Norgren is looking to a future where performance is bought and sold while the products themselves become the conduit. Sean Toomes, Norgren’s international marketing director, paints a picture of a pneumatics industry very different from the one we recognise today. Toomes can see a day when Norgren will not necessarily charge customers on a per-unit
basis for individual valves, actuators and FRLs. Instead, the company will be able to sell whatever is of most value to the customer – be it cycles in the case of a valve, strokes in the case of an actuator, or throughput in the case of air-line equipment. In his words, “customers should have the option of paying for usage, not units […] If a piece of equipment – be it a valve, a filter or an actuator – stops working, then why should the customer have to pay for it? It’s not the product itself which a customer wants – it’s what it can deliver.”
But how would Norgren be able to tell how many strokes any given actuator had delivered, or how many litres of air had been pushed through an FRL? How would it be practically possible to charge a customer for the exact number of cycles delivered by a valve? This, according to Toomes, is where the Internet comes in. “We already have our V20/V22 valves which can communicate through a fieldbus to an operator, warning of impending failure or advising which particular valve in an island needs replacing. It’s only a short step to build in a monitoring capability which would let the equipment communicate with us at Norgren,
advising us how hard it has been working today, this week or this month.”