Quantify Environmental, based in Guelph, ON, Canada, is a specialized integration firm dedicated to enhancing efficiency within the manufacturing sector. Operating strictly within industrial environments—such as tier-one automotive plants, food and beverage facilities, and plastics manufacturing—the company deploys advanced metering and sensor technologies to capture vital production and utility data. While Quantify Environmental operates as a hardware-agnostic organization, over 50% of their field deployments rely on NCD’s robust wireless sensors. By combining NCD’s industrial-grade hardware with Ubidots‘ real-time dashboards, Quantify Environmental delivers transformative visibility to their clients.
Quantify Environmental: http://quantifyenv.com/
Challenge
Unseen Waste and Costly Integration
Industrial facilities frequently operate with critical blind spots regarding their environmental conditions, asset health, and utility consumption. Quantify Environmental identified several recurring challenges across their client base:
- Lack of Real-Time Data: Many plant managers rely exclusively on monthly utility bills, offering zero visibility into day-to-day operations or off-hours waste.
- Manual and Inefficient Processes: In facilities with strict health and safety protocols, highly paid staff are often tasked with walking the plant floor every 30 minutes with a clipboard to manually record temperature and humidity readings.
- Prohibitive Installation Costs: Hardwiring sensors requires running expensive conduit, which disrupts production and drastically increases project costs.
- Complex Wireless Environments: Heavy machinery and dense metal structures create signal dead zones that standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even LoRaWAN protocols struggle to penetrate.
- Hidden Utility Costs: Facilities often underestimate utility expenses; for example, water treated with reverse osmosis and heated with natural gas can cost upwards of $10 per cubic meter.
Solution
An Agile, Wireless IoT Architecture
To solve these challenges rapidly and cost-effectively, Quantify Environmental utilizes a modern technology stack featuring NCD Wireless Enterprise Sensors.
- Rapid Deployment: NCD sensors are installed in minutes using industrial magnets, completely eliminating the need for hardwired conduit.
- Robust Mesh Networking: Utilizing a 900MHz mesh network, the NCD sensors reliably transmit data through complex manufacturing environments. If a dead spot is found, a mesh repeater can be added for a few hundred dollars to instantly bridge the gap.
- Edge Processing: Node-RED is utilized at the edge to process and format complex industrial data before it reaches the cloud.
- Actionable Visualization: Data is pushed to Ubidots, providing clients with white-labeled, minute-by-minute dashboards, automated alerts, and color-coded floor map overlays.
"A lot of people are still very apprehensive about wireless because 15 years ago they bought a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth receiver and it never worked right. That is not the reality today. Being able to go into a plant and install sensors in a matter of one, two, or three days without running conduit—and being able to simply take those sensors with their magnets and move them to find the perfect location—is just a no-brainer."
Real-World Success Stories & ROI
Quantify Environmental has deployed this architecture across multiple demanding applications, resulting in rapid returns on investment.
1. Halting Massive Utility Waste at a Major Brewery
The Problem: A large brewing facility assumed their water usage was normal, despite high utility bills.
The Discovery: By equipping existing water flow meters with the NCD Industrial IoT Long Range Wireless 4-20mA Current Loop Receiver and The Industrial IoT 3-Channel Production Counter Transmitter, Quantify Environmental established a clear operational baseline for the facility.
The Fix & ROI:Â Real-time visibility enabled management to safely reduce the daily consumption of expensive heated and treated water without compromising process outcomes. Ultimately, through simple operational adjustments and low- to no-cost fixes, the company achieved a sustainable savings of $500,000 per year.
"In the end, that project and other projects led to them saving half a million dollars a year on water, every year, because of your sensors and our integration."
4-20mA Current Loop Receiver
2. Automating Worker Health and Safety
The Problem: A rubber manufacturing plant experienced severe heat and humidity during summer months. Staff had to manually check temperatures across the facility every 30 minutes to ensure union and safety compliance.
The Solution: NCD temperature and humidity sensors were deployed across the facility. The manual clipboard system was replaced with a digital floor map overlay showing green, yellow, and red safety zones.
The Outcome: Automated alerts now notify management when break schedules need to be adjusted due to heat. This frees up personnel to focus on core tasks rather than manual data collection. Furthermore, the system analyzes weather forecasts to predict indoor heat spikes hours in advance.
Wireless Temperature / Humidity Sensor
3. Protecting Critical Production Environments
The Problem: An alternative protein startup cultivating black soldier fly larvae faced a massive risk; if the temperature or humidity fell out of a precise range, the entire livestock population would die, jeopardizing a $50 million facility.
The Solution: Quantify Environmental deployed sensors to monitor the HVAC performance via a mobile trial cart.
The Outcome: They mapped dead zones and ensured the environment was stable before the client committed to full-scale production.
4. Predictive Maintenance for High-Value Assets
The Problem: An automotive plant faced catastrophic downtime if their main air compressor failed, equating to $100,000 a day in lost production.
The Solution: By attaching an NCD Industrial IoT Wireless Smart Vibration Sensor Gen4 to the compressor, plant managers now have continuous oversight.
The Outcome: A minor investment in a vibration sensor provides an early warning window to prevent mechanical failures and avoid massive financial losses.
Industrial IoT Wireless Vibration Temperature Sensor Gen4
Conclusion
By combining deep industrial expertise with agile NCD hardware and Ubidots dashboards, Quantify Environmental delivers precise, actionable insights to the factory floor. The transition from manual, clipboard-based processes to automated, wireless networks allows manufacturers to achieve complete operational visibility, ensuring safety compliance, preventing equipment failure, and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in utility waste.
Connect
Seeking next-generation IIoT solutions and support? Here are some next steps:
- Contact Quantify Environmental to explore IIoT Solutions.
- Contact us to talk to a NCD Technicial Support.
- Visit our Blog Entries to learn about emerging trends.
- Shop for solutions from NCD and our partners.
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