Ensuring the Success of Your Greenhouse with Precise Temperature Monitoring

Franchising essentially hands over control of a corporation’s most valuable asset – its brand reputation – to a third party which increases risks for the brand to maintain its reputation. This no longer needs to be the case.Adopting a cloud-based monitoring system gives brands the ability to monitor franchise activities across multiple locations in real-time reduces risk and ensures customers receive the same experience, whichever restaurant they visit.

Maintaining Compliance Across Multiple Franchises and Corporate Restaurant Chains

Whether you are responsible for multiple restaurant franchises, or a whole corporate chain Enviromon can provide you with the necessary temperature monitoring systems to allow you to focus on what is important, the restaurant’s operations.

Restaurant and franchise operators can benefit from a centralized monitoring system that consolidates data from all connected sensors across multiple locations for real-time analyzation and reporting as well as automatically alert management to issues that require immediate attention.

As a manager or owner of a restaurant franchise or corporate chain you undoubtedly understand the importance of maintaining food storage conditions and freezer temperatures for food safety compliance and customer satisfaction. While managing compliance with food safety regulations for one restaurant can be a daunting task; managing compliance across several or hundreds of restaurants can be near impossible to do without a comprehensive and cohesive system in place.

How would you like a single system that can monitor and record freezer temperatures across your entire enterprise that is accessible on the web with real-time data and historical reports that can make compliance reporting and audits more convenient and accurate?

Proactive Food Safety Monitoring

Enviromon’s temperature monitoring system for food storage freezers can collect data from hundreds of individual sensors in multiple locations under one easy to use dashboard.

Imagine. No more tasking employees with tedious reporting (which can be sometimes inaccurate or inconsistent). No more calibrating analog sensors. No more handwritten temperature logs to submit into your data collection system. Everything is viewable at the push of a button from a laptop, tablet, smartphone or enterprise management system at a corporate headquarters.

As a corporate brand, the benefit is complete awareness of how franchisees are managing food storage to ensure compliance which goes a long way to protect brand reputation and customer satisfaction. Temperature-smart sensors automatically send data securely to the cloud and can be monitored in real-time by managers at brands, providing the ability to spot discrepancies and take action before major issues arise. This minimizes the potential for reputational damage while helping franchisees follow processes correctly.

As a franchise owner with multiple locations, this provides an overall look at the state of food storage across all locations for improved management and proactive maintenance.

Modern Restaurant Management

Due to the processes food must go through from storage to preparation it can make it difficult to monitor the compliance from one stage to the next, which is why it is critical that food safety programs are implemented across multiple touchpoints. The benefits can be seen in improved food quality standards, reduced costs from spoilage, and avoiding food safety incidents that can result in negative publicity for the brand.

Commercial Refrigerators & Walk-in Freezers

The temperatures of the walk-in freezers and refrigerators can fluctuate quickly depending on how often they are opened and closed. These fluctuations are not likely to be recorded by manual methods and can miss rises in temperature that may last over a period of hours, where food temperature are within unsafe and potentially dangerous ranges.

For these reasons, we recommend continuously monitoring food storage temperatures. Automated alerting also notified managers, owners, and staff who can then react swiftly which prevents unsafe food storage trends from going unnoticed.

Warming Areas and Hot Carts

Once the food is cooked to the proper temperatures and placed into warming areas or hot carts, temperatures must still be maintained in order to ensure that it is safe for consumption. The drawback of these warming solutions is that they often do not have a way of recording the temperature of the warming area.

Using a thermal probe, the temperatures of warming areas can be monitored and recorded for consistency. Not only does this help prevent food safety incidents but it also provides a full compliance audit trail that can be used by both management and health inspectors to show that HACCP processes are being consistently followed.

Enviromon’s temperature monitoring system can dramatically improve the food safety compliance for restaurants by providing automated monitoring and real-time alerts for food businesses of all sizes. Paired with other digital technology, such as work management systems, it will transform the ability of managers and owners to see what is happening in their businesses, respond to issues, and deliver a full audit trail for regulators.

Contact us, and our dedicated product support team work with you to develop a complete monitoring solution for your franchise or corporate restaurant chain, that is customized to your needs and scalable to any number of locations.

