User-Friendly Software Delivers Connected DC Insights

The emergence of connected infrastructures in distribution and fulfillment center environments offers potential access to an abundance of untapped operational data. Provided by a network of connected devices, machine-level assets and system controls, this information is typically pushed to a storage platform — such as a cloud database — where historical data is continuously gathered. But without the software needed to process this data and transform it into actionable insights, it’s essentially an untapped resource, i.e., technology for technology’s sake.

With decades of experience providing industrial automation and analytics software for process control industries, Honeywell is uniquely positioned to deliver deep operational insights in the distribution and fulfillment sector. By combining our The Connected Distribution Center infrastructure with these proven software tools, we’re helping DC operators and enterprise managers to implement effective  predictive maintenance programs and uncover hidden utilization potential. 

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse

It all starts with the Honeywell Pulse™ mobile alert, notification and visualization app. As the first line of defense into your connected operations, Pulse is designed to alert you of issues as they happen, so you can respond quickly and avoid downtime.

Pulse remotely connects DC managers and maintenance staff with customized, real-time DC performance notifications. It enables key stakeholders to stay connected to their enterprise and monitor condition-based metrics directly on their mobile devices. 

Pulse helps DC operators:

• Visualize fault event data and information in near-real time
• Proactively seek and tag trending throughput conditions
• Respond faster to conditions and leverage situational awareness

With its built-in collaboration capabilities, Pulse allows stakeholders to share notifications and increase organizational awareness of critical situations. This helps responsible parties quickly visualize the nature of an asset or performance issue and ensure the fastest possible resolution.

Stay Vigilant Over Equipment, Systems and Assets

Honeywell’s Uniformance® Asset Sentinel software allows DC operators and enterprise managers to conduct further analysis of equipment faults and performance issues. This proven analytics solution continuously monitors asset health and process metrics in real time to minimize unplanned downtime and greatly reduce the costs of DC operations and maintenance.

DC operators can leverage its deep toolset and intuitive data visualizations to quickly detect, predict and prevent asset failures and repetitive barriers to productivity. Asset Sentinel combines real-time monitoring capabilities with powerful historical analytics to provide the earliest possible indications of asset degradation. It utilizes a flexible rules environment that supports custom-defined threshold parameters in both failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and root cause analysis (RCA).  

With access to robust performance dash-boards, DC operators can select from a variety of intuitive visualizations — such as event heat maps for fast access to asset status, fault history and trends — or choose the fault-tree option for a detailed overview of asset-level status within a system. Asset Sentinel dashboards help DC operators monitor key performance metrics, including:

• Cartons per minute at sortation conveyors
• Total shipping throughput
• Scanner read rates
• Wave completion status of merge conveyors

Gain Valuable Insights and Actionable Intelligence

For even deeper insights into real-time and historic equipment health, Honeywell Uniformance Insight helps DC operators and enterprise managers further investigate symptoms and root causes of asset degradation. Insight is fully integrated into Pulse and Asset Sentinel, helping operators pinpoint the time of an exception and its surrounding conditions. 

Insight can be utilized to investigate a variety of issues that impact DC productivity, including:

• Temperature and vibration of sortation/conveyor motors
• Current draw of a power control panel
• Impacts (in gravitational forces) of sustained product impact

And because Asset Sentinel and Insight are thin-client, web-based HTML5 solutions, no installations or downloads are needed. This means it can be easily deployed with little or no IT support and minimal training, and quickly be pushed to as many end users as your organization requires.

Smart Use of Your Operational Data

Toady’s DC operators and enterprise managers need tools for smarter decision making and greater insights into their operations. Pulse and the Uniformance software suite allow users throughout your enterprise to collaborate and remotely investigate key asset and performance information from anywhere at any time. 

In the DC, this translates into protecting what’s most critical to your operation: assets, systems and processes that allow you to meet your daily throughput goals. It also means making a critical transition — from the wasteful practice of letting daily operational data slip through your fingertips to capturing continuous asset health and performance data. With these smart software tools, you can leverage this valuable real-time and historical data to detect asset degradations, maximize uptime, and minimize operational costs.