Recently, Phizzle hosted the EDGMaker Digital Air Series Product Launch and Live Demo Webinar. During the event, we received many questions from webinar participants, however due to time constraints we were unable to answer them all. In this blog post, I will address the questions and answers we missed.
Q: Curious if you could elaborate a bit on how the particle counter onboarding discovery process works
Yes! The onboarding process adds each individual particle counter to a unified digital UI. From this platform operators can quickly discover each new device and onboard them for remote operation. This takes two short clicks. All devices are automatically discoverable in the platform upon installation of the EDGMaker system. After onboarding you will be able to remotely operate and automate your fleet of multi-vendor particle counters from here.
Q: How well does Phizzle technology work in mission-critical situations that require real-time data transmission?
Phizzle’s technology is ideally suited for mission-critical situations, which is why our first customer wins came in heavily regulated industries like pharmaceutical manufacturing. Enhancing this industry’s data collection was mission-critical because it meant better testing and verification for life saving drugs and medical products.
One of edge computing’s biggest benefits is adding reactivity at the fringe of networks. In this use case, real-time data transmission in manufacturing means the ability to stop a batch mid sample. If there is even one erroneous test, knowing and reacting as quickly as possible can prevent significant recall costs and batch dumpage. We’ve heard plenty of customer stories about the massive price tag for batch dumpage due to faulty testing processes. Our IoT solution eliminates human error and allows operators to react in near-real time across their entire fleet of devices to these situations.
Q: Where do you typically store the data? Are you loading anything on the device or is the EDGMaker SW on the device connected to it?
Both the EDGMaker software and device data are stored on the secure Cisco IR-829. Our team can work with similar edge line routers as well.
Q: Impressive and exciting! What barriers and time frames do you anticipate, regarding regulations?
Thank you for your support! We anticipate relatively smooth entrances into new verticals like chemical manufacturing and food production. Each industry has unique regulatory codes but they tend to operate with similar measurement devices. They also face daily challenges for meeting strict FDA, EPA, or USDA standards. One benefit of Phizzle’s solution is that our technology is industry-agnostic and scales extremely well to different regulatory environments.
The EDGMaker Digital Air Series should actually speed up the traditional process for achieving certifications or compliance thresholds. We typically expect about 3 months to begin installation for larger deployments after plenty of proofing to ensure we’ve both met the regulatory specifics for each environment.
Q: There are many other “edge” compute solutions and data presentation solutions out there. What is your differentiator? The “connector” to interface to these PC’s? The way you can normalize and display this particular scientific data? Or both? Great question. While our team is proud of the connector system and our ability to standardize data from so many different edge devices, our biggest differentiator is likely the use cases that we operate with. When we contextualize how critical the data generated by these scientific devices can be -- the market is billions of dollars annually -- you start to realize how ideal these processes are for automation and digitization. Not all problems can or should be solved by IoT technology. There’s a time and place to implement sophisticated solutions and change can be difficult. But the scientific measurement process in production environments is perfect for digitization, and before entering the space we had no idea that the ROI for automating particle counters could be so high either.
- Ryan Brady, Phizzle CTO