This blog was submitted by Southern Forest Products Association associate member Opticom Technologies. The original post can be found by clicking here.
Mention cameras in a business setting and everyone thinks about surveillance and security. In a sense, they’re right: surveillance and security are important benefits of industrial video monitoring systems.
But when it comes to industrial environments such as sawmills, there are benefits beyond security. Each industrial application differs in the scope of these benefits. For example, sawmills have different video monitoring KPIs from mines.
However, the eight benefits of industrial video monitoring below generally apply across the board:
Improve Operational Efficiency
Video monitoring provides situational awareness to improve processes, avoid costly downtimes, and plan predictive maintenance, which could lead to a boost in operational efficiency.
By watching processes in real time, or recording and analyzing them later, you can spot opportunities for improvement. Moreover, you can identify potentially faulty equipment and plan maintenance before it brings production to a halt.
Safety Compliance and Accident Prevention
There is nothing more important than safety in industrial environments. By monitoring operations constantly, you can see which safety protocols are ignored or improperly implemented, then address them before they lead to incidents. Moreover, if you are in a highly regulated industry, you can use the video feeds to prove your safety compliance.
Quality Assurance
Consistent product quality is one of the highest priorities in manufacturing. The tiniest change in process, equipment, or supplies can wreak havoc on product quality. That change may not be observed by the naked eye, or if the quality issue is obvious, the underlying cause may not be.
Video feeds can help pinpoint quality issues and causes. Monitoring manufacturing processes can show quality discrepancies before you’ve produced entire batches. The sooner you catch the issue, the easier it will be to resolve and the more costs you save.
Remote Equipment and Process Inspection
Many organizations operate more than one facility, some of which may be far away from one another. This makes inspections time-consuming and cumbersome, especially because inspectors must travel between facilities.
Industrial video monitoring allows for inspections anytime without interrupting operations. Inspectors can watch the live feed or the recording, zoom in and out as needed, and draw conclusions and recommendations without traveling a single mile.
Regulation Compliance
Regulation compliance is one of those murky activities many plant managers dread. However, they dread the fines for noncompliance even more. If an incident occurs, your compliance will be under scrutiny for months. Worse yet, compliance is hard to prove without a video record of all your operations, especially those from the day of the incident.
Video monitoring can save the day by providing proof to demonstrate compliance. You can avoid hefty fines and costly shutdowns just by providing the inspectors with video feeds of your operations.
Environmental Compliance and Sustainability
In the coming years, every industry will have to deal with expanded environmental laws and regulations. For industrial facilities, emissions and waste are the top two areas.
Video monitoring can help prove compliance in both those areas. And, like operational improvements, reviewing video feeds can illuminate opportunities for improvement to work toward sustainability goals.
Remote Management and Supervision Made Easy
“When in doubt, zoom out” is a saying that refers to life or business decisions. In industrial settings with video monitoring, it can be applied quite literally.
Monitoring operations remotely isn’t just a way to cut costs. A single operator can monitor several processes at once. It’s also a way to spot glitches, process flaws, and worker efficiency much more easily. Video monitoring provides a vantage point that helps pinpoint mistakes and processes that can be improved upon at a glance.
Peace of Mind
Industrial environments are deemed harsh for several reasons. One of them is that something can go wrong at any time, and you can’t be in 1,000 places at once.
Video monitoring gives plant managers peace of mind, knowing they can track seemingly 1,000 places at once. By monitoring the live feed, operators and facility managers save time and can stay up to date with everything that happens anywhere in the facility.
Click here to learn more from Opticom Technologies.
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