Digitisation in the sector: trends not to miss
Industry fairs such as Maintenance and M+R invariably showcase dozens of innovative products and technologies. In the shadows, however, something is moving: digitalisation is catching on, but is everyone on board? At the last exhibition edition, two striking trends stood out.
Every year, a lot of attention goes to the latest technologies from the field. New products are in the spotlight, ready to conquer their sector and offer solutions to known problems. Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that something is brewing. Digitalisation and automation are quietly reaching every corner of our sectors – and they are unstoppable.
The possibilities of drones
Automation has existed for a long time, of course, but until very recently it was thought that certain tasks would always remain manual labour. A computer, for example, could not make thorough determinations. With exhibitors like Skyebase, that is now changing at breakneck speed. Last year at Maintenance, they demonstrated the first possibilities with wall thickness measurements by drones. This year, they were clearly building on that.
“We have not been standing still,” confirms Jeroen te Boekhorst, Technical Sales at Skyebase. “There is a high demand for solutions that facilitate efficiency and reporting. To meet this, we are putting a lot of effort into the development of our own AI tools, for example.”
Today, for example, Skyebase offers tools that, based on a semi-automatic round-trip flight by a drone, plots an entire business park and indicates risk areas on it. “This ranges from automatically recognising cracks in concrete or asphalt, to corrosion recognition,” explains Te Boekhorst. “An automated report is then produced that an organisation can immediately work with.”
Exponential growth
The possibilities are great and demand is clearly growing, yet Te Boekhorst still notices a lack of awareness here and there in the industry. “We still often have to explain what it is, how it works and what the advantages are. Nevertheless, more and more companies are noticing that the economic situation calls for efficiency gains. We doubled our turnover last year and expect it to triple this year. In addition, we were allowed to welcome a Vinçotte stake last year. So something is clearly moving.”
A river of (unprotected) data
With the strong digitisation of production processes, inspection capabilities and everything that comes with it, data collection is also increasing. Installations are interconnected, leading to great cases such as automatic leak detection and more efficient production, but this also brings risks.
“A modern company has a lot of data, collected by many endpoints and these provide a mass of communication between them,” Kurt Neuskens explains. He is Data and AI Lead at TÜV Austria Belgium. “We notice daily that most companies are not yet awake to this – their heads are deep in their company’s maintenance and production. Wrongly so, because a hacker who finds a loophole takes control of your entire production process in no time. He shuts down mission-critical pipelines, for example, or creates dangerous overpressure on systems.”
HAZOP studies contribute to preventive maintenance, but cybersecurity is still only an optional part of it. “They look at how dangerous that piece of the production process is, what the risks are, fire safety and so on, but only a minority pay attention to all connectivity.”
Helping to set priorities
TÜV does pay that attention. One way they do this is by checking and fine-tuning companies’ action plans and then running penetration tests on them. By behaving like (ethical) hackers, they thus expose all pain points.
“The monitoring platform we offer our clients prioritises alerts and reports, so our clients can see which issues need their attention here and now, and which can wait,” Kurt says. “For that, we deploy AI that also supports them in reporting.”
See you next year at the fair(?)
The maintenance of the future will increasingly demand digitisation: both to cut costs and to cope with growing labour shortages. In addition, it will simply become a necessity. Companies will not be able to do without it, or they risk exposure to unnecessary risks. How our sectors continue to evolve, you will discover each time at our trade shows!