| Thanks for taking to time to raise your concerns, these are all legitimate questions that have been raised by our customers during our sales process Our your second point - the problem we are solving is human error and principal/agent problem, which can be addressed by management controls. We have seen the management controls fail when there varying skill and experience levels in the maitenance crew, when the operation has a transient workforce (say contractors at a harvest) or when the records are falsified. Falsification of records is principal agent - the person responsible for greasing doesn't wear the cost of downtime, labour and spares to fix it. GreaseBoss can be used to eliminate all of these factors - customers who buy it may be a gold mine in PNG, or a potato farm in Victoria, a smelter in India. These types of operations have minmimal management controls compared to a modern developed world operation. As with everything, GreaseBoss has a sweet spot in the ecomony and it may not be where you have previously worked. On your second point - we added a computer to a grease gun... that runs the risk of over complicating a simple tool, let alone an RFID on a zerk. We have worked really hard to make our system simple - we know our users are not going to tolerate a screen freeze, syncing errors etc - its not perfect now, but its on the trajectory. We have built our system with minmial impact to completing the current task, the only change is that you have to charge the unit at night. The only input interface is the RFID (no buttons) and the output on the screen. We want our users to pick it up and it just works. With regards to the final comments, we have a version of the system that can be deployed locally - therefore no risk of losing data, bricking the device. The system works entirely offline, it only needs to sync once - provided the schedule never changes. And the third party can guide you around the plant, tell you how much grease and when its required, if you have a day off it can ensure the greasing is completed to the same standard as you would. I hope this answwers your quesitons - thanks for making me work hard :) |
In industries relying on large machines, there's always companies promising their tools or their parts or their systems will increase profits and efficiency etc.
In many cases i've seen, the benefits end up being marginal, while complexity in the current systems are increased.
They end up bringing their own maintenance challenges and other unexpected challenges.
Availability of proprietary attachments and parts was always a big issue. We'd be at the whims of the sole provider as far as availability, pricing and delivery time went. This factors in to the amount of downtime when inevitable down time occurs.
There's a big difference between waiting a week for your fancy proprietary doodad to show up than sending someone to the hardware store.
Every external proprietary system you add to your current system is another layer of 'things' that comes with it's own problems eventually.
My questions aren't so much about how much money this will save from down times, but how much extra money will it cost when inevitable problems do occur with it.
Is it going to cost more in the long run than current human error does?
What i've noticed a lot of these systems actually do isn't reduce losses or increase profits, it just hides the losses further down the road.
From what I can tell, this system would be applied to hundreds of individual grease zerks across an entire industry, requiring likely at least a dozen or more of your proprietary ends.
Now, we're reliant not only on every one of those zerks functioning properly always, but we're limited in the amount of greasegun's we can actually deploy.
As the other commenter said, the greasegun attachments are expensive. They're going to be used a lot, everything that's used a lot wears down. Hell, normal greaseguns die pretty regularly.
This is now a new expensive part that the company will have to rely on to perform basic maintenance, which itself will need either maintainance or replacement at some point.
At which point, the company's waiting for their delivery instead of just going to buy a new greasegun.
On gun down means a loss of a person's worth of greasing until it's replaced. That's time and money lost there on top of the cost of replacement.
A zerk down means no data from that one until it's replaced meaning it's back to human error again.
I appreciate your zerks and attachments may be built ruggedly, but everything in a machine is prone to wear and breakage and eventually, they will bring maintenance issues.
What are the extra costs this will bring on top of initial and other ongoing service costs?
Are they low enough to actually save money in the long run?
5-10 years down the road?
These aren't tech startups with ephemeral existences, these machines will need to be relied on for years are you offering that kind of reliability?
A decade from now, will I still be able to buy your proprietary attachments and your zerks?