Air Products (www.airproducts.com) in January formed a joint venture with nPhase, LLC (www.nphase.com), to offer automated inventory management services across a number of industrial markets. The service use customized machine-to-machine (M2M) telemetry to perform real-time, automated monitoring of inventory levels in tanks or other containers to replace periodic manual readings.

The remote monitoring package includes sensors, computer software, communications tools and the information technology infrastructure to let users review inventory and production operations data either on-line or in their own ERP systems. Once product levels are gathered by the system, the data is transferred to a central system for automated forecasting, or to arrange production and delivery schedules.