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Calculating the Variables of Downtime

Follow along with each section and fill out the corresponding variable for your business. At the end of the article, you will have a comprehensive “cost of downtime” calculation and summary based on your inputs.

1.) Lost Revenue

In today’s world, it is most likely that if IT assets are down, your business is down and you cannot generate revenue. Even if your primary revenue channels are not focused on the web due recent nature of business operations it is likely your peripheral channels such as accounting, sales and communication channels will be rendered inoperable as well.

Here are the steps to calculate lost revenue:

√ – Identify which areas of their business generate revenue.

Make a list of the areas of your business responsible for generating revenue and calculate the amount of revenue per hour for each of these areas. To get the hourly revenue generated from each area use one of the following equations:

Equation:

“Business Area Revenue Generated per day”  = ( Avg. revenue per week / 40 hours ) or  (Avg. revenue per month / 30 days

√ – Estimate how much each revenue-generating area relies on uptime and represent this number as a percentage.

In the above example, if your business only has an eCommerce website this means 100% of your business depends on uptime. If you have a brick-and-mortar store or have offline revenue streams perhaps only 10 percent of your business revenue is dependent on your uptime since people can still purchase goods from your store or sale calls even if your website is down.

To understand how much of your revenue channels rely on the uptime of your network infrastructure you will need to determine the amount each area requires the use of online resources.

1. Is revenue generated solely online?
2. Is revenue dependent on the use of email, databases, payment terminals or other online resources?

Using the above questions, estimate the percentage your business relies on uptime.

Example: A sales team for a wholesale distributor uses their website to generate leads, email to contact prospects and a customer database to processes orders. Although they are still able to make phone calls and meet appointments from previously scheduled work. This means their team relies on the uptime of their network for about 80% of generated revenue.

√ – Calculate the amount of revenue per hour that is lost during downtime for each business area.

For example, say your business is an eCommerce website that generates $100/hour. If that website is offline for two hours, you lose $200. However, let’s say a brick-and-mortar shop which also generates $100/hour in revenue. If the brick-and-mortar store’s website is down for two hours and only 10% of the business is affected, they only stand to lose $20.

Add the figures for these different revenue-generating areas to get the total cost of downtime per hour for your client’s business.

Once that baseline is established it’s easy to figure out the amount of revenue lost during any length of outage or downtime event.

Equation:

Business Area Lost Revenue = ( Avg. Revenue Generated Per Day  X  % reliant on uptime )

2.) Lost Productivity

The cost of downtime also increases when clients or employees are unable to work or are required to do “non-revenue-related” tasks such as resolving the issue. This is because salaries are a fixed cost and are typically paid regardless of how much work staff actually completes. Here are the steps to calculate the cost of lost productivity:

√ – Estimate the percentage department relies on uptime.

Determine what percentage of your business’s departments productivity are reliant on uptime. This may vary across their team. Take for example, a manufacturing plant, if the servers were to go down any of their automated or CNC machines would not be able to work until the servers were back up so they are 100% reliant on uptime. Whereas any machines that require the operator to control manually or work done by hand would still be productive and thus would be 0% reliant on the uptime of servers. Their administration staff and sales team would still be able to make phone calls but would not be able to access their email, shared calendars or other resources which would make them about 80% reliant on the uptime of their servers to be productive.

√ – Calculate the average hourly wage of the employees in each department.

Once you have your estimated reliance on uptime for each department, you will now take the average hourly wage of the employees in that department and multiply by the reliance on uptime percentage. If the employees in the sales department earn on average $10/hour and they can only work at 20% percent when systems are down, your business loses $8 per employee for each hour of downtime while they are unable to work.

Add the costs in #3 for all employees to calculate the total hourly cost of lost productivity.

Equation:

Department Productivity Lost = {(# of employees x median wage per hr) x reliance on uptime %}

3.) Cost to Recover

Businesses often times underestimate the costs associated with recovering from a downtime disaster and resuming normal business operations. This is because it can be hard to estimate as it usually depends on the extent of the outage and/or any data that was lost, but costs can typically be summed into these categories:

√ – Services needed to recover lost data

Services to recover can include your employees working to troubleshoot the issue and get systems back up and running, as well as any outside contractors such as an MSP or third-party IT company who is contracted to help as well.

