Home
Knowledge base
Small and scattered places

When the things you need to watch are small and scattered

Some places need watching, but are too small or too far apart for the usual tools. This is who Bhairava Sense is made for.

A facility or building management system serves one large facility. Small places elsewhere each report to one

Bhairava Dashboard.

What a facility or building management system is

A facility or building management system, or FMS, BMS, is the central system that supervises the equipment in one large facility: its cooling, lighting, pumps, alarms and more. It usually comes from a third party and is set up by specialist engineers, who connect and configure it sensor by sensor over a period of weeks.

Its screens are mostly engineering drawings, made to be read by trained people.

A specialist studying a wall of dense engineering screens in a facility control room — An FMS, BMS control room: dense engineering screens, read by a trained specialist.

What it is good at

For a large facility, this is the right approach. The facility is in one place, there is a great deal of equipment to run, and there are engineers to look after it. The cost of specialist setup is worth paying.

Why small and scattered places fall outside it

A small facility cannot justify an FMS, BMS. Neither can the many small units spread across a town or a region:

a machine in a cottage industry, working in a house of its own
a small workshop
a shop
a cold room
a vehicle

Each one is too small for an FMS, BMS, and together they are in too many places for one. So today many of them are simply not watched, and the first sign of trouble is a failure.

A lane of small houses, each with a small CNC lathe workshop inside, and nobody watching them — Today: small CNC lathes, one or two to a house, and nobody is watching.

How Bhairava Sense covers them

Bhairava Sense is made for exactly these places. A laptop at each place, and soon a phone, is run by an ordinary person with no technical background. It finds the controllers and sensors by itself, and the person draws the place as a tree in an afternoon.

Every place, however many and however far apart, reports to one Bhairava Dashboard. Sensor Broadcast carries it there, so many small places can be watched together on one screen.

The same lane of houses with CNC lathes, now with the owner standing in the foreground checking a phone that shows a simple tree of green dots and one red, with thin threads of coloured light reaching it from the workshops — The same lane, now watched: the owner checks every workshop from his phone.

Take an example: CNC lathes in a cottage industry

This is an illustration, not a customer story. Say a business has small CNC lathes run as a cottage industry: a dozen machines, one or two to a house, in nine houses across one town.

Today. Nobody knows which lathe is running and which has stopped until someone visits or phones.
An FMS, BMS is out of the question. A facility or building management system for a single lathe in a house cannot be justified.
At each house. The person there opens Bhairava Sense on the laptop they already have and presses Discover. The lathe’s controller appears.
Name it, place it. They name it, place it on the tree (Workshop, then Machine) and add a photo.
One dashboard. The owner opens one Bhairava Dashboard and sees every workshop: green where the machines report, red where one has stopped, with the place and the photo of exactly which lathe.

What changed: the owner no longer drives round or phones to find out. A stopped lathe shows up red, with the house and the photo that say where to go.

What you no longer carry

Cost. An FMS, BMS means software licences, specialist engineering to set it up, and often its own hardware. Bhairava Sense is free with Bhairava: it comes with Bhairava at no extra charge, runs on the laptop you already have, and soon your phone, and is set up by your own person.
Vendor lock-in. An FMS, BMS usually ties the facility to one maker’s system, and to that maker’s engineers for every change. Bhairava Sense works with equipment from different makers side by side, and the tree, names and photos you build are yours.
A call-out for every change. With an FMS, BMS, a moved room, a replaced controller or a new sensor is often a call-out to a specialist. With Bhairava Sense your own person makes the change on the tree, and the “Go to” directions with photos tell anyone where to look.

Works with what you already have

Bhairava Sense runs on the devices you already own: a Windows laptop today, and soon your phone, so there is nothing special to buy. It works with the controllers and sensors already installed, from different makers side by side, with nothing to replace or rewire.

Alongside an FMS, BMS, not instead of one

Where a large facility already has an FMS, BMS, nothing needs to change. Bhairava Sense can sit alongside it. It only asks and reads, and it changes nothing, so the FMS, BMS carries on exactly as before. Read what that means in practice.

Short version: an FMS, BMS is built for one large facility. Bhairava Sense is built for the small and the scattered, and can sit beside an FMS, BMS.