior setups.

Bear changes the game by providing the ability to truly virtualize industrial equipment, fully control the configurations and connections of devices and effortlessly switch complex architectures through stored profiles.  A profile might control a set of core equipment that is running a different set of internal connections and interacting with a subset of peripheral devices.  Another profile might determine how data/electricity is routed and enable real-time disaster recovery in case of device failure or, given Bear’s ability to monitor device health, enable zero downtime maintenance.

Energy Savings

One interesting application that has grown out of this virtualization control is the ability to evolve energy savings in smart systems and lighting provides a great example.  Currently, most smart lighting systems leverage fairly simple controls (turn off the lights when no movement is detected or per some schedule) combined with LED bulbs.  Some efforts are underway to push this concept further by attempting to determine the amount of light needed, measured in lumens, and then adjusting the available electricity accordingly.

While this latter approach does result in significant savings, it fails to truly reach the potential savings these systems can achieve.  Suppose, for example, a four bulb fixture only needs 50% lumen.  Currently, these advanced approaches will provide 50% energy to all 4 bulbs.  This does save energy but the bulbs will still burn out at the same rate whether they run 100% or 50%.  Moreover, when a bulb starts to go bad and flicker, it becomes extremely inefficient and these systems have no ability to track this issue.

Bear can evolve this concept to its full extent by working directly on the fixture and, in this example, running two of the four bulbs at 100% and then rotating to the other pair.  This rotation both achieves the desired energy savings and it prolongs the life of the bulbs.  Bear can also detect power fluctuations and take a bad bulb out of rotation when it starts to go bad and enable it to be replaced with no overall disruption.

The true power of Bear, however, comes into play when these features are combined across fixtures and the lumen levels are stored in profiles that can be loaded through an automation routine in the Bear cloud.  Much like smart thermostats, wide area lighting can be reduced to optimal scheduling that is adjusted based on user feedback, demand-response paradigms, and fixture/bulb health metrics.  The complexity of managing these large systems can be effectively reducedintuitivethe inutiitve, visual, Bear interface.

If you would like to discuss how Bear can help your company, please contact us today!