Putting "Big Data" to work for you
Crown has been talking about the
InfoLink System a lot recently. As of this writing, 9 of the last 10 of their
blog posts has at least mentioned it, if not been entirely about it. You may have heard about "big data" in the news or even around the lunch table (in those places we're allowed to sit at lunch tables anymore/again anyway), and usually that mention goes something like "My phone figured out where my house and work are. What else does it know?" (the answer is "everything" but this isn't that kind of blog).
You'll see stories about everything from predicting teenage pregnancy to "ghost pixels" that track everything, but at its heart big data is essentialy a bunch of numbers in a hard drive somewhere that are being analyzed in different ways. Amazon uses it to try and show you ads for stuff it thinks you'll buy. Google uses it to try and sell ads that you'll click on. Your grocery store uses it to figure out how to get you into the store and walking down those expensive impulse aisles. It sounds like a lot of "used to make you buy," but that isn't the only way it can be used.
That's where the
Crown InfoLink comes in. You can actually wire it up to almost anything from a trash compactor to a
Turretted Stock Picker (and everything in between). The
Crown InfoLink will of course do its best when hooked up to a
Crown forklift because both the sytem and the forklifts are built to talk to each oher, but you can attach the module to almost anything electrical.
Once installed and configured, the
Crown InfoLink module starts recording basically everything. Starts, stops, accel/decelerations, X&Y axis impacts, key on time, travel time, lift time, the dreaded idle time, it can even track power usage with a couple of battery-side upgrades... there's a reason it's called
BIG data. All of that gets transmitted through your local wifi to
Crown's servers and comes back to you in the form of handy graphs and reports that you can configure to best suit your business needs. Don't care about lift time but hot damn do you want to know about impacts? You can have them emailed to you in real time. Want to know which operators maybe need a little time re-training?
Crown InfoLink can help you figure that out. It may be that you need more or fewer forklifts in your operation; this kind of usage data can help you make those decisions!
All the sections shown below in the Dashboard sample lead to a variety of data and reports. This particular customer isn't using
InfoLink to track power usage or service so those options aren't colour coded.