Environmental Monitoring for a Better Workplace
Your employee’s working environment has an outsized impact on your business. It affects their mental and physical state, which has a knock-on effect on productivity. The working environment also plays a part in maintaining your assets, equipment, and stock at the right temperatures and conditions. These reasons combine to make a case for investing in sophisticated environmental monitoring that can help maximise profits and minimise costs.
Learn More: How Businesses Can Create Smart Warehouses With IoT
What Is Environmental Monitoring?
Environmental monitoring refers to measuring, checking, and monitoring changes to site and facility conditions. From humidity to air quality and temperature, environmental monitoring encompasses a wide range of factors that can affect the workplace environment.
Utilising sensors and devices like Bluetooth Low Energy devices, Wi-Fi gateways, and RFID, you can have end-to-end visibility of your entire facility without resorting to tedious manual collection of data.
Benefits Of Environmental Monitoring
1. Extending The Life Cycles Of Equipment
Machinery, equipment, and other physical assets represent significant investments by businesses to support their operations. In many cases, there is a heavy reliance on industrial equipment, and unplanned downtimes and failures can result in heavy losses for businesses.
To mitigate such situations, companies typically strive to protect their investment by extending the life cycle of their equipment and physical assets. One important way of doing this is by ensuring an optimal working environment and good equipment monitoring.
Operating industrial equipment at less than ideal temperatures and humidity can lower the life cycle of your physical assets. It can lead to more frequent maintenance, higher resource usage, and increased downtimes. Strategic environmental monitoring keeps your equipment in the best possible conditions and allows you to keep track of how different conditions can affect the maintenance schedule.
Insights gathered from IoT monitoring data can be utilised to gauge equipment performance, usage cycles, and frequency of breakdowns. Businesses are empowered to analyse these insights to anticipate equipment breakdowns and initiate predictive maintenance schedules to reduce downtimes even further.
2. Protecting Cargo And Goods
Many goods are sensitive to temperature and humidity. Some products need to be stored at extremely well-controlled temperatures in compliance with regulations. To protect goods like food, plants, chemicals, and fuel, among many others, robust environmental monitoring may be needed to prevent major issues from surfacing and reduce your risk and liability.
Real-time monitoring when combined with IoT technologies can help businesses stay clear of legal violations. They also help businesses protect their bottom line by ensuring products are stored properly until they can be delivered to the customer. For perishable products, IoT technologies extend product shelf life so they do not have to be discarded prematurely and cause inventory loss.
3. Keeping Your Employees Safe
For high-risk environments, our OverGuard suite of services use real time location tracking, equipment monitoring, and site assessments to ensure employee safety. Workers in unsafe conditions like prolonged exposure to high temperatures or humidity might be more prone to physical health issues. Real-time tracking can also monitor individual worker movements within the facility. This allows businesses to identify unauthorised access to protected areas and keep tabs on workers assigned to dangerous areas as an enhanced safety measure.
Maintaining a comfortable and safe working environment can lower your risk of worker accidents and increase employee productivity. If your business works with potentially toxic products or equipment, then air quality checks may be crucial in making sure your employees are not at risk of exposure to potentially harmful substances.
Finally, equipment monitoring helps detect misuse of equipment or abnormalities in functioning that can potentially cause machine failure or even explosions. Working with equipment that is poorly maintained can also dampen employee morale and reflects badly on your organisation as a whole. When equipment, products, and employees are taken care of in suitable working conditions, then overall efficiency and output are likely to increase.
Responsible environmental monitoring utilising IoT technologies provides a host of benefits that help protect and maintain your most important assets. Optimal conditions increase the longevity of expensive equipment, ensure your warehouse stock doesn’t deteriorate in storage, and keep your workers healthy, safe, and reduce the risk of accidents or physical health problems.
Looking to invest in an environmental monitoring system for your organisation? Contact us today and let us know what your requirements are. Our support team can take you through our suite of products and services to find out how we can best help support your business.
