Dave Perrotta
If you have a question about anything to do with power protection, power management, or any other power-related issue, I can’t think of a better person to speak with than Dave Perrotta, COO, ESP/SurgeX. That’s equally true if you’re a document technology dealer and are looking for an additional opportunity to bring more value to your customers.
In the next few weeks ESP/SurgeX will formally introduce a new power management product called, Expert Manager, which takes power management to a whole new level by providing predictive maintenance capabilities. The system has already undergone pilot programs with some of ESP/SurgeX’s existing customers over the last few months and will be rolled out to the channel in the next 30 to 60 days. Last week I received a heads up from Perrotta about Expert Manager along with a tutorial on predictive maintenance. If you’re selling technology that relies on electrical power, and what technology doesn’t, you might find Perrotta’s comments useful as well.
Can you define what you mean by “Predictive Maintenance”?
Perrotta: Predictive Maintenance rather than reactive maintenance is taking steps before a failure happens. It’s not only Preventive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance are those possibly unexpected failures that might be foreseen with the proper data.
What might that proper data encompass?
Perrotta: In this case the data is electrical data in regards to the power being supplied to the unit and the way the unit is operating in the power environment. Electrical data is used to predict that something is possibly going to fail.
As this data is coming in, what specifically might I be seeing?
Perrotta: You’d be looking at various electrical metrics related to how the equipment is operating such as trends that go outside normality, or if the unit is drawing too much current under different modes, including at rest, when it’s under load, and when it’s at full power. Typically this is very predictable and repeatable with a piece of equipment so you get some level of normality. When things start to deviate from normal that may be an indication something has changed with that equipment or in that power environment. Both of those you’d want to correct beforehand.
Can you provide an example of how Predictive Maintenance might save a document imaging dealer’s customer money?
Perrotta: This is a new system so we don’t have huge amount of customers using it yet. But if the system is installed and there’s a sudden change in the power being supplied to the MFP, what’s happening is it’s starting to cause problems with the equipment. But it hasn’t caused an outright failure or reached the point yet where the customer is calling about repeated issues. It might develop into that. The system has alerted the service tech to recommend changes to correct problems with power delivery to the device. Say if the device was trying to draw full power, but couldn’t and was showing drops of voltage every time the machine tried to draw full power for a print job, for example. Catching that early saves customer frustration and saves a tremendous amount of service time because without that knowledge when walking into that issue the first thought is “it’s an equipment problem” and you’d be replacing parts or maybe the entire machine. That problem won’t ever go away until you fix the power problem, which could be all the way back at the transformer feed.
How do energy diagnostics and remote energy management increase uptime?
Perrotta: By having this information and using the system you’re naturally going to increase uptime because you’re going to spend less time with that equipment down or responding to some sort of operating problem with the equipment. If there’s a catastrophic failure waiting to happen it could possibly be predicted with this system. If the electrical environmental has drastically changed which is causing a failure call with that equipment, it can be detected. Either one of those is going to require service. By default this is going to increase uptime with any piece of equipment
Have you had to educate the document imaging dealer whose vocabulary includes Preventive Maintenance, on Predictive Maintenance?
Perrotta: It’s an easier discussion [with document imaging dealers] compared to other verticals because they already understand Preventive Maintenance and the issues that power problems can cause.
What are the technical challenges when implementing a “Predictive Maintenance” solution as part of a networked power management system?
Perrotta: Speed is of the essence because you don’t want to spend a lot of time installing systems like this, especially in the office equipment/MFP environment. The system is very flexible; it can be used only when necessary in any problem areas. It could be used to maintain or monitor large installs of equipment.
Typically what you’re going to find is the office equipment channel is going to use this on the MFPs in some of their critical installs and view this as another way to provide a service to their clients. In educational facilities, for example, why not also offer a system that can monitor critical pieces of equipment in labs or the IT room—you want to know when power to that room has been affected. There’s a lot of opportunities for implementing something like this.
What other trends are emerging as far as smart energy management and power protection?
Perrotta: The trends just go along with all the other trends related to the Internet of Things, connectivity, and the way you use that information. In some cases there tends to be an over-saturation of Internet-connected things. How many things do you really need to connect to the Internet and what are you going to do with it? Am I really going to want to know my refrigerator is making ice at 1 in the morning? Or if I’m on vacation the refrigerator doesn’t come back on after a power outage? With this type of system it’s a possibility to separate “need to know” from “nice to know.”
For example, if you have a specific Ricoh, Konica, or Xerox machine that performs in a certain way and has a certain profile to it, we can fine tune our algorithm to report that not only is something failing, but a specific part [on that device] is failing and you might want to check this.
Providing Predictive Maintenance through a system like Expert Manager, sounds like a great value add, is there some sort of ROI that dealers can expect?
Perrotta: Expert Manager doesn’t intrinsically help you save energy, but by giving people the tools and the Expert Manager platform, which enables them to monitor all this different data, it makes it easier to understand all these sets of data points that they can use to see how their different business decisions affect the amount of power they’re using. It will help people get educated and see what decisions affect the amount of energy they’re consuming so identifying these various issues that will help you detect when things are happening and help you reduce energy even though it’s not reducing the amount of consumption. It’s pointing out flaws and issues that are wasting energy and allowing you to fix them. These are things you can’t place a price tag on.
If I’m a reseller, what’s the best way to present this to customers?
Perrotta: The best way is to talk about how it provides a whole new level of service. Not just the MFP, but when you’re having problems in your server room, in your lab or on any other pieces of equipment you want to be aware of. That’s the key part. With this type of tool it’s easy to do a pilot program, plug it in, assess the data, and that could pretty much be the sales pitch. And you can show them right there by allowing the product to do what it does.
