Retrofitting legacy systems doesn't have to be a budget breaker
Why would anyone spend tens of thousands of dollars to replace a machine that works now and should continue to work for another ten years?
Often mistaken for resistance to new technology, many companies’ reluctance to adopt the Internet of Things comes from sound economic thinking. Factory equipment, building facilities, and other critical physical assets are significant investments, and they’re meant to last. Five to thirty years is the typical life companies expect from these high cost purchases, so most are unlikely to replace them just because something newer and supposedly better comes along. This isn’t like replacing a smartphone or a computer, which are both less expensive and have much shorter useful lives. Add in the risks inherent in making big changes and the possibility of disrupting what’s working now, and the bar for convincing companies to adopt Internet of Things applications into their business processes rises higher. How will this hamper the spread of IoT applications and the efficiencies and resource-saving capabilities they bring?
There’s a smarter way to add IoT to any business.
It doesn’t require replacing expensive equipment, unpredictably costly commitments, or developing new expertise. All that’s needed is easily available chipsets, sensors, and actuators, plus automatically generated code that connects them all together and to the Internet. That’s how implementing IoT can become a cakewalk for any organization with Temboo’s code generation. And it’s how the Internet of Things is unfolding every day around the world, often in unexpected places.
20,000 different celebrations are happening today across Mumbai. But it’s not a holiday. It’s Tuesday. This happens every day in this growing, dynamic city. Birthdays, graduations, whatever the reason for joy — there’s black forest cake being served, slices of red velvet cake being eaten, and other pastries waiting to be brought out.
The Internet of Things is helping make all these celebrations go off without a hitch.
Retrofitting legacy systems doesn't have to be a budget breaker
No, there aren’t any microchips in these cakes, or anything else you wouldn’t want to eat. Hashim Kahily uses Temboo technology to make sure of that. A factory engineer for Monginis Foods, he’s retrofitted their factories’ production lines and facilities with IoT systems that enable quality assurance food safety teams to know immediately whenever impurities are detected in their products. He’s updated their cold chain and modified their commercial freezers so that factory supervisors can optimize the whole production process from batter to bite. And he’s building more IoT solutions and rolling out existing ones to more factories. “All in all I’m simply loving Temboo,” says Kahily. The industrial ovens are next on his list of equipment to connect.
Monginis’ Mumbai factory alone ships 20,000 cakes a day, and all of them need to pass ISO safety standards, be stored properly, and be shipped to thousands of retail locations safely. And that’s just one of several factories serving Mongini’s expanding reach internationally.
If anything goes wrong, the price is steep — food recalls cost $10M on average without even taking into account lost sales and brand damage, let alone the potential health impact. Moreover, reducing the risk of product loss not only makes good business sense, it also helps the environment. Food waste in the US accounts for more than a quarter of freshwater consumption and about 300M barrels of oil each year.
So how has Temboo made it possible for one engineer to push forward ground-breaking changes across a multinational company in just a few weeks?
The secret is Temboo’s powerful code generation.
Unique IoT applications are built faster by generating all the necessary code with Temboo. And since Temboo’s code generation is designed for flexibility — allowing almost infinite combinations of chipsets, sensors, actuators, programming languages, architectures, and cloud services —
Retrofitting legacy systems doesn't have to be a budget breaker
Hashim and others like him can build applications that suit their needs, run on low cost hardware, and add value to their businesses immediately without a lot of deliberation. Temboo accelerates efforts without adding overhead or restricting future flexibility.
Hashim could create his first IoT application in minutes and then scale up from there easily.
This is how the Internet of Things is happening and will happen — individuals and small teams at companies using off the shelf hardware and code generation from Temboo to start IoT applications that bring value and solve problems immediately without too much complexity.
Retrofitting legacy systems doesn't have to be a budget breaker
Now Hashim is about to get even more out of Temboo. With Cloud Controls, Temboo is extending code generation to include sensor data visualization and actuator controls. Now, keeping an eye on the conditions of any operation can be done from anywhere — whether you’re working to improve factory production, shipping logistics, water consumption, waste management, or laboratory processes in life sciences.
With Cloud Controls, a single Temboo-generated code snippet is all it takes to create resilient and powerful applications.
All of the code is optimized to be plug-and-play and worry free and is designed to address common requirements and needs across the wide spectrum of IoT applications:
Retrofitting legacy systems doesn't have to be a budget breaker
Sensor readings for the real world — Analog and digital values are automatically converted into common units so graphs provide actionable intelligence from the start. Applies to any sensor, with leading sensors from Honeywell, TE Connectivity, Analog Devices, and others pre-integrated into Temboo for faster setup.
Power efficiency and speed — Message packet sizes are minimized and Temboo’s cloud does all the heavy lifting where possible, including running the unit conversion for data readings which can increase the calculation speeds 200–1000x faster than running conversions locally on devices.
Offline resiliency — Lose connection briefly? Up to 70,000 readings will be stored on the chipset and automatically posted when connectivity is restored. For an application that logs every minute, that’s nearly 7 weeks of data.
Future proof flexibility — Change alert recipients, keep third party API connections working when they change, and modify your applications all with Temboo’s cloud. Temboo makes it simple to keep your applications up-to-date.
Now there’s no longer a good reason for companies to delay IoT applications that improve their business and the world.
Temboo code generation makes them possible for any organization no matter how large or small. Monginis is just one of many success stories we see every day at Temboo, and we’re looking forward to sharing more companies who are celebrating transformative implementations of IoT into their work.
Interested in learning more? Try it by signing up for a free account at Temboo.