Customer CARE- Going the Extra Mile!

Canary Labs has been known for its notable customer care since the start-up of the company. Being a software developer, Canary Labs understands dealing with other software companies and what makes Customer Care exceptional. No one likes hearing the message that someone will get back to you sometime in the next 3 days, discreetly meaning that they may believe it's not their problem and it will resolve itself in the next 3 days. No one likes having someone from a different country take you through the basic steps of reinstalling your original software, maybe because the person behind the phone believes that will fix your problem or at least make you go away. No one likes having to jump through hoops; it's inconvenient to be transferred from one department to the next before finally talking to someone who can even comprehend what you are talking about.

There are many frustrations that we have all encountered when working with a customer support department. At Canary Labs, we strive to make your Customer Care experience different. When talking with Canary Labs Customer Care, you are talking with experienced people that can quickly solve your problem, sometimes within minutes. If the problem is intermittent or requires more investigation, our support people have direct access to our developers. Problems are typically solved on the spot or within hours, in worst case scenarios it may take a day or two. Our longest outstanding item over the last 30 years took 3 days to solve, it was a difficult intermittent problem that was found to be a problem within a Microsoft operating system module. Our support team has a CRM database to track past problems and help our support team learn from previous experiences. Many times users will call Canary Labs first even though it may be another software’s problem, maybe because the user knows Canary Labs will talk with them and help confirm the problem. We treat our customers the way we would like to be treated. Sometimes the problem is not our problem, but if it affects the operation of the Canary Software, our Customer Care team is diligent to check it out!

"Nobody raves about average." -Bill Quiseng

Canary Labs builds diagnostic tools into certain software modules and provides more tools for data management and analysis such as network communications and where your data is between Canary modules such as the sender and receiver module when connected to satellites or networks that are not consistently running. We know how valuable your historical data is, we want to provide reliable data and tools to notify users of what is happening within their system or if configuration changes are made unexpectedly.

Canary Labs is not out to gouge you on customer support costs. Our objective is to provide extreme value to our clients while exceeding their expectations. We have had customers report an excess of a 10-fold return on their Canary 20K investment within months. We do our best to live out the phrase, "Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you". At the end of the day, as a company, are we giving more than we take? Canary Labs Customer Care strives to be excellent in its services and do what is right!

Counting the Cost: Not Having the Data (PART 1)

When I buy a product, I always stop and consider the cost; is it worth the price I’m paying for it? Do I really need it? Will it stand up to other products out there? Many companies have the same or similar questions about data collection and the historians on the market today. Questions like: “Is it worth the price?” Or even, “Do I even need to collect data at all?” These are all viable questions but there is one more you need to consider: What is it costing me by NOT having the data? The answer is, a lot. 

Having the Data provides:
- Faster Solutions
- Accurate Reporting

Data helps prevent or reduce:
- Downtime
- Fines
- A Wrong Diagnosis of a Problem

You can record vast amounts of data: machine pressures, humidity, and quantity… the list goes on and on. Keeping track of all this data is difficult but necessary. When a piece of equipment breaks down, the simple fact is that it costs the company money; sometimes thousands of dollars per hour. Most times, trial and error are used to solve the solution, but this can take a lot of time out of the day. If you have the time series data in your hands, you are able to quickly determine what went wrong based on what the data tells you. A drop in pressure will tell you what went wrong and when it happened.

Sometimes the inspectors require reports; in these cases a company needs reports that are accurate, otherwise fines might be inflicted. When there is no data, there is no report. In these cases a fine is more than likely. But with accurate data reports, a fine might be lessened or even eliminated completely.  Knowing what actually took place gives a company better credibility with an inspector.

In short, there is a lot that could go wrong. The software might be faulty. The pressures might be awry. The equipment might be broke or the operator just might need better training. Whatever the problem is, it helps to know the problem. Sometimes basing the solution off of a gut feeling doesn’t solve the problem. It is better to have the answer right in front of you instead of playing a game of Russian roulette.

If you don’t know the problem, you won’t be able to find the solution.

Data can also help in other areas of your company such as decision making and planning, but I’ll save that for my next post.

Your Data, is Your Data

In my last couple of posts, I have tried to establish how important data can be to a company. However, a concern that comes along with collecting data is the fear of losing that data. Many historian software programs on the market lose some of the data in the process of collecting it. So there is always that fear of not getting all the data needed when the time to analyze comes around. This is a major problem that many companies face. When there is loss of data, the data has potential to lose its value to a company.

No loss of data.

Many historian software programs use a compression algorithm that compress the data by only collecting data within a certain limit. The main problem with this is that the company cannot go back and view the original data. This means that valuable data can be lost in the process, hurting the company. 

At Canary Labs, we know the value that this data can have, and how vital it is that there is no loss while collecting it. Our software, the Canary Historian, compacts the data without losing the resolution. It packs the data in a compact format that is loss-less. What does this mean? It means that the data returned from the historian is the same data that was stored. Canary Labs uses an exclusive method that squeezes the time

series value down to about six bytes of storage, storing the real history data in a more cost effective format without the fear of losing that data. Some modeling and forecasting tools require the real data values instead of approximations to provide accurate data. The Canary Historian gives you the opportunity to do this with all the data and not just approximations.

Our philosophy has always been that ‘your data is your data’. This philosophy has helped build our software. We know the value that this data can be to a company, so we developed this software as a means to get all the information to your desk without gaps in the timeline. So if this is one of your major concerns when looking for the right software to record your data, you no longer have a reason to be worried.

Technological Advances in Hydraulic Fracturing

I have recently come across some very interesting facts that could become very important for the energy industry. Hydraulic fracturing has become more and more common in the world today as a method to create an oil or gas well. There is much effort that goes into creating just one of these wells. So companies that have multiple fleets to produce these wells have a hard time keeping track of all the sites and the information produced from them. These companies are becoming more and more reliant on the data that is compiled from these locations.

Fracking fleet. Photo by Kansas Geological Survey.

One fleet is usually composed of multiple trucks. Some of these trucks house multiple pieces of equipment including engines to run this equipment. That’s a lot of data to keep track of; which is why there is a separate vehicle called a data van that has the sole purpose of keeping track of the data. There are not many companies that take advantage of collecting this data. It gives a company the opportunity to speed up the production of the well and also save time and money. 

The benefits that come from collecting this data are great. Access to the time series data makes it much simpler to track down the source of a problem when it occurs. It also makes routine maintenance checks much easier to track. This allows planning for future checks to become almost effortless. Canary Labs has developed a solution to effectively manage these dynamic assets as they move around the country between different fleets. The AxiomTrend allows the data to be collected with no loss and sorted by fleet which shows the individual trucks associated with that fleet at a centralized corporate site by satellite or cellular connection. All this data can be accessed offsite and can be viewed anywhere. The end result is a more efficient, easy to maintain fleets that speed up the production process and allows better utilization of equipment, resources and most importantly increases profitability.

This is just one of the many industries that is being shaped by the collection of data. It leads me to wonder how time series data can change other industries as well…