Over twenty delegates made the day for this first collaborative workshop organised and hosted by iconsys at their Telford, UK headquarters. Here Andy Bunce the Sales Director introduces the mornings presentations.

This collaborative event was all about knowledge sharing with interested parties from across sectors including Automotive, Steel, FMCG, Food, Utilities and representatives from confederations.

I opened up the conversation with a 15 minute keynote on how with the advent of accessible sensors, cloud and artificial intelligence prediction will become more affordable and widespread in all industrial environments.
My job was to set the scene for the following three presentations that were more about the applications and hardware whereas I talked about the cultural shift in the workforce and a joined up approach.

Next up was Paolo Sermisoni from PCB Piezotronics to talk about why Vibration as a sensor technology is ubiquitous and for many is the application of choice where a lot of domain knowledge and experience already exists.
Paolo was accompanied by an old friend of mine David Smith the UK & ROI Sales Manager and the MD of PCB UK Bob Barrett; they had lots of interaction with delegates so it was a good job there were three of them!

After a short comfort break it was time to hear from Tom Hammond representing Siemens Mindsphere the Cloud part of this scalable predictive solution. The main trust of his presentation was more about how secure Cloud based technology is and the benefits it brings to accessing applications that are hosted on its platform.

It was good to see Simon Kampa CEO of Senseye giving an excellent overview of how and what their predictive maintenance software does in the real world, no blue sky thinking here but evidence of real results with major blue chip companies.
I believe this is the way forward to scale from tens and hundreds of data points to thousands of points of interest, checking the wellness of complete plants on multiple continents and highlighting those critical few that require the attention of a technician.

Andy Bunce then closed the presentations with a piece on how iconsys is working from the user end to design in or retro fit predictive devices to their control systems. This was followed by live demonstrations of sensors in their technical lab along with another live demo by Simon from Senseye of the software at work in real time on assets throughout the world.

I believe this is the first collaboration of this kind in the UK where all the domain experts in collaboration have put on an event that can talk about an actual working solution and more importantly how to get from proactive to predictive.