Lexmark over the last three decades or so has become a name synonymous with computer printers, but in the last three years the company has started to gain a foothold in the industrial IoT market.
From its experience in connected and managed printing environments, the Lexington, Kentucky, company has built IoT and edge computing expertise it is using to help clients in a variety of industries, the most recent of which is a fellow Lexington firm, the colorfully but appropriately named Big Ass Fans (BAF). The latter company recently announced CommandSense, described as an automated comfort ecosystem for industrial settings that uses sensors and IoT technology, along with Lexmark’s Optra IoT and Optra IoT edge platforms to create a controlled cooling system designed to reduce heat stress while improving worker safety and lowering energy costs for industrial facilities.
BAF provides the brawn of CommandSense, with sensors that continuously monitor occupancy, humidity, temperature, and other facility conditions to automatically adjust fans, heaters, and ventilation fans as needed. Meanwhile, Lexmark brings the brains, with Optra IoT, an IoT platform with data processing, analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities, and Optra Edge, which executes IoT data processing and AI applications at the edge, closer to the point of data collection, providing an ability to analyze sensor data such as sight, sound, vibration, and temperature, and enable real-time decisions, without edge-to-cloud latency being an issue.
So, how do you go from making printers to working with other companies to deploy industrial IoT offerings. Demetrios Karathanasis, IoT portfolio director for Lexmark, explained that everything about Optra IoT and Optra Edge is derived from Lexmark’s own experience operating a global managed printing service connected to more than 1 million printers worldwide.
“Being a manufacturer ourselves, we've been on our own IoT journey as a company with our own core imaging business,” he said. “If you think about it, printers were some of the first edge devices. They process data locally, and do all kinds of things at the edge, and so we used our printer technology experience to develop our Optra edge device. Meanwhile, from the cloud perspective, for over 25 years ago, we’ve been connecting our devices to a central IoT platform [through which] we currently manage over a million printers globally in our Managed Print Services business. We monitor the devices, provide automated supplies, fulfillment, and predictive service, all kinds of things.”
Over the years, Lexmark realized how the IoT data processing and AI capabilities it developed in its core business could have applicability to other types of products, companies, and industrial environments. For BAF, Lexmark “is providing underlying technology pieces and our experience” to CommandSense, Karathanasis said, adding that data from BAF fans deployed in an industrial facility, as well wireless sensors and other devices on site, are ingested into Optra Edge, which includes a local protocol translator application that processes the data and acts upon it. The edge data insights help power one of BAF’s key CommandSense features, an intelligent comfort application that automatically adjusts fan use based on conditions. Optra Edge also filters data, sending essential data to the cloud-based Optra IoT platform, where further analytics can be done and more insights can be generated.
The result, according to BAF, is a system that provide efficient cooling, but also:
- Improves employee morale and productivity by mitigating heat stress by up to 60% and boosting employee productivity by up to 50% when paired with BAF fans and heaters.
- Provides robust monitoring and automatic alerts when system components encounter functional errors.
- Uses four times less energy than HVAC and at a fraction of the cost, producing savings up to $1 million over five years.
BAF’s CommandSense will be available in April 2025. In the meantime. Lexmark is working with several other clients on their own IoT journeys. Another example is a medical equipment manufacturer that has thousands of its imaging devices deployed in doctors’ offices around the world, and wants to leverage collected data and AI to drive improved customer service.
Karathanasis said some clients have arrived at Lexmark’s doorstep after they tried on their own to set up and manage an analytics-driven IoT capability.
“A lot of companies get stuck in pilot mode trying to deploy these solutions,” he said. “Generally, our competition is a company first trying to do it themselves, and it ends up costing them a lot of time and money. As a fellow manufacturer we have lived and breathed thhe sameh challenges as we developed our own solution... We can help guide them."