Last year, Fabio Enriquez Uribe founded Genial in Medellin, Colombia with the aim to solve business problems for machine manufacturers. After working in technology for 22 years with a background in engineering and enterprise sales, Fabio saw the opportunity to help bring accessible IoT technology to industrial machines and manufacturing. The first being with powerHHO, a manufacturer of decarbonization machines, who is now using remote monitoring to reduce ongoing in-person performance maintenance and automate daily reporting.
Since the pilot began, Genial’s Particle-powered solution reduced powerHHO’s service calls by 50%, increasing overall productivity and allowing for better tracking on when maintenance is needed. Learn how Genial is leveraging IoT and Particle to help manufacturing gain more intelligence from their machines.
Addressing manual challenges with cellular IoT
Decarbonization machines help to increase gas mileage efficiency for cars and are accessible for drivers through car dealerships and autobody shops. powerHHO manufactures and sells these machines to the dealers and shops with a revenue share model based on a number of services. It’s also critical these machines are working properly with little to no downtime.
There were two challenges Genial and powerHHO were looking to solve: how to automate tracking of usage for revenue share with end users of decarbonization machines and reduce in-person visits for maintenance calls. Before, powerHHO would send their service team to each machine to manually check electricity meters, service usage, and perform ongoing maintenance every few days. Not only was this time intensive on site, but there was also additional travel time to consider. For example, in a city like Bogota, the service team could only visit about four machines per day considering distance and city traffic. With a growing number of machines across multiple cities, the overhead was becoming a blocker to scale.
Photo source: powerHHO
Cutting service visits in half and tracking with predictive maintenance
Working closely with Genial’s expertise, powerHHO implemented a new version of a connected decarbonization machine that leveraged Particle’s cellular solution and device platform. Using the data from these machines, powerHHO’s sales and operations teams can now monitor each machine’s status on items like the number of decarbonization services the machine has performed and overall operation time. The team can also predict the next maintenance window from a forecast based on the manufacturer recommendations of critical machine parts.
The “Mantenimiento Celdas Sugerido” dashboard helps keep track of when the “next suggested cells maintenance” is required.
After rolling out a pilot program with over 20 machines in two cities, powerHHO reduced the number of in-person visits by 50% and are expecting to eliminate all “service count” visits completely. powerHHO can also expand their customer base to cities outside Medellin and Bogota with confidence in their IoT enabled fleet.
Genial continues to expand IoT solutions for manufacturing lines
Particle’s IoT hardware and ease of scale was critical in Genial’s ability to bring a connected solution to market, especially as a lean team. Fabio and the Genial team are quickly expanding by building custom solutions for other manufacturers including packaged goods and construction materials to improve line efficiency, capacity, and overall quality assurance.
Learn more about how Particle can help make your manufacturing more intelligent with IoT or talk to an expert here.
