4 ms·
Very cool! I work in industrial automation and deal with grease all the time. All my equipment is indoors; sometimes it feels like the cast iron foundries are
by LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Very cool! I work in industrial automation and deal with grease all the time. All my equipment is indoors; sometimes it feels like the cast iron foundries are some of the most hellish places on earth but I know your Outback mine sites will give them a run for that unenviable title!
Most of the new equipment we build has automated grease dispensing systems, where my PLC dispenses a fixed amount of grease through hard-plumbed tubing onto ball screw nuts, linear rail trucks, bushings, slides, or whatever else the machine requires. Those don't need GreaseBoss fittings, but perhaps chould be able to tie into your cloud if they've got some of your equipment and some of mine.
A lot of robotic equipment and repurposed older equipment, however, plus some new equipment with hard-to-plumb areas, has automatic greasing distance counters that pop up a warning/fault on the HMI that reads something to the effect of "Grease Warning: 20km travel on Z axis ballscrew, follow the greasing procedure and enter maintenance password to dismiss or OK to continue".
Those, I suppose, could benefit from GreaseBoss in three ways: First, you could guarantee that the procedure was actually followed (that both the easy-to-access top nut and the buried bottom nut were greased). Second, you skip the maintenance password step by detecting the grease being applied. Third, you could dismiss/reset the warning automatically if my PLC could query your API to determine when the zerks on my machine were last greased.
However, Haas is a machine builder, not a viable business model. A subscription to use the equipment is not going to fly with most of my customers. They're not stingy, CapEx is already huge and grease zerks are cheap compared to the engineering costs they're paying - you're putting in a $2.5M piece of equipment, they don't care if the optional RFID grease zerks are $0.25 or $2.50 or $250 - but OpEx and equipment lifetime are critical. The idea that their equipment stops working because someone in the front office didn't pay a third party is anathema to them. They'd rather spend $250 per zerk once than $2.50 for the tag plus a yearly fee of $5/zerk for the 10-year lifetime of the equipment.
- SteveGreaseBoss 6y agoGreat feedback, cast iron foundaries are terrible places. I used to work at a foundary, the sand and the dust was terrible. We get feedback from customers all the time that they use auto-greasers, or their new equipment comes with auto greaser fitted standard. One issue we see is when they blend the new equipment with old equipment, they inevitably have a bunch of manual grease nipples that don't get managed and are forgotton about. There is also a class of nipples that are uneconomic or physically unable to have auto lubers. We are initially the neglected cohort of nipples as our target market, because they are the ones that fail the regularly. Our intention is to eventually get our system to cover integrate the Autolubers as well - we think it would be very valuable to have a single source of truth for greasing. You are right in saying that our customers prefer to buy on capex, we are still figuring out ways to satisfy this. The problem of missed greasing occurs every day, so it should be paid for everyday, however our customers don't quite see it this way..
- uranium 6y agoIf they stop paying you, do they just lose the reporting, or can they no longer grease things? If they can still grease, I'd think that'd be easier to swallow. They can always stop paying if they're not seeing ongoing value.
- timhall99 6y agoHi Leif, Haha i know what you mean in terms of the most hellish places on earth. Last month, we went 300m into an underground mine and that is not a place you want to be spending too much time.. haha Very interesting use case and yes, the GreaseBoss system would be perfect to talk into your PLC through API's to verify that zerks had been greased. Thanks also for the feedback on the business model (i like the comment "Haas is a machine builder, not a business model"). I agree that CAPEX expenditure for some companies is by far the easiest way to procure others are seeking OPEX as a way to manage cashflow. I think we need solid offerings for both models. What is the name of your company? It would be great to chat further.