To understand these costs you will want to calculate the average hourly wage of employees who are working to solve the issue and any additional services needed as well, and then multiply by the number of hours to recover.

Equation:

Services Needed to Recover = {(# of employees x median wage) x hrs to recover + $ of services to recover }

√ – Physical tools/devices that may need repairs or replacements

You will also want to calculate the costs of any tools, software or hardware that needs to be purchased to solve the issue or replace that have failed. Along with the purchase price, you will also need to calculate the costs for employees who are doing the repairs or replacements.

Equation:

Cost of Tools, Repairs & Replacements = {(# of employees x median wage) x hrs to recover + $ of tools/services to recover } >

√ – Cost of lost data

Determining the cost of lost data will include calculating the amount of time and money spent on creating the data in the first place if the data is irreversibly destroyed in the incident. As the data is no longer available and money has been spent in generating it, it is now considered a loss.

Equation:

Cost of lost data = {( % data lost x median hrs to complete) x profit from data}

√ – Ongoing costs as a result of the data loss

If data is lost during a downtime incident, there can be residual losses that extend even after it has been resolved. Costs associated with replacing or reproducing data should be calculated in order to understand the full impact. Employee wage and hours to reproduce the data are costs that will need to be calculated, as well as any profit that was made from the use of this data is now considered a loss.

Equation:

Ongoing Costs of Lost Data = {( data lost x hourly profit from data) x (# of employees x median wage per hour) x hrs to recover data

Identifying these costs during your business continuity planning period helps minimize the recovery costs clients may face in a disaster scenario down the line.

4.) Intangible Costs

If customers are directly affected by the downtime, it can cause damage to a businesses reputation. The slightest downtime can potentially cast an insurmountable shadow over your business. The speed of recovery and how downtime is handled with customers can be the difference between recovering and going under. These intangible costs can be difficult to predict and will depend on how the downtime affects your customers. Having at least some understanding that downtime can have a long-term impact on future sales and customer retention can help business owners see the real value of being genuinely prepared for such an event.

Referring back to our previous example, if your brick-and-mortar business server goes down, clients who purchase from your establishment likely won’t notice website downtime as terminal POS is separate from your on-premise servers and online payment processing. However, if your eCommerce site goes offline, it reflects very poorly on the brand and customers will be left bewildered and search for competitors.

Equation:

(daily sales / % of total business reliant on uptime) x (% lost potential business to competitors)

5.) Calculating the Final Cost of Downtime

After determining the costs for each section, you can now add them into the main formula below to calculate your total cost of downtime. 

Equation:

Cost of Downtime = Lost Revenue + Lost Productivity + Cost to recover + Cost of intangibles

If the resulting number far exceeds the costs of investing in disaster recovery, backup solutions, redundancy planning, and systems that can actually prevent downtime such as environmental monitoring systems, then you should be able to use these calculations to convince stakeholders about the ROI of these systems in order to protect your business from downtime and the associated risks of data loss, loss of reputation, and lost revenue.

Calculating the ROI of Environmental Monitoring

98% of Enviromon customers come to us after they have experienced these kinds of issues and want to prevent from happening again. In many cases, it may be due to a failed AC power supply or other challenges of working in older buildings with HVAC systems that are not designed for the additional cooling load of a server room, or potentially if their server room is located in an unventilated storage closet. Regardless of the situation, temperature sensors can help prevent the risks of overheated servers by automatically alerting staff to the issues immediately when it happens.

Additionally regarding the RoI of Environmental Monitoring and being able to resolve temperature and environmental issues before they become more serious is that the majority of IT equipment OEMs and customers such as large telecoms have noted although not all excessive temperature issues cause immediate failure of hardware there is increasing evidence that there is a higher occurrence than average for hardware to incur intermittent performance issues or failures are seen over the preceding months.

These later issues are additional RoI inputs for the case of environmental monitoring, particularly for small and medium-sized business that, unlike large Data Centers and fortune 500 companies are not able to change out their servers or other devices on two or three years cycles. Often the IT infrastructure at many SMBs can be 5-10 years old meaning there is potential that these systems have been stressed several times during their service life making them even more prone to intermittent issues or failure.

