I am a strong believer that data is needed to make good decisions and the more data the better. I qualify that there is still the need for a review of the data and exploration of all the possibilities.

Data is something that is needed to migrate from preventive lift maintenance to predictive maintenance. I am definitely not advocating the elimination of preventive maintenance but if we can predict the need for maintenance from how a ski lift is running the better are chances are of improving the performance of a ski lift.

There are a few ski areas I am aware of which have or are planning on using SCADA software to begin the accumulation of data feedback from their ski lifts.  Making this step is a big one and many ski areas don’t have the IT staff or the infrastructure to enable making this move or even exploring it.

This article,  Industrial-LoT made fast and easy, might be the answer on how to make this leap in raising the bar in the lift maintenance world.  The oil and gas industry, which has many of the same obstacles that ski areas have, has utilized the two software programs to develop a data-gathering system to enhance their field performance.  Having a telemetry program that’s designed for constrained devices, lifts, and low bandwidth, high latency, or unreliable networks and an open-source software specification with a framework to integrate data, is a framework for ski areas to develop the ability to collect data from a ski lift and build the database needed to institute predictive maintenance.

Complete data sets the stage for machine learning and artificial intelligence.   The article details how to implement IIoT – Internet of Things – with these two programs.  I hope some of the tech-savvy lift technicians enjoy this article and expand beyond to explore the possibility of installing at their ski areas.

I believe theisis the future of ski lift maintenance.