Case study · Energy Drive · Fulcrum
A global energy-efficiency company needed industrial IoT data management software: one place for the data its edge devices collect at industrial sites. We built the software on those devices, plus the cloud platform, web app and mobile app that bring all of that data together.
2013
Energy Drive founded
54
Sites deployed
4
Regions with clients and offices
43%
Average electricity saving on MV fans and pumps
Energy Drive helps heavy industry cut the electricity used by medium-voltage fans and pumps, with an average saving of 43%. Since 2013 it has grown to clients, team members and offices in North America, Europe, the UK and South Africa.
Its solution is deployed at 54 sites, for clients including Glencore, ArcelorMittal, Sibanye-Stillwater and Vale.
Energy Drive’s data was spread across several stand-alone applications. Turning what its edge devices collected in the field into useful intelligence took a lot of manual work to piece together.
It needed one central application where:
We built every layer of the system, from the software on the devices in the field to the apps Energy Drive’s engineers and clients use every day.
Low-level software on edge devices in the field that collects readings from site equipment and sends them to the cloud.
All device data lands in Google Cloud’s data lake. A fast storage and caching layer serves it, so charts load quickly and alerts trigger without delay.
A browser-based app where admins create their own dashboards, reports and alert rules, and decide who sees what with role-based access.
An iOS and Android app with push notifications, so the right people hear about an alert wherever they are.
Fulcrum reads every site once a second, generating around 200 000 records every second across the fleet. Rather than store every reading, the platform stores only what has changed since the last one, so far less data has to be loaded and the platform stays fast as the history grows.
Collection is planned as carefully as storage. A temperature doesn’t need to be captured to the decimal place if the client never acts on it, so each reading is collected at the precision that actually adds value, and nothing more.
Admin users build the dashboards, reports and alerts their operation needs, for their own specific requirements.
Role-based access for Energy Drive’s teams and for its clients, so each person sees the sites and data that are theirs.
A data layer tuned for speed keeps charts quick to load and alerts quick to fire, however much data builds up.
Epicdev understood our business needs quickly, but more importantly, were able to translate those needs into working solutions accurately and efficiently. Along with expert development skills and coding best practices, Epicdev bring Industrial IoT proficiencies, a blend that is hard to come by.
Ryan Botha
VP Digitalisation, Energy Drive
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