UNIADEX: Crafting Business Opportunities with Io

IoT is still a new and an ambiguous concept for most firms around the globe. Firms intending to bank on the powers of IoT, first and foremost need to understand how the value generated by IoT will solve the issues around product and service delivery and user experience. "This requires a future-proof business scenario planning and not boardroom discussions on the current position of IoT," says Tetsuya Yamahira GM of IoT Business Development at UNIADEX. It is difficult to create and develop this kind of chemistry-generating business planning if it happens as internal discussion in one company. "UNIADEX, as a catalyst, provides workshop type service so that a customer can portray its IoT business story," smiles Mr. Yamahira.

He mentions that UNIADEX also brings an alliance and partnership scheme called “Co-creation Partners” as part of its “IoT Ecosystem Lab.” Under this scheme, the firm’s clients get the opportunity to work with people who are adept at deploying IoT services. The collaborative approach assists companies to develop the apt business scenario for implementing IoT services. As of January 2018, the member companies of Co-creation Partners reached to 44 companies- -ranging from sensor manufacturers and communication technology providers to mega cloud service providers and data analytics professional services companies.

Furthermore, to assist organizations to leverage the power of IoT, UNIADEX renders three series of core SaaS offerings— AirProduct, AirInsight, and AirFacility.

Yamahira highlights that the AirProduct series assists industrial and healthcare equipment manufacturers with cloud-based “IoT-ready” products. AirProduct Machine, the first of the IoT cloud service of AirProduct, allows industrial and healthcare equipment manufacturers to collect, accumulate, monitor, notify, and visualize the status of industrial machines. AirInsight Maintenance serves companies in equipment inspection and diagnosis work utilized by IoT and machine learning & artificial intelligence. Lastly, Yamahira delineates that the AirFacility Aqua is a SaaS offering that grasps the state of facilities that have not been digitized and adds value in facility maintenance.

Over the years, the firm has played a pivotal role in assisting its clients to deploy IoT solutions. Referring to one of the projects Yamahira explains how UNIADEX helped one of its clients, Sumitomo Precision Products (SPP), to detect faults in one of their core products— coolant pump. SPP approached UNIADEX for fault prediction and preventive maintenance of coolant pumps through predicting the aged deterioration of the components inside the pump. In the collaborative work that started in June 2017, three coolant pumps were prepared for detecting the abnormal patterns in the coolant pump, where the first one was an ordinary pump, the second one wears the gear, and the third one was a pump that destroys the gear. In addition, sensors were embedded to these pumps to find out the "normal", "abnormal occurrence", and "failure" patterns through machine learning. Once the results of this experiment was produced, the feedback was sent to the product planning process for improving the service and maintenance of the coolant pump.

Moreover, the company has developed an internal academy, called “UNIADEX Academy” to train their personnel for continually driving innovation and rendering optimal services to its clients. On the geographical front, UNIADEX intends to diversify its base to China and Southeast Asian countries with the help of its affiliated companies in these territories.