INIMCO: Revolutionizing an Asset Management System with Intelligent IoT Technology

About the project

INIMCO helps manufacturing companies, machine and industrial equipment builders to gain insights into their machine and productivity data, improve operation efficiency and offer data-driven services without the burden of building everything from scratch.

They approached HTEC Group to help them build a secure monitoring IoT platform that would collect data across supply chain and provide end-customers with real-time insight into the status, performance and operation of machinery which would further enable much easier collaboration.

Challenge

According to Gartner, by 2024 the number of enterprise internal and external hardware and software asset audit requests will increase by 100 %.  Accurate asset management continues to be prerequisite for most factories, especially after Covid-19. Having a deep insight into how the machinery operates in real time opens a world of opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity and reduce menial work and costs. Our client and partner INIMCO faced the same challenge and approached us to help them build an automated system of maintaining real-time asset intelligence for every device using industrial IoT. This solution would help them avoid high manual labor costs, potential downtime less-than-optimal performance and risk of security breaches. They wanted to avoid the scenario where they would depend on management agents to gather, potentially incomplete, non-correlated data. 

Solution

We helped INIMCO build a multitenant software IoT platform that can collect data from different machine sources and sensors which end-users would then use to keep track of performance, productivity and connectivity of all the machines in real-time through user-friendly and intuitive chats and dashboards. The solution was built from ground zero and was initially called MAMS (My Asset Management System). It serves as a backbone, a foundation for developing any of the concrete client-specific solutions based on the clients’ needs and requirements.  

Our team used a set of technologies on the back-end side, such as .Net, framework C sharp language on the front-end part Angular, and on the Cloud part we used Azure Resources. 

The team created a few role-based dashboards that provide end-users with real-time reporting allowing them to precisely track all of their assets, thus significantly reducing manual work and providing a unified view of consolidated reports and asset records. Our team also developed a powerful mobile app for some of the clients, to periodically audit assets from any place in the world. This app is perfectly integrated with the entire solution thus accelerating the time needed to register assets which then results in major time savings and increased operational efficiency.  

One of the most important features of the solution is scalability. Its multitenant system allows for much easier scalability to a bigger number of tenants, clients or factories in some cases. On top of this, this solution ensures safety and security of the data (telemetry data is sensitive data) as well as reliability as it enables factories to work seamlessly 24/7, calculations running constantly, with a system available for each factory and each tenant in different parts of the world and different time zones. Finally, simplicity of the solution we built plays a major role as it enables users who do not have much experience with using digital devices to easily and much more quickly keep track of the assets through dashboards, different colors, widgets and other functionalities.

Success

We helped INIMCO build a unique solution that helps manufacturing companies, machine builders and industrial equipment builders enable remote monitoring for industrial installations from any part of the world, optimize production processes and operation efficiency, engage with customers on a much higher level through intuitive dashboards and interactive customer portal, avoid trial-and-error projects and increase their ROI in the long run. Manage multiple tenants from any part of the world. As for the end-user, this solution allows them to have ease of access to all the relevant data through user-friendly dashboards which further reduces the amount of manual work. Overall, this single integrated solution streamlines processes and helps manage the lifecycle of assets from start to finish across industries enabling a whole new level of agility, tracking and forecasting in factories and enterprises across industries.  

This solution was a game-changer for many INIMCO‘s clients like AkzoNobel and TOMRA, whom we helped solve their challenges by helping them maximize their use of data. AkzoNobel managed to streamline processes and make them user-friendly for everyone, no matter the level of technical expertise of the staff and check on the performance of the factory in real time. Read more about AkzoNobel success story in this article published by Microsoft.  

This solution was a game-changer for many INIMCO‘s clients

Also, TOMRA, Norwegian manufacturer of resource productivity solutions is seeing productivity gains ever since they started using TOMRA Insight, a secure, nearly real-time and on-demand monitoring platform for sorting lines where we helped build the backbone of their technology. They were not only looking for an IoT solution that collects machine data for internal use, but they also wanted to build a system that would make sure that the software was integrated with other business systems. Read more about TOMRA’s success story also published by Microsoft.

The Industrial IoT platform itself enables INIMCO and HTEC to build fast end-solutions for different kinds of industries such as, for instance, producing paints, sorting of recycling, etc.