Like any other industry, the oil, gas, and mining spaces are undergoing a digital transformation. These industries need a more adaptable and modern approach to make their business processes more efficient. It is only by adapting technological innovations and digital solutions that the oil, gas, and mining industries can deal with problems like changing demographics, scarcity of manpower, and limited budget. This way, they can focus on more pressing concerns like fluctuating fuel costs and mineral expenses, increasing energy demand, and unyielding supply rules.
This is where Azure IoT Suite comes in. This technology helps gas, oil, and mining companies regularly monitor their raw materials, equipment, and machinery they use to extract and transport valuable resources. Aside from monitoring, this solution also helps in the maintenance of their assets and in ensuring profitability.
What is Azure IoT and What Does it Do for Oil, Gas, and Mining Industry?
The Internet of Things, by itself, supports businesses and organizations reinvent their processes, productivity, mobility, and customer engagement through connectivity and exchange of data. But with its cloud offering service, Azure, Microsoft takes IoT to the next level.
With Azure IoT, certain tasks become a lot easier for oil, gas, and mining companies. The biggest benefit for these industries is in terms of monitoring.
Whether it is the location of a mineral dozens of feet below the ground, or status of a drill at the oil rig, these companies will be able to keep track of its assets from afar using just a smartphone – in real time.
Here are the top 4 advantages of using Azure IoT in oil, gas, and mining:
- Time saving. The time required for oil, gas, and mining companies to collect information needed to develop and maintain a mining site is significantly reduced. Azure IoT can help contractors gather relevant data more quickly. They can use this data and share it in real-time with the relevant industry players prior to digging. The time saved can then be used to expedite the next steps in the process, like extracting and transporting mined products to a refinery. Whatever task and phase are in the process, Azure IoT will help achieve it in less time than it would have taken the company to do it using purely conventional methods.
- Disaster Recovery and Data Backup. Mining sites and oil rigs are susceptible to disasters, and any failure in machinery can spell delay in the extraction and processing of products, as well as additional costs. Azure IoT will help companies keep track of the function of every machine and equipment by helping them analyze real-time data. The data from this analysis can be used to predict any machine-related mishap. Companies will be able to put up preventive measures in a timely manner. What’s more, even when accidents happen, Azure will enable businesses to easily recover data from the cloud. In other words, companies won’t have to go back to square one.
- Predictive Maintenance. Azure will facilitate the creation of an integrated network that would allow companies to monitor every asset and aspect of their field operations. As such, companies can easily predict any issue concerning their equipment and machinery, the status of their sites and resources, and the availability of logistics. Predictive maintenance will help them avoid any major problem that would have taken place otherwise.
- Cost Benefits. All these benefits above could lead to cost efficiency. By expediting processes and preventing problems, productivity is higher, and expenditures will be reduced. These, in turn, will result to a better bottom-line and will generate a significant profit margin for the company.
Call Four Cornerstone Today
If you need help understanding how Azure IoT works for your industry and company, and how you can benefit from its suite of applications, call Four Cornerstone now. From figuring out how Azure IoT Suite fits into your organization, to incorporating the technology to your systems, to training your employees about how to apply the solution, Four Cornerstone can help you.
Our team of experts is ready to help you reap the benefits of Azure IoT. Call us at +1 (817) 377-1144.
Photo courtesy of Fernando Butcher.
