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But Covid-19 and the resulting requirement for remote working played in the favour of Bristol-based Reach Industries, which was in the early-stage development of SentinelEngine, a cloud-based data management platform targeted at Industry 4.0 and industrial automation.
Silas Adekunle, co-founder and CEO at Reach Industries, said: “Although it was a tough time generally to start a business, we actually found that a lot of people were becoming increasingly receptive to the idea of being able to monitor, manage and control their robots, industrial automation and IoT devices remotely. So while trialling some proof-of-concepts last year we saw a cultural shift and increased acceptance for this way of working.”
Reinventing the wheel
Adekunle is no stranger to starting new enterprises as he and his co-founder Chris Beck set up Reach Robotics in 2013, which saw them successfully bring gaming robots and STEM education platform, MekaMon, to market. Having closed that company in 2019, the inspiration for SentinelEngine came through their own experience of having to manufacture robotic products.
Adekunle said: “When we were looking for a platform or piece of software ourselves to actually manage that process and help us improve efficiencies and productivity, we found that there wasn’t anything that quite fit the bill. This resulted in a lot of pain as we reinvented the wheel quite a few times. So when we closed that business we saw an opportunity to create a no-code, plug-and-play solution to help users, from developers to small firms, who don’t have access to the big budget that global enterprises do.”
While connected devices are the foundation of the Internet of Things, its value lies in the data that is generated from those devices. But, as Adekunle was quick to point out, it’s not just about gathering data for data’s sake, it’s being able to garner insights from that data to help drive productivity, efficiency and performance. And key to the development of SentinelEngine was to make it as easy and flexible as possible for users to start deriving that value.
“Having lived the pain before, our goal was to build a platform that would very quickly allow users to see the levers they can pull that will actually have an impact on their business,” said Adekunle.
Of course, where data is involved, security is paramount, and SentinelEngine ensures that all data is secure even before it gets to the platform.
Adekunle explained: “The user gets a code snippet that allows data to be sent from a machine, robot or IoT asset to our platform. If it’s not secured then we add a piece of hardware that secures that communication – essentially in the gateway. As that data makes its way to the platform we also then have a way of capturing extra dimensions such as ambient factory data and operator data, so other sensors or users are able to add context to that data, leading to the deepest level of insight.”
Improving revenue
Once data is at the platform, there is a KPI dashboard tracking everything from production rate to how it integrates with existing infrastructure. As well as an analysis of big data coming in, SentinelEngine also uses natural language processing to provide human understandable recommendations to improve revenue or productivity.
SentinelEngine’s business model will be pay-as-you-go with users only paying for the number of devices and the complexity of the services they use each month. For instance, services include, among others: data logging and replay; predictive maintenance enabled by machine learning; and industrial-grade security and encryption for multiple users.
SentinelEngine is gearing up for a full launch later this year.
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