At any given time, the textile company’s manufacturing facility has up to 2,000 textile carts in use. These carts are pushed from room to room, carrying materials or semi-finished products. Previously, a paper with a hand-written description was attached to each cart. This traditional method of processing made product tracking extremely difficult. Additionally, making sure that every cart of materials or semi-finished products went to its correct processing work station was also a problem. Therefore, the company desired an intelligent solution for tracking assets at their factories. They also wanted a solution that would help them collect process data so they could improve their manufacturing efficiency.

During the energy crisis of the 1970’s there was a sea-change in the building industry when it paid more attention to the idea of conserving energy and introduced the terms Building Management System (BMS) and Building Automation System (BAS). Continuing rising energy prices and carbonreduction issues have also further spurred the development and deployment of BMS in recent years. However, the early systems were bulky, not user friendly, unreliable, and very expensive. With the advent of computerization, BMS analog signals became digitized so as to be communicated over long distance as well as facilitating the building management process these issues became less.Due to the multiple many management functions and wide range of expertise, modern BMS is quite complex. Successful building management not only needs to link to a multitude of devices but also take account of the suitability of the software for the intended application. Equipped with a web browser-based software package for human-machine interfaces (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) which provides automated, centralized and unattended management with a high degree of electronic accuracy, the BMS can fully control the building’s mechanical and electrical equipments and thus effectively monitor energy consumption so that it provides a comfortable, safe and secure environment.Property management is facing various and complex challenges and reducing operating costs have become increasingly important for building owners. As a result, a growing number of new and refitted buildings are being designed to use less energy and focus on the building’s performance. A System Integrator was helping a builder implement advanced BMS for its newest construction project in a creative park in Asia. The construction, a 14-storey building with four underground floors, covers an area of nearly one hundred thousand square meters and contains three distinct sectors - shopping mall, hotel guest room floors and office floors. In order to provide optimal energy management, this BMS needed to be capable of monitoring and controlling a variety of facilities, including air conditioning, power system, plumbing system, fire system, ventilation, elevator, lighting, garden watering and so on. Meanwhile, using one system with an adequate number of nodes in a main control room to manage three different places was a key requirement but each place had to have their own dedicated system and can be controlled independently without mutual interference so as to saving the implementation costs. Due to the need to monitor many areas, there would be tens of thousands of detection points, and the new system also needed to offer remote control capabilities so that building managers or patrol staff can view the status of various facilities in real-time and deal with issues using handheld or mobile devices.

Since electricity costs keep on rising, the bills for convenience stores keep on increasing and unfortunately it’s difficult for convenience stores to raise their prices to maintain the same profit margins. Variable overheads are difficult to budget for and give accountants a headache, therefore one convenience store chain in Thailand has decided to redress the balance and put themselves in chargeof power generation by installing solar panels in their stores.Our customer wanted to reduce their energy costs by at least 10 percent and having installed solar panels in their store locations they needed to be able to send the power to where it was needed and when it was needed. Since the stores are open for 24 hours and it’s onlysunny forroughly 12 of those, it was essential that the power distribution to the lighting and refrigeration units was managed efficiently.