With industrial electricity rates rising and interest in ESG management growing, manufacturers of every size are looking for efficient ways to manage energy. Meanwhile, the government runs a variety of support programs to ease the burden on small businesses and strengthen their digital capabilities and infrastructure. As a result, more and more manufacturers are adopting power monitoring solutions through these programs. This article introduces Daliworks’ Thingplus® Prime deployments carried out through the Smart Workshop technology support program.
Prime Service Overview
Thingplus® Prime is a smart factory solution for monitoring equipment operations and managing energy at manufacturing companies. Its key features are as follows.
– Real-time power monitoring: Collects data through power sensors and supports productivity gains and cost savings through real-time analysis.
– Dashboards and reports: An intuitive UI makes operational status easy to grasp, with detailed reports provided.
– Contribution to ESG management: Supports eco-friendly management through energy consumption analysis.
– Reasonable deployment cost: Emphasizes cost efficiency so small and mid-sized companies can pursue digital transformation without strain.
About the Smart Workshop Technology Support Program
Prime architecture diagram
The government operates support programs that subsidize various costs to help small manufacturers make their processes smarter and more digital. Among them, the “Smart Workshop Technology Support Program” ran in 2024 as follows.
– Goal of smart workshop technology adoption: Apply IoT and AI technologies to automate processes and improve efficiency
– Eligibility: Manufacturers with fewer than 10 full-time employees (small-scale manufacturers)
– Covered items: Hardware rental fees, parts and materials, software development costs, and more
Because adopting companies only had to cover a small co-payment, the program proved popular; this year, in 2025, it has been announced in a more segmented form as the “Smart Manufacturing Support Program“.
Why These Customers Adopted Prime
The customers that deployed Prime through the Smart Workshop program were small in scale but owned equipment that consumes a great deal of electricity. Spread across Gwangju, Daejeon, Busan, and Suncheon, these companies had one thing in common: though the makers differed, each owned one or two laser cutting machines.
With small teams and most work done by hand, they needed to collect and analyze equipment data through a smart workshop deployment to save energy and improve utilization.
How the Deployment Went
After being selected for the Smart Workshop program, each customer deployed Prime through the following steps.
– On-site survey: We identify the equipment to be monitored and the distribution panels connected to it. Since power meters are installed in the distribution panel and must communicate with the cloud, the network environment is inspected as well.
– Installation prep: Along with the power meters, we prepare any additional communication equipment needed. In factories, network construction can be difficult, and even where Wi-Fi exists the signal often struggles to get through. To solve this we use LoRaWAN gateways — a favorite in IoT because they can be deployed at low power and low cost without complex network construction.
– Deployment: On the hardware side, power meters are installed based on the site survey. Qualified technicians install the meters so data can be collected from the target equipment, then verify that the data transmits properly. On the software side, a Prime account is created and configured, and we confirm that data collected by the meters is being reflected correctly.
Power meter installed inside the distribution panel and LoRaWAN gateway installed outside
– Trial operation and training: We confirm that data is being collected without issues and provide user training.
The Prime operations screen
From there, customers can start using it in earnest.
Results
Companies that adopted the Prime solution experienced the following benefits.
– Energy savings: Reduced power consumption by checking usage levels and spotting abnormal use
– Visibility into equipment utilization: Optimized operations by analyzing uptime and downtime with real-time data
– Lower solution costs: Minimized expenses with two years of rental fees covered by the Smart Workshop support program
Closing Thoughts
Power monitoring built on the Smart Workshop support program and the Prime solution can go a long way toward improving productivity and cutting costs for small and mid-sized manufacturers. As these cases show, making active use of government support programs eases the burden on small manufacturers while strengthening their digital capabilities and infrastructure. In 2025 the initiative continues as the “Smart Manufacturing Support Program” — we encourage you to take advantage of it, adopt Prime, and begin your digital transformation.
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