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January 2008 | |
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2008 Wireless Resolutions
The start of a new year provides us with the opportunity to make improvements in many areas. In our personal life, typical new year’s resolutions include items such as “lose weight”, “recycle more” or “stay positive at work”. Resolutions that will make us a better person. Likewise, creating a list of new year’s resolutions to improve your plant’s security, network management, and reliability will make your plant a more efficient facility by the end of 2008. Following is a list of 2008 wireless resolution ideas for you and your facility to successfully implement wireless or extend your wireless application infrastructure.
1. Attend an online wireless educational webinar. A key factor for successful design, deployment management, and maintenance of a wireless infrastructure is understanding wireless technology. There are many webinars available for different technical levels, and most of them are free. Industry organizations such as ISA offer a number of educational courses. Wireless vendors such as Apprion offer free webinars presented by industry experts, on numerous topics such as Industrial Wireless Application Networks. 2. Create a wireless team within your division or plant. Putting together a wireless team at your plant is one of the best ways to keep the momentum to implement wireless moving forward. In addition, you’ll have the input and support within your division, one more factor to help make your wireless implementations successful. The team you create should include representation from various departments involved in the wireless application and system selection including: Process, Security, Safety, Maintenance, IT and other management. 3. Conduct a wireless analysis and site assessment of your facility. Wireless experts can provide you with a wireless analysis that includes RF site assessment reports, vendor neutral recommendations, wireless application roadmaps, and integrated architecture plans for both wired and wireless systems at your facility and much more. A wireless site assessment will equip you with a strategic plan to optimize your investment in wireless and enable a scalable infrastructure for future application and systems. 4. Complete a wireless ROI analysis. Once you have completed a wireless site assessment, evaluated all potential vendor options and completed a preliminary budget, an ROI calculator can help you determine projected cost savings, efficiency improvements, and the overall return on your future wireless investment. Various ROI calculators for wireless implementations are available on vendor websites. Calculating the potential ROI for future projects will help you with project proposals, cost justification and speed up the financial approval process with management. 5. Attend a wireless technology or industry specific conference. Wireless and industry conferences are great events to learn more about the wireless solutions available today. Many conferences provide a number of educational sessions to learn more about emerging technologies and customer case studies of successful implementations and the exhibit floors are venues with numerous vendors demonstrating their products and services. 6. Visit another facility to evaluate wireless implementation. Learn from others’ experiences by visiting a plant or facility, either within your organization or close to your plant, that has successfully implemented one of the wireless applications on your facility’s wish list. By evaluating a live wireless implementation, in an environment similar to yours, you can learn what vendor applications are available, what to do and not do during the implementation process and see first hand all the benefits of wireless in action. 7. Pilot a new wireless program by end of Q2. Once you have completed the site analysis and finalized your budget, resolve to implement a new wireless application in some area of your facility. This could be anything from condition monitoring or VoIP applications to providing your field workers with mobile wireless access. By committing to have a new pilot project in place by the end of Q2 will help you reduce IT and operational costs, increase plant security and network management, improve data reliability and enable increased operational efficiencies that much sooner. 8. Get active in a wireless industry group. One of the best ways to keep up with wireless technology is to participate in an industry group focused on creating best-practices and standards for wireless applications. These groups bring together the operational managers from various process industries who are using wireless technologies to create unique competitive advantages for their organization – along with leading academics and technologists. The Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance (WINA) and the ISA 100 are two leading organizations to consider joining. 9. Subscribe to a new industry or technology publication. Industry publications, eNewsletters and magazines are a great way to keep up to date on new technology, products, mandates and standards. In addition, they can be a good resource for events, conferences and other educational forums. Many publications feature a new wireless case study in each issue, so you can find out what other plants are implementing and learn from their experiences. 10. Define your own wireless resolution: What is your wireless resolution for 2008. Can we help? Email us at Info@apprion.com.  |
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