M.G. Bryan, a Dallas-based manufacturer of large equipment in the oil and gas industry, has uncovered a serious deficit in the industry costing companies millions in lost revenue and damages: accountability.
The company's massive hydraulic fracturing units are deployed into the harshest of conditions, to split ground for gas extraction. In general, these $1.1 million machines are operated by employees with limited training, which presents an enormous risk potential.
"You're paying a guy $18 an hour to go onsite with a $30 million spread of equipment," explained Benjamin Blackwell, electrical controls engineer at M.G. Bryan. Under these conditions, to ensure the equipment is safe and operating appropriately, managers need access to real-time data on the equipment and operations -- data that simply did not exist.
To address this, M.G. Bryan has teamed up with Rockwell Automation (IW 500/179) and Microsoft Corp. (IW 500/16) to develop an innovative system to provide real-time intelligence on the state of equipment in the field, which promises to dramatically alter the current model and drive new value by saving the dramatic costs associated with damaged or under-maintained equipment.
This system relies on one piece of transformative technology: the cloud.
