Hitachi Global Life Solutions, Inc.
Climate change is making the reliable operation of heating, cooling, and air conditioning equipment more important than ever. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain the human resources necessary for equipment maintenance due to the shrinking workforce and the aging of skilled maintenance staff. The exiida remote monitoring service for overcoming these issues not only monitors the performance of heating, cooling, and air conditioning equipment, but also incorporates predictive diagnosis functions for detecting problems with equipment before they cause a malfunction. This is done using the “HiPAMPS” predictive diagnostics system from Hitachi Power Solutions. By drawing on the synergies of the Hitachi group, Hitachi Power Solutions is contributing to overcoming various different challenges and creating new value for customers’ businesses.
Hitachi Global Life Solutions has been supplying remote monitoring services for more than 20 years with the aim of making heating, cooling, and air conditioning systems less intrusive as well as more reliable and convenient. While these services initiate repair work in response to fault alarms from this equipment to get the equipment working again quickly, they have not been able to eliminate downtime altogether. Recalling how they set about looking for ways of performing maintenance on equipment before it fails in order to reduce such downtime to an absolute minimum, Mr. Baba, one of the members coordinating the project, had the following to say.
“For customers whose operations rely on the use of cold storage, for example, sudden equipment outages have the potential to cause significant losses. Likewise, heatwaves in recent years have taken on a new dimension, to the extent that air conditioning faults can put lives at risk. Whether it happens at industrial factories and warehouses or at the hospitals and retail stores that feature in people’s daily lives, the failure of heating, cooling, or air conditioning equipment can cause serious losses. To be able to act before equipment stops working is a solution that customers clearly want. This means going beyond breakdown maintenance and implementing precise predictive maintenance practices.”
Mr. Baba first heard about “HiPAMPS” from Hitachi Power Solutions just as he was about to embark on development aimed at putting predictive maintenance into practice. This happened when one of the company’s senior managers at the time suggested that, rather than starting from scratch, he should consider using HiPAMPS, making the point that this would be good for customers while also helping get the service up and running more quickly. “It was thanks to this suggestion that we were able to launch predictive diagnosis ahead of our competitors,” noted Mr. Baba. “We were also able to achieve a high level of predictive diagnosis accuracy thanks to the availability of 20 years’ of data that we used to verify the technology.” That customers had been waiting for predictive diagnosis to become available was demonstrated by the rise in the number of service users during the 18 months or so after adding the function to the service, the number increasing to 1.5 times larger than previous levels.
