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former_member182149
Contributor

The mobile work is almost old hat these days. Everyone knows about the benefits of the mobile worker. In the Chemical Industry one of the problems in enabling the mobile maintenance and operations staff has been the lack of intrinsically safe tablets. This problem I am glad to say has been resolved with multiple manufactures producing such devices.

So the next question is what applications need to be placed in such devices. While I generally gravitate to those apps. that present information to the worker (e.g. work to be done, part availability, engineering drawings etc.) I had not thought too much about the various data gathering applications (other than collecting data from an inspection rounds) when I ran across this article on Video for Field Tech's

The author asks some interesting questions:

  • Since field tech's are carrying devices that are capable to record steaming video, why are they not doing so?
  • For companies who have gone mobile, how excited are they about video?
  • Will companies struggle to get employees to use video in the field?

While this seems to be the next evolution for the mobile worker, right now someone would still need to look at the video and determine the problem. At a first glance this seems to be a duplication of effort, but with the projected skill shortage in industry, this might be a way to increase the utilization of senior staff. A junior goes out to perform the work / records a problem, and transmits it back to the office for the senior to analyze and provide advice. In addition I cans see the video as an extremely fine documentation tool for recording problems, or enhancing training.

This definitely is a leading edge application with less that 20% of companies building a business case for the use.

Do you see a place for steaming video in the chemical industry maintenance and operations world? If so keep this in mind when you spec. out those intrinsically safe devices that you are required to use.