Inauro
An innovative IoT company, Inauro specialises in linking IoT data and operational systems to bridge the physical and digital divide and enable businesses to automate workflows with smart technology.The Opportunity
Equipment hire, construction, and logistics companies need real-time visibility into the location, and condition, of physical, moving assets to reduce operational risk and improve their utilisation.The IoT Solution
- “single asset view” to verify actual versus invoiced asset utilisation and cost
- lower operational cost
- reduced operational and business risk
- improved environmental impact
- better asset utilisation.
With years of experience working with Australia’s largest equipment hire companies, there is little Max Girault, the Chief Commercial Officer at Inauro, doesn’t know about industrial asset utilisation.
Established in 2020, Inauro brings insights from widely untapped IoT-sourced physical asset data into operational systems to enrich, automate, and improve operational processes. The Inauro team come well-credentialed, with over five years’ experience developing a proprietary asset tracking solution for a Tier1 Australian Hire Company and extensive expertise with telecoms, networking, and telemetry solutions.
The challenges of large-scale asset tracking for equipment hire and construction companies
Large hire equipment and construction firms all face similar challenges with asset management. How to cost-effectively and reliably track the location and condition of assets to increase utilisation, anticipate maintenance, assure a positive customer experience, and improve operational efficiencies? Australia’s largest hire equipment firms manage hundreds of thousands of serialised assets.
Over the last decade, tracking large asset fleets with telemetry solutions has grown in popularity. Telemetry is the in-situ collection and automatic transmission of data points to monitor assets. It has become so widespread for tracking that many manufacturers make assets with embedded tracking devices.
While telemetry data is better than no data on assets, it presents two significant challenges for businesses managing large asset fleets:
Overwhelming numbers of data sources
Imagine the difficulty capturing and managing data from thousands of assets daily when every telemetry device is different and requires software and hardware installation. With traditional telemetry tracking solutions, fleet operators are rapidly overwhelmed with too many data sources, in multiple formats, from different software packages. The time needed to compile, integrate, deduplicate and analyse data to extract meaningful insights makes it virtually impossible to improve operational efficiencies.
Siloed, disconnected systems
Data captured through telemetry usually resides in dedicated databases or the cloud. It isn’t connected organically to other systems used to operate a business, including ERP, SFA, or CRM systems. Traditional tracking systems can’t link asset data, such as location or condition, with other business information, like the hirer’s contact information, invoice status, hire duration. When telemetry solutions and business systems are disconnected, a wealth of knowledge to improve efficiency and the customer experience remains out of reach.
The Inauro technology difference
Girault says, “As telemetry became popular over the last five years, there was a persistent lack of solutions to solve the problem of fleet operators having too many disconnected siloed data points across a business. No commercial platform captured, shared, and represented telemetry data to make it useable by a business within its existing systems.
Inauro’s vision was to create a simple-to-use industrial IoT platform to connect business data points and enhance operations in real-time. Our Perspio™ platform solves those challenges.”
Inauro’s Perspio™ platform ingests, processes and analyses data from telemetry systems, and provides it context by adding to it the operational layer found in other more traditional business systems. Leveraging Thinxtra’s cellular IoT network, powered by Soracom, to complete the telemetry picture, the modular platform turns data into meaningful contextualised insights.
Bridging the gap between an organisation’s physical and digital worlds lets companies improve and automate workflows to vastly improve operational efficiencies, safety, and environmental performance. Inauro’s customers agree.
Over the last two years, the business has accelerated, with brands including Uphire, Hire Express, Scully RSV, and Game Farm benefiting from Inauro’s innovative solutions. Renowned charity Heart of the Nation is another Inauro customer, using the Perspio™ platform for real-time monitoring of the location, maintenance and readiness of automated external defibrillators (AED) for patient assistance.
“We’re always focused on developing more solutions to solve customer productivity challenges for industrial-scale fleet managers