DCIM systems may be difficult to specify, justify the cost or calculate the ROI. They often require extensive installation, maintenance, and training resources and continuous analysis of the data to make them useful, meaning staff resources will need to have time dedicated to these tasks.

Simple, low-cost environmental monitoring devices can are easy to install and setup, and perform the simple task of letting their users know when there is a problem coming or one that has occurred. Small and MidSized Businesses will be well served by these devices.

Contact us at Enviromon to discuss your server room situation and we will be able to provide you with the best recommendations to monitor your server room and prevent avoidable disasters like these.

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Contact us at Enviromon and we will be able to provide you with the best recommendations to for your business goals.

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Contact us to discuss your monitoring needs and we will be able to provide you with the best solutions to monitor your assets and prevent avoidable disasters.

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FOR GENERATORS

Diesel and Gas Fuel-level Monitoring

Many remote sites such as those used in the rail and telecom industries are essential to stay online even when commercial power fails. For this reason, many remote sites will also use generators to provide power during an outage. Although tracking fuel levels for multiple remote sites across a region can get complicated as each may experience power outages at different times, and consume fuel at different rates. This makes predicting fuel levels very difficult and inaccurate.

The SecurityHawk Fuel Level sensor is ideal for remote sites that depend on backup generator power to ensure that fuel tanks are filled and ready for the most critical moments.

√- Designed for monitoring levels of diesel and petrol fuel. Monitor level of liquid in a tank and display this level on the SecurityHawk 5E’s web interface and send alerts accordingly.

√- Instantly be alerted via web, email, or SMS before and when fuel level is below critical levels.  Advance alerting, provides fuel status for Normal, Low and Critical levels as well as additional alerting if tank level is dropping too quickly which notifies in the event of possible fuel leaks or theft to ensure tanks never run dry again.

√ – Capable of monitoring many types of tanks. The sensor assembly incorporates an advanced tank sender based on the ultrasonic measurement technology. Tanks can be in linear and nonlinear sizes as they are easily calibrated from a simple wizard that is run from the SecurityHawk 5E’s web interface.

Fuel Leak Monitoring

It is not uncommon for fuel leakages to go unnoticed from generators at remote sites which are not checked often. A slow fuel leak can present big issues when the generator is called on to supply power and is not capable or worse can lead to dangerously flammable conditions.

The SensorHawk Rope Fuel sensor can be used with gasoline or diesel generators in remote locations where early warning of fuel leakage or theft is vital to maintaining the power supply.

√ – Rope-type leak detector that is perfect for lying beneath fuel tanks. Detect liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and others at any point along its length.

√ – Immediately once fuel is detected an alarm is triggered to alert key personnel. Alerts can be received via web interface, email, or SMS and can even pinpoint the location of a leak within a foot of the original source of contact.

Voltage Monitoring

Most generators at remote sites will have functions to startup automatically and supply power to the site as soon as a power outage is detected. Although generators may begin working automatically there is usually a lack of confirmation back from the remote site that this has occurred.

Enviromon’s SensorHawk DC voltage detector is used to indicate the presence or absence of DC line voltage and can be used in conjunction with a remote sites generator to provide confirmation of power failures, and the generators ability to provide backup power.

√ – Monitor for Power Failures and the presence of backup power. The DC voltage detector is used to alert to the presence or absence of DC line voltage, whereby providing confirmation of a power outage and backup power supply being turned on successfully.

√ – Set custom thresholds. Readings are available in both an absolute value and a percentage of full scale. Full-scale user programmable with both the base and top voltage from -60 to 0 or 0 to 60 volts.

FOR REMOTE SITE MONITORING

Enviromon’s CloudHawk service provides cloud-based data collection and real-time monitoring capabilities for multiple locations in a centralized platform.

√ – Complete monitoring from a centralized platform. Sensor data can be collected, exported and monitored for your entire network of field sensors in one platform using the Cloudhawk service.

√ – Integrate into SCADA access control systems. All SensorHawk / SecurityHawk sensors support SNMP polling via the base unit and can be integrated into third-party SCADA access control systems using supplied MIB files and Cloudhawk service. SecurityHawk base unit also supports Modbus Master / Slave, Modbus RTU and Modbus over TCP / IP creating a simple and easy to configure Modbus to SNMP gateway.

Environmental Monitoring

Remote sites located outdoors likely contain a range of equipment that needs to be monitored and protected against potential environmental damages from internal and external forces.

√ – Protect critical assets from environmental damages. Enviromon’s smart sensors can monitor a range of parameters and send alerts when environmental conditions are above or below predefined thresholds for temperature, humidity, air flow and water leaks.

Security Monitoring

Remote infrastructure is often difficult to protect given that the majority of facilities go unattended for extended periods of time between manual checks and are often located in remote areas. Remote sites contain mission-critical assets and any compromise of these devices can impact the integrity and reliability of services.

Installing a web-enabled video surveillance system to monitor remote facilities makes it possible for an operator to monitor several remote sites from one centralized platform. In addition, Enviromon’s video surveillance systems can incorporate the use of smart sensors for motion or door entries to trigger automated recording and alert operators in real-time.

√ – Add real time or event based video recording for complete peace of mind. Enviromon’s SecutiryHawk line of cameras can provide live 24hr streaming video or be triggered using peripheral motion or door sensors for event monitoring.

√ – Send alerts and video / photos via Email or SMS Text message. Alerts can include a link to live video stream or attached photos when configured with security cameras to provide visual confirmation and records of triggered events.

√ – Event Logging. Motion and door sensors can be used to keep accurate logs of motion or door openings for sensitive areas.

Remote Power Control

Device failure may be impossible to prevent, but the vast majority of outages can be fixed with a simple on / off reboot. Typically a technician or operator is required to visit a remote site in order to reboot a failed system, which leads to increased downtime and added expenses for service calls.

With easy configuration and integration with our base units, Enviromon’s sensor controlled relay defines a new era in environmental management and provides an ideal solution for managing reboot functions at remote sites without the need for expensive, time-consuming service calls. The device can also be monitored and controlled by external management systems via SNMP to reboot failed devices and get up and running in the most cost effective way possible.

√ – Control power remotely to save time, eliminate site visits and save money. Sensor-controlled relays can be controlled manually via the integrated web interface on the SecurityHawk or can also be controlled through the base unit via external computers using the included SNMP command line utilities either interactively or programmatically.

√ – Reboot power automatically or interactively. Monitored devices using PING, SNMP or more sophisticated command response scripts can be integrated via base unit to provide status, and triggers in the event remote equipment responds incorrectly. An encrypted, password protected software shutdown command can be issued. If the system fails to respond automatically, the base unit using sensor relays connected to the power control for that device can cut the power supply to the connected equipment at the relay to reboot the system.

Remote IO Control

Compatible generator models can be connected to Enviromon’s base units using an Ethernet connection or 2-Wire RS458 connection, which provides the ability to monitor and control equipment remotely across distributed networks and receive automated alerts for predefined equipment statuses. *Remote monitoring and control require CloudHawk cloud services subscription.

√ – Integration with Enterprise Monitoring and SCADA control systems. Connection through RS485 port or TCP. Using the virtual sensor port feature to create a Modbus to SNMP gateway allows integration into any SCADA system.

√ – Be alerted by E-mail, SNMP or SMS when generator parameters are critical. Alerts can be set for total fuel used, oil pressure, oil level, water pressure, runtime, coolant temperature, fault codes and warnings, and more.

√ – Exact engine parameters vary depending on your generator. Please refer to your generator specific Modbus or Canbus registers.

Off-grid power supply and battery monitoring

Monitoring backup power supplies and UPS systems are essential to ensuring the reliability of these systems when they are needed.

Enviromon’s SecurityHawk base units can monitor the health of existing UPS systems and emergency generators over TCP IP for SNMP enabled devices.

√ – Temperature and Battery Health monitoring. Depending on the type of battery supply, using dry contact or ethernet connections to the base unit, battery health can be monitored using SNMP so that scheduled maintenance can be arranged before the backup power supply fails.

Contact us at Enviromon to discuss your server room situation and we will be able to provide you with the best recommendations to monitor your server room and prevent avoidable disasters like these.

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