Spiroflow has recently won an award at this year’s Sub36 Lancashire Business View Award, with technical development manager, Craig Hollings, being presented with the Innovator Award. The Sub36 awards are an annual event honouring Lancashire’s most influential, innovative and inspiring business people aged sub36. The awards were presented at a virtual ceremony held on 22 Oct 20.
In successfully meeting the criteria for the Innovator Award, Craig had to show that his role at Spiroflow involved innovating to create better products, better services and better ways to work. His winning entry focused on his inspiring work in developing Spiroflow’s remote monitoring service, SAM (Spiroflow Active Monitoring). His submission clearly impressed the judges who commented: “Craig and Spiroflow are breaking new ground, they are at the cutting edge of modern technology and defining the future of technology development. This is an innovation with a potential global impact”.
The SAM initiative involves the placing of sensors on Spiroflow’s equipment or virtually any piece of equipment in any part of a customer’s process, and connecting the sensors via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In doing so, SAM can monitor and report on operations in real time, thereby allowing the customer to have an enhanced overview of their equipment performance, together with the ability to quickly identify issues and rectify them. With SAM being able to track data remotely, without involving engineers on-site, it more than satisfies COVID-19 social distancing restrictions, creating positive impacts on production, with limited downtime and critical failures becoming obsolete. SAM will also alert when it is time to replace wearable parts, allowing production to plan for the correct amount of spares stock to be held, ensuring no overstock, but having the right amount available for predictive maintenance. Again, given the current COVID-19 restrictions, being able to accurately hold sufficient spares represents a major benefit to any operation.
His work on IIoT has since led to a fresh challenge for Craig, in developing a new area for Spiroflow in building electric and pneumatic control panels, designing related software and providing commissioning and IIoT software as a complete solution.
In commenting on the award, Spiroflow’s managing director, James Podevyn, said: “This is a fantastic result for Craig and Spiroflow. Much of our progression, whether it be product related, IT, customer support or technology initiatives, emanates from the extensive skill sets of the Spiroflow team. We are delighted for Craig and his award is richly deserved – he has a great future ahead of him.”
