What is Pulsa “detecting” and how does it affect my business?
Pulsa sensors send measurements to your dashboard every three minutes (as opposed to every 24 hours with alternative solutions). This is important because if there’s a leak or if something goes wrong then time is of the essence. With three-minute increments between “pulses” and the ability to set alerts, you can know about an issue right awayー and hopefully fix it before your customer knows about it. Pulsa was built with gas distributors in mind.
More about alerts
There are two types of alerts:
In this article, we’ll cover Sensor alerts. Check out our next article about Gateway alerts.
The basics
You’ll want to set alerts for each sensor so you’ll know when to take action. For starters, be sure you have alerts set for when the gas gets lower than a certain level. You’ll have to decide the ideal fill ratio for an alert based on factors like how fast your customer has been consuming gas. Start with a couple of sensors and set a few different alerts for each one: a midway point, refill point, and critical level alert (set this one to repeat to ensure it's not missed). These consumption rate alerts can help detect periods of high usage or leaks as they are happening.
When thinking about consumption look at past patterns, how quickly do they consume? Think about your customers' specific needs like seasonality. For example, a brewery will likely increase consumption in the summer months, and even more so on weekends. The objective is efficiency: to visit your customers as infrequently as possible without running them out. This is how Pulsa customers are increasing their profits.
Who should get the alerts
Multiple subscribers can be added to any alert. Different people in your organization will want to know and will care about certain things. Think about it from the perspective of procurement, sales, drivers, ops dispatch, and more. Who needs to know what?
Different people in your organization want to know and will care about certain things. Think about it from the perspective of procurement, sales, drivers, ops dispatch, and more. Who needs to know what?
Adjust alerts to work for you
You’ll want to avoid getting a constant barrage of alerts– no one wants that. Figure out what the right settings are for you. You don’t need to have it all figured out now, keep adjusting as you learn. The Smoothing settings allow alerts to be smarter by taking into consideration the last one, four, eight or 24 hours. Create more aggressive alerts by selecting instant or hourly smoothing. On the other hand, prevent receiving alerts triggered by levels hovering around the same range by selecting eight hourly or daily. View the analytics located below your sensor graph for select intervals. Read more here.
You can adjust whether or not you want an alert, who gets the alert, the frequency, and the duration.
Tips:
- Inspect average usage in a given day, week, month, or custom. Even if you set an alert to daily, it’s a good idea to also look at your data week over week or month over month. Slow leaks can be detected this way.
- SMS alerts: receive alerts via text message on your smartphone. Imagine if there’s a leak or if a Pulsa gateway gets unplugged? Get a sensor alert via text and a gateway alert via email or vice versa.
To learn more, check out Creating and Modifying Alerts at the Pulsa Help Center
Now you know what it means to detect issues faster and a little more about how to get there. You’re on your way to less headaches and more efficiency for your business.
Read our next article about Gateway alerts.
