My God Jim, He’s Dead!

It turns out Star Trek and grammar lessons can teach IIoT principles.  A rule in 1960’s Star Trek episodes is the “red shirt rule.” A character in a red shirt will die before Bones can treat him.  Or diagnose him.  The rule provided grammar teachers with decades of use teaching the past perfect tense.

But, it’s not “perfect” to diagnose death.  We want to diagnose problems before fatality.

All this seems lost on most Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) analytics competitors. Lone Star recently won a shoot off in an IIoT analytics challenge.  We correctly predicted failure of an industrial pump and motor system about ten times earlier than the next best challenger.

That seemed like a big deal to everyone but Lone Star.  In our view, it’s not enough to diagnose (predict) impending doom.  What’s critical is to prescribe a menu of prevention options.

In this case, some other firms involved said “vibration” killed the system.  But this is silly.  By the time shaking starts, the system is already failing.  Vibration is a symptom that something has gone wrong.

In other cases, we’ve seen competitors claim overheating caused failure.  Again, this conflates a symptom with a cause.  In humans, fever is a symptom, as the Mayo Clinic points out; http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fever/in-depth/fever/art-20050997 Good parents treat symptoms.  But, we want doctors to do more than tell us to take an aspirin and a cool bath.  We hope a doctor will prescribe something to eliminate the cause of the fever.

We expect more from professionals. We want IIoT analytics to tell us something more than “this thing is falling apart.” Perfect prediction of failure, even when done with flawless grammar, is not the same thing as prescription.

Cause and effect relationships are the best way to diagnose problems and prescribe prevention.

The dead Star Trek crewman died because Gene Roddenberry wrote it in the script.  It wasn’t the evil AI who ran the planet in episode 5 of season 2; Gene did it. The actor’s agent should have held out for something better than being cast as a red shirt.  That’s the root cause of his one episode career.

Lone Star’s Digital Oil Field solutions map the cause-effect relationships in critical assets like top drives, power generation, and ESPs.   Like our other IIoT solutions, they provide prescription, not just predictions of doom.

So, for IIoT perfection do three things;

1. Use good grammar
2. Don’t wear a red shirt
3. Call Lone Star Analysis to learn how one of our AnaltyicsOS solutions can make your IIoT project truly prescriptive