Johan Pretorius shares his thoughts on Embracing Change Naturally. Most people in business and IT are now familiar with prescriptive analytics and the accompanying dashboards that help them make business-critical decisions. But have you ever thought about how animals respond…
For many companies, Microsoft SQL Server is an enabling component of their business operations, and the information they retain can reside on anything from one to hundreds of servers. No matter how large data grows, every last byte must be…
AN EVOLUTIONARY STEP FORWARD IN PLANNED MAINTENANCE, PROMISING MAXIMUM ASSET UPTIME, OPTIMAL RESOURCE EFFICIENCIES AND SUBSTANTIAL COST REDUCTION THE MAINTENANCE DEFICIT Every day, businesses in all sectors sacrifice valuable income to unsustainable asset maintenance strategies. While recognising the need to…
We are born with the much-needed intuition of extracting complex information from our environments. We learn by developing hypothesis and testing them for truth, and if they hold truth, we accept them as fact, until they are debunked, and we…
Improved business agility is when large organisations make faster, more accurate, data driven decisions and improve the speed with which these decisions are implemented. Some examples of how IoT and Advanced Analytics will promote business agility are: 1. The collection of…
It is important to collect all data, for machine learning and stream analytics to produce the best possible insights. Even if you think it has no relevance to the question you are trying to find an answer for. Context is…
This is the second in a series of articles on predictive maintenance. In the introductory article (Available here), we discussed the 4 maintenance models: Reactive maintenance waits for parts to break before repairing them, often making matters worse and resulting…
These days, neither management nor operational personnel argue the merits of ongoing asset maintenance. In modern manufacturing or mining environments, 20% to 60% of operational costs relate to maintenance activities, excluding upgrades or improvements. Thus, making maintenance as efficient as…
ERP investments often fail because software selection gets more attention than business strategy formulation. Here’s how to avoid falling into that trap. Software that is designed to direct business operations – Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software – has earned a…
Legend has it that when Apple engineers demonstrated the first iPod prototype to Steve Jobs, he rejected it as being too big. When they argued that they couldn’t make it smaller, Jobs dropped it into his office aquarium and pointed…