>On the hardware side: we put RFID tags that fit like washers under each zerk. These are read by a head unit that is retrofittable to existing grease guns, which includes a custom RFID reader integrated into the nozzle. It also includes a flow meter and supporting electronics. Our device has 4G, Wifi and LoRa for comms, but also operates in an offline mode for customers in remote locations. Our hardware is rugged, dust proof, and water proof for some of the toughest operational environments (and operators..)
Sounds expensive, grease zerk's are cheap, and easily replaceable, these sound expensive and likely just as prone to failure as a simple one.
>On the software side, we record each greasing in the cloud, right as the worker greases the zerk. Since most industry is still tracking this using paperwork, you can imagine how much more efficient this is. Our customers get back to production much faster.
This sounds like an over engineered, expensive version of a maintenance schedule. It's a management problem if they're not scheduling maintenance.
Workers are still stopping to grease machines, they're still using the same amount of grease, greasing the same spots at the same scheduled times. Tracking this by cloud adds nothing really from what I can tell.
This whole system would have driven me nuts when I was working machines doing biweekly greasing and maintenance.
It would have been just one more thing to worry about inside the machines and believe me, every little thing inside a machine that can go wrong, will go wrong at some point.
A couple of the machines had a few parts that were greased by a computer controlled auto greaser, it was always prone to trouble and needed to be adjusted frequently.
As you say yourself also, greasing maintenance is incredibly important to avoid downtime and machine damage, why should a company rely on your third party cloud for this?
What guarantee is there of its continued support and existence?
What happens if there's internet outages?
How does having a third party between me and the maintenance of my machines benefit me?
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 :)
Thanks for taking the time to answer, sorry for coming across bluntly, but it is a pretty big sell. I appreciate you taking the time to address those points and yours and the above commenter did clarify things.
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?
Thanks for the feedback.
In answer to your comments:
Each tag that is fit under the zerk is small and cheap, installed just like a washer. They cost about $2.50 USD and once fitted, should last a long time. The expensive equipment is located in the head unit, which attaches to a grease gun. So, most sites will only need a handful of these.
On the software side, the system uses the customer's existing maintenance schedule. The problem that it is solving there is that paper based work orders don't track tasks down to a per zerk basis. At a huge refinery we visited, the lube tech had one work order that they would do all week and close off on a Friday afternoon. There is no way that systems like these can verify that each machine has been correctly greased.
In your situation, performing bi-weekly grease runs, the system would be setup to schedule all of your greasing on the nominated days of the grease run and would indicate the required grease volume for each zerk as you went through the rounds to make sure the correct volume is applied. If at the end of the day, you missed one zerk (lets face it, we are all humans here) the system would let you know that it was missed so you could ensure it gets greased.
We don't want to be a third party between a customer and their machines. simply a tool that supports the customer to verify that their machines are being correctly maintained.
> Workers are still stopping to grease machines, they're still using the same amount of grease, greasing the same spots at the same scheduled times. Tracking this by cloud adds nothing really from what I can tell.
Except apparently they aren't if the initial claim is to be believed (that $21B of industrial failure is caused by incorrect greasing). If you integrate tracking hardware on a per-zerk basis, you can easily tell if a worker missed a zerk, etc.
Well, for a fraction of the price, one could hire a person who's job it is solely to inspect and keep track of maintenance, it's pretty visually obvious when a zerk hasn't been recently greased.
Seems a lot cheaper than retrofitting my machines and greaseguns at my expense and paying for ongoing service for a company I have zero reason to trust will even exist in a year.
Our main compeittors are to do nothing and hire a specialist.
It turns out there is a whole dicipline of lubrication specialists called Tribologists - they have an association and chapters in many industrial cities.
Many operations have a target to reduce head count - aside from the salary cost, the logic is that people cannot get hurt if they are not on site. We have seen many cases hiring a specialist cannot be justified on both cost and safety.
As the maitenance workforce is reduced, the same level of performance is required. GreaseBoss is positioning so that anyone on site can pick up the tool, know what to do and then do the greasing. This way site can maintain the same maintenance performance, without increasing head count or putting additional people in the plant.
I understand your concerns.
We are running trials with numerous companies (large and small) right now so that we can develop case studies to understand and communicate the ROI of the system.
The pricing of GreaseBoss is positioned to be less than the cost of having a full-time hire looking after the greasing alone (based on Western country pay scales).
Yes, precisely.
In many industries, like mining, when a piece of equipment fails a root cause analysis is performed to identify the reason for failure. Incorrect greasing is a huge contributor to this.
One of the world's largest bearing suppliers (SKF) note that over 36% of bearing failures is due to incorrect greasing "wrong lubricant, wrong quantity, wrong
lubrication interval" (source link is below)
Tracking the completion of lubrication is the only way to verify that the equipment is actually being correctly maintained.
Sounds expensive, grease zerk's are cheap, and easily replaceable, these sound expensive and likely just as prone to failure as a simple one.
>On the software side, we record each greasing in the cloud, right as the worker greases the zerk. Since most industry is still tracking this using paperwork, you can imagine how much more efficient this is. Our customers get back to production much faster.
This sounds like an over engineered, expensive version of a maintenance schedule. It's a management problem if they're not scheduling maintenance.
Workers are still stopping to grease machines, they're still using the same amount of grease, greasing the same spots at the same scheduled times. Tracking this by cloud adds nothing really from what I can tell.
This whole system would have driven me nuts when I was working machines doing biweekly greasing and maintenance.
It would have been just one more thing to worry about inside the machines and believe me, every little thing inside a machine that can go wrong, will go wrong at some point.
A couple of the machines had a few parts that were greased by a computer controlled auto greaser, it was always prone to trouble and needed to be adjusted frequently.
As you say yourself also, greasing maintenance is incredibly important to avoid downtime and machine damage, why should a company rely on your third party cloud for this?
What guarantee is there of its continued support and existence?
What happens if there's internet outages?
How does having a third party between me and the maintenance of my machines benefit me?