Technology Reseller v41

01732 759725 34 Q&A compliance. This includes auditing the water supply, checking the water is at the right temperature and is not at risk of growing legionella bacteria. Historically, this has always been a manual task – a staff member with a clipboard has to go from location to location, turn a tap on, stick a thermometer under the water and wait until it comes to the right temperature. You are wasting time, burning fuel to travel around and are pouring hot water down the drain. We can automate all of that: we can monitor the status of every single point that staff would have checked and only issue an alert if there is a problem. That saves costs and generates efficiencies. One of my colleagues always says we are looking to put that person with the clipboard out of business. If a facilities management team or an adult social care team can offload a very manual task into an automated system, they can use their people for something much more beneficial. TR: Do you have any figures on the sorts of savings people are making? EM: We analysed the data from the bin monitoring trial in Bournemouth, which showed a saving of 52% on the bin collection spend. TR: How do people pay for your solutions? Is there an OPEX option to reduce upfront costs? EM: Yes there is. We do not charge a CAPEX cost for the hardware but supply every element of the solution for a small monthly fee. We provide the hardware, the connectivity and the software analytics, all for a fixed price. Not selling the hardware makes the solution more affordable for a local authority and helps us be more sustainable. We have just signed a three-year contract with Watford Borough Council for legionella and emergency lighting monitoring, including continual monitoring of device function. If we receive signs that a unit is failing or its battery is declining, we will automatically ship out a replacement. The failing unit will come back to us for analysis and then to the factory for refurbishment. TR: You have already mentioned how you work with system integrators and enable your solutions to be integrated with third party solutions. Are partnerships important for your growth and product development? EM: In the past, there was the attitude that a company could do it all. We have are made in Hong Kong. Our main manufacturing resource is in rural Dorset, which you would not expect, but they make smart meters, for example, so they are a switched-on bunch. We provide the design, and they build to our specifications. By building our own system, we can ensure that every element integrates seamlessly and delivers the desired outcomes. Manufacturing in the UK has worked well for us. It has been much easier from a management perspective and our customers like the fact that the solution is home-grown and supporting the UK economy. Everything from manufacturing to cloud hosting is UK-based, which also benefits security and issues around GDPR and dealing with personal data. TR: How many customers do you now have? EM: We have about 40 in various forms, with some small deployments that I would say are at the pilot stage. We ran a pilot scheme with Biffa and Northern Rail to deploy sensors in bins in railway stations. We are now on their approved supplier list for smart bin technology, which they are looking to push down other avenues. We also recently completed a trial with Biffa along Bournemouth seafront where they had a problem with people throwing disposable barbecues in bins. Embers that were still smouldering would cause bin fires; once a truck caught fire and another time a storage depot went up in flames. There are many bin sensors out there, but ours will tell you how full the bin is; it will tell you if the lid has been left open; it will tell you if someone has kicked it over, and it will tell you the internal temperature. We won’t tell you your bin is on fire, but we will say this bin in this location is much hotter than another 100 feet away. From our trials, we have discovered that we can also detect if someone gets in a bin. This sounds funny but can be exceptionally dangerous if the bin is emptied by a collection truck. So, we have a base product that we can add elements to, delivering far more granular data and added value. TR: Is IoT adoption mainly driven by cost savings or are there other considerations? EM: There are multiple drivers for IoT adoption. In local government, pretty much everyone’s budgets are being cut, but they still have many statutory services to deliver. A council, for example, has to monitor its properties for legionella The network allows data from sensors to be received by our cloud platform, where it is analysed and visualised on a dashboard. For example, in the case of parking bay sensors deployed in a residential parking zone, a map will show the location of every single parking space and whether that space is empty or occupied. You can then drill down into quite a lot of granular detail for further analysis. A sensor in each parking bay senses when a car parks above it. It then detects whether there is a dedicated tag in the car, identifying it as belonging to a resident authorised to park in that zone. If a non-authorised vehicle parks in the resident’s parking zone and a ticket isn’t purchased, then an alert is sent out to civil enforcement officers, such as ‘Unauthorised vehicle in bay 24 on Bernard Street, go and investigate’. TR: So, your solution can also be integrated with other systems. EM: Yes, people can either use our solution or we can integrate with third- party systems. For example, our parking solution can pull in data from pay and display machines, and, working in partnership with Ringo, we can offer a complete cashless parking solution. In adult social care deployments, we can integrate into the Doro alarm system for out of hours cover. During the day, council- employed adult social care team members can use the system to monitor the status of their residents. Then, when they clock off at 5 p.m., the system can automatically switch over to Doro. TR: Do you use generic sensors imported from China, say, or do you manufacture your own? EM: We design and manufacture all our own hardware sensing devices in the UK. The only thing we manufacture outside the UK is plastic boxes, which continued... ...continued Doris, the in-home sensor