Reliable mobile industrial equipment, networks and software improve the productivity of industrial workers and the performance of companies, says industrial equipment company Honeywell Scanning & Mobility Europe, Middle East and Africa market development manager Enzo Capobianco.

Although significant focus is often placed on various equipment or software to boost industrial productivity, Honeywell focuses on the entire industrial technology ecosystem, including equipment and software systems, to enable companies to determine which systems or equipment are suitable tools to improve their workers’ productivity.

Honeywell also provides software development kits for companies to design their own systems.

“Productivity, rather than devices or software, is the key objective and is aimed at improving industrial competitiveness, which is achieved by enabling companies to customise systems or deploy software that they find useful.” says Capobianco.

Honeywell is known for manufacturing rugged mobile industrial devices that combine key features of smartphones, tablets and personal digital- assistant devices.

“Implementing technology systems must improve the speed, accuracy, cost effectiveness and performance of people, and the tasks completed by the company. Therefore, we design our devices to be reliable and include common and useful features, such as barcode readers, touch screens, digital document capturing and connectivity for accessing corporate databases and remote management.

“All of these systems are aimed at making it easier for people to perform their work functions and to improve their access to information remotely, which improves the performance of workers in the field, as well as oversight and management.”

Honeywell foresees the increased use of augmented reality systems in industrial settings such as factory managers and engineers using tablets to see when last maintenance was performed on a component, what the process set points are compared with the design parameters, which component failed most frequently and when maintenance is scheduled, besides other information. Augmented reality systems commonly use the video cameras of devices and display information over an image.

“Honeywell promotes a life-cycle approach to industrial technology and workflow performance systems, specifically to build devices, connect devices and systems, and mine the information derived from these systems to continuously improve industrial performance,” explains Capobianco.

“Improved efficiency translates directly into an improvement in companies’ bottom lines. This requires reliability and the ability to customise systems and tools.