Owl in use: Owl Tells You the Moment Your Melt Temperature Drops

Owl blog series, part 1: alarms.

What if something on your production line starts to go wrong, and nobody notices right away?

Take plastic pipe manufacturing. Melt temperature is one of the values that has to stay within its limits. If it drops too low, you want to know about it before it causes any bigger trouble. One of our customers had exactly this situation. Here is how Owl handles it.

Setting an alarm takes about a minute

The Owl dashboard lists your devices and the measurement points you have chosen to follow for each one. In the customer's case, the value to watch was melt temperature.

1. Open the device from the dashboard. You will see its other values too, but this time we only want alarms on melt temperature.
2. Go to the settings and set the alarm limits. The customer wanted a warning if the temperature falls below 219 °C, so that becomes the low warning limit.
3. Add a second limit for when things get serious. At 215.5 °C the alarm becomes low critical.
4. Save. That's it.

The chart shows where you stand

The moment the limits are saved, they appear on the chart of the stream. You can see straight away whether the process is in the warning zone, and the critical zone is marked in red below it. Every active alarm is listed next to the chart, so nobody has to guess whether something is going on.

Acknowledge it, and say why

An active alarm can be acknowledged, and the person who acknowledges it gives a reason. There are four ready-made reasons to choose from, or you can write your own. "Known issue" is a typical one: the cause is already known, and nothing needs to be done.

An acknowledged alarm does not disappear. It stays visible for as long as it is active, so the next person to look can still see it, and see why it was acknowledged.

Email, text message, or both

For each alarm you choose whether it sends a notification by email, by text message, or both.

• The admin decides what is switched on. In the global settings, the administrator chooses whether Owl sends emails and text messages at all.
• A cooldown keeps your inbox calm. If the same value keeps crossing its limit, you don't need a message for every single alarm. The cooldown sets a waiting time so that a burst of alarms doesn't turn into a burst of emails or texts.
• Everyone sets their own preferences. Under My account, each user enters the phone number for text messages and chooses which severities reach them by email and which by text message.

In the demo, both warnings and critical alarms come by email, and critical alarms also come as a text message. A warning can wait until you are back at your desk. A critical alarm finds you wherever you are.

You don't have to watch the screen

This is the point of it all. The information reaches you in real time, so nobody has to stay at the plant staring at a chart in case something happens. You can go to lunch, or go home, and know that Owl will tell you if the melt temperature starts to drop.

In the next parts of the Owl series, we look at the new factory floor views, the AI assistant that answers questions about your production data, and calculated streams that combine several values into one.

Which value on your line would you want to hear about first? Get in touch, and we'll show you what an Owl alarm on it looks like.