A Falcker Case Study
Falcker is a drone-based industrial inspection company located in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Falcker’s maintenance platform and mobile inspection app collects, stores, and provides key data insights to companies in the oil and gas industry. The precise, accurate data helps customers develop effective inspection and maintenance programs for its oil terminal tank assets.
Petrochemical companies today are tasked with performing regular inspections of critical assets like floating roof tanks and are essential to identifying and addressing potentially catastrophic issues that can be dangerous to workers and the environment. Traditional inspection approaches are manual and visual-based and produce inaccurate and inconsistent data that can impact the asset lifecycle and risk catastrophic failure.
Falcker turned to Thread as a software solution for streamlining their industrial inspection workflows with drones and robots, aiming to take automated inspections to the next level. UNITI, Thread’s automated technology platform, supports Falcker’s tank inspection workflow and feeds data to their Software as a Solution (SaaS) asset care platform. In addition, Falcker is able to expand its services into new regions because of the scalability of Thread’s data capture methodology. The templated flight routine data ensures constant results no matter the pilot skill.
“Working for companies like Vopak, BP and Sabic, Falcker is a front runner in the application of drones used for asset inspection in harbour and industry. Consistent high-quality data acquisition and safety is essential for success. This goal can only be reached when drones are operated autonomously while monitored by the pilot responsible. We are proud to announce our commitment as a value added reseller for Thread’s edge computing hardware and software platform as we recognize their solution to offer next level flight planning and execution."
Falcker pulls capture tank inspection data from Thread’s UNITI technology platform to support these customer features:
360 Viewer:
Perform visual inspections based on a 360º view
Deficiencies:
Describe, allocate and share deficiencies
Documents:
View previous documentation and reports
Work Items:
Schedule and follow up on inspection work
Maintenance:
View and assign maintenance recommendations
Generate:
Comprehensive inspection reports
Assign:
Associate a checklist to an inspection
History:
Activities logged for future reference
Thanks to the collaboration between Thread and Falcker, inspection data can be collected more efficiently and a foundation is laid for fully remotely controlled inspection flights.
