PetrolPlaza Special Cloud-based solutions: OMIS includes now a self-learning OCR system for type plates

“EDC” speeds up maintenance

Easydatacollector (EDC) is a smart software designed to recognize information on pictures and is available as an open and mobile cloud application.

EDC enables users to quickly and easily gather and store data of equipment, machines and other hardware. This data can then be used for Faschang’s cloud-based maintenance software “OMIS” or independently in a customer-specific database.

EDC is an adaptive system, which is designed to autonomously recognize identical or similar type plates after several iterations. Since all the data analysis is done on a server, EDC has a very steep learning curve, and makes more data available to users with each iteration. The biggest challenge is to identify type plates which are difficult to read due to weathering, fading or damage. Because of the self-learning functionality, the tool can access similar data and reconstruct a certain type plate digitally. If no clear identification is reached, the most likely type plate will be suggested by the system according to “nearest neighbour”.

Type plates are found on most machine parts and are used to get the most important technical and maintenance related data. They are also used to clearly identify a machine.

Intuitive handling

“By using our OCR tool, the user should have an advantage and not be distracted from his actual work, maintenance of machines and devices. For that reason, one of our main focuses was to develop a user friendly and practice-oriented software tool”, says Faschang project leader Markus Wimmer.

Reduction of human mistakes

Although a camera will never function as well as the human eye, the acquisition of data through a device reduces the amount of mistakes compared to manual data collection. The software tool uses archived data to reliably identify and compare even extremely difficult to read samples. Hence, the software is also more reliable in unfavourable conditions as well as in stress situation in which humans tend to make more mistakes.

Time is money – especially in maintenance

“Maintenance is often done with unfavourable conditions. Our customers use this software tool to collect data from and identify machines and devices. They expect that the tool works reliable and is user friendly. This way, they can avoid expensive multi-step data acquisition processes and save time during maintenance. Key aspects of our OCR software tool are also smart database systems and fast data transmission, often between continents. In this area, we are ahead of our competition”, explains CEO Rudolf Faschang.