UK-based theme park technical services and engineering company, Amusement Technical launches RideMinder, a turnkey IIoT amusement park ride performance maintenance solution.

With RideMinder amusement ride operators can securely connect to their travelling and park model rides regardless of control system type. With the resulting data they can use cloud-based analytics to improve the reliability and availability of those rides, minimise total cost of ownership, and reduce operational risks.

The launch builds on the underlying IoT trend within the industrial and facilities management sectors to move towards a predictive performance and maintenance strategy for assets.

Clients in the amusement park industry can monitor and manage data from all types of rides with retrofitted sensors for properties such as location, level, temperature, vibration, moisture, humidity or flow and with an alert when pre-determined thresholds or rules are met. Key benefits include:

• Ride health management: RideMinder provides a unified view of the ride portfolio, virtually anytime, anywhere, to understand real performance and extend ride life.
• Move from preventative maintenance to a predictive model: RideMinder collects real-time data which details the current condition of equipment. Unlike preventative maintenance which seeks to decrease the likelihood of a ride’s failure through the performance of regular maintenance, predictive maintenance relies on data to determine a ride’s probability of failure before that failure occurs. RideMinder allows ride operators to move from a repair and replace model to a predict and fix maintenance model using predictive analysis.
• Improved ride reliability: RideMinder predicts equipment performance issues so maintenance activities are scheduled at low impact times avoiding costly unplanned downtime.
• Increased ride availability: RideMinder provides continual monitoring and reporting so that decisions about delaying or bringing forward planned maintenance are made with solid information and not reliance on ‘average duty’ schedules.
• Reduced costs. RideMinder enables ride operators to keep track of spare parts, ride conditions and other critical data needed to make smart financial decisions regarding the management of the ride.

“We’ve found customers today want a complete solution that allows them to monitor their multi-age, multi-vendor and multi-category rides across their park that is easy to implement, open, scalable, secure and extremely affordable,” states Sean Brian, managing director, Amusement Technical.

“We responded with RideMinder. We’ve already installed this solution in our last five control system projects. We are deploying the basic package as standard in new control system commissions.”

Amusement Technical clients have the option to use the system via a web-based application or clients can a managed service from Amusement Technical, where the ride is monitored, and remote maintenance performed based on pre-agreed SLAs without the client even knowing there’s a problem.

“The managed services option is resonating in the US market where downtime impacts brand positioning, particularly in the larger parks such as Hershey Park,” explains Sean Brian.