Minnovation: Asset Management powered by IoT and Data Science

Simon Maselli, MD

Technologies to connect sensors and collect data are common, but finding value in that data is the challenge. Making data an integral part of doing business, and enabling data driven decision making is a hot topic for all large organisations in today’s competitive environment. “Data is like crude oil—there’s lots of it around, but it’s not of much value until its refined and processed,” says Simon Maselli, Managing Director of Minnovation. Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, the company has been helping clients with various industrial IoT challenges, for example, enabling organizations to connect assets and harness technologies to predict total cost of ownership and MTTF in real time, through to those who simply need to monitor a single point of interest in a simple process. “We find some clients have quite advanced Industrial IoT capabilities and approach Minnovation for upgrades and optimisation while others look for a simple turnkey package to embark on their IoT journey”.

The Minnovation 360° suite of solutions are powered by technologies that enhance clients’ decision making capability. At the heart of the suite is AlphaX, an IoT Engine, which enhances decisions through its embedded machine learning AI and automated decision making logic. This doesn’t just benefit industrial applications; it is deployed across a range of sectors across Australia including urban infrastructure and natural environments. The engine can manage millions of devices in real time, with numerous options for processing, analysis, and reporting augmented by machine learning and AI. Users simply define their business logic and the engine goes to work.

The AlphaX interface is simple, providing a satellite and object orientated interface enabling access to data, across the organisation, in a few simple clicks. Features like “Status at a Glance” highlight assets that need attention without having to sift through long lists or performance logs. AlphaX is adaptable, and can be seamlessly integrated with Tech1, Maximo, SAP and most common asset management applications providing fully or semi-automated work order creation and monitoring through to workflow planning and automation. The flexibility and robustness of the Minnovation technology is a significant step towards unlocking the value of data through broad reliable deployment of machine learning and AI capability.

AlphaX is the most advanced IoT engine ever imagined, powering smart decisions for engineers, scientists and government bodies

At the device level, the AlphaX distributed intelligence is provided by the Machine Health Manager, a data capture and processing device that is compatible with an almost unlimited array of both proprietary and third-party industrial-grade sensors. The device creates direct connectivity between sensors and the AlphaX IoT Engine without the need for intermediate gateways.

Minnovation has developed application-tailored variants of the AlphaX ecosystem, namely AlphaX CT and AlphaX AG, which are respectively aimed at the development of Smart City and Smart Environments. For example, in the government sector, the AlphaX IoT Engine enables facilities management of public assets like railways, bridges, and buildings to make smart decisions and make a large step-change improvement to asset performance and resource utilisation.

Minnovation has deployed technologies across Australia including iconic sites such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Loy Yang Power Station, and Australian road toll operator Transurban’s Eastlink underground roadway. In these applications, the suite of technologies provides unprecedented capability to monitor asset performance, predict future events and make smart data driven decisions. ConnectEast sought the assistance of Minnovation for the management of their critical assets as early as 2013. “ConnectEast uses our algorithms to make major maintenance and capital replacement decisions on critical assets,” affirms Maselli. Since then, the industrial IoT provider has been assisting ConnectEast with a wide range of decisions on asset maintenance and replacement.

The 360° suite of flexible hardware, analytics and data science expertise is what sets Minnovation apart. “Data itself is just a piece of the puzzle,” explains Maselli. “First you need to collect the right data, in the right way, using robust, and adaptable technology. Today it’s possible to measure more things than ever before, and that means better inputs for smarter decision-making.” Minnovation's data science services help clients to sift through vast amounts of data to discover and unlock data-driven insight and value from their IoT data. The company has a dedicated IoT lab for the development of future technologies that could one day prove to be breakthroughs in the fields of Data Science and AI. Minnovation owns and operates an onsite micro data center powered by scalable Hadoop clusters. “We simply add more clusters as demand increases.” says Maselli.

Maselli’s final insight? “The performance of an organization’s assets is all about the quality of its decisions, and smart decision-making is about an understanding of what’s happened in the past what you need to do in the future. The more quickly you know what’s going on and what that means for you, the smarter your decisions will be. AlphaX is your IoT infrastructure for asset performance and decision-making success.”