iNet Control+

It Answers Three Questions

The structure of iNet Control+ follows three questions, and framing it that way makes it far easier to understand than a feature list.

What are your people exposed to? Gas type, alarm duration, peak concentration, average concentration, and which instrument, user and location it happened at. Full data log records show which hazards workers actually encountered, rather than which ones the risk assessment predicted.

Are instruments being used properly? Who used an instrument without it being bump tested or calibrated. Who turned a monitor off during an alarm. Who changed a critical setting. Who manually calibrated or bump tested rather than docking.

Are instruments working properly? Bump test or calibration overdue. Equipment not seen, with no data uploaded. Marginal or failed sensors. Firmware updates available.

Those three run as email alerts as well as reports, so the information comes to you, rather than waiting to be looked for.

The Data Arrives on Its Own

This is the part that makes it work, and it’s why nobody has to be disciplined about record keeping.

Dock an Industrial Scientific instrument, and the docking station uploads its data to the cloud. That’s the whole process. There’s no input from the user, no spreadsheet, no copying, and no gap between what happened and what was recorded.

The software tabulates it and presents it back as a dashboard. Reports can be customised, historical data can be sorted and filtered by instrument, user or alarm type, and email summaries can be tailored to whatever matters to a particular person.

There’s no IT project involved, and no extra software to install. It runs from any web enabled device.

Consistency Across a Fleet

Configuring one instrument correctly is easy. Keeping a hundred configured correctly is the real problem, and Control+ deals with it in three ways.

Settings can be bulk assigned to a group of monitors, rather than instrument by instrument. Configurations can be locked, so they don’t get changed during the day and quietly drift. And the software flags where an alarm has been set above the recommended value. That catches someone raising a setpoint to stop an instrument alarming, rather than fixing what was causing it.

User groups carry different settings and permissions, with alerts when any setting changes. So a change is visible, rather than discovered later.

Scheduling Compliance Rather Than Chasing It

Equipment groups get schedules for bump tests, calibrations, data downloads and diagnostic reports, which turns maintenance from something remembered into something that happens.

Bump test and calibration certificates can be printed or emailed on demand. That’s exactly what an auditor asks for, and exactly what’s hard to produce at short notice from paper records.

Firmware update alerts come through when updates become available, and they’re applied from the same place.

Component and user history is tracked over time, so trends and anomalies surface, rather than staying buried in individual records.

Calibration Gas That Reorders Itself

Industrial Scientific’s Automatic Calibration Gas Replenishment Program is a free service for DSX docking station and iNet users. When iNet Control+ detects a calibration gas cylinder running low, a new cylinder ships automatically.

So the docking station doesn’t run out of gas halfway through a bump test cycle, and nobody has to remember to reorder.

Where It Sits Against iNet Now

Industrial Scientific draws the line simply, and it’s the clearest distinction in the range.

iNet Now works during the shift. Live readings, real time alerts, a map, and someone able to act while it’s happening.

Control+ works between shifts. Historical data and reports reveal patterns that need attention, such as repeated alarms at one location, or a worker who turned an instrument off during an alarm.

One stops an incident. The other stops the next one.

What It Costs

It’s worth knowing before anything else, because for many operations the answer is nothing.

Access to the platform is included at no additional charge for DSXi docking station customers and for iNet Exchange customers. A DSX docking station running in standalone mode can be upgraded to DSXi in the field. See the DSX Range for details.

So if you run DSXi stations, or lease through iNet Exchange, the software is already part of what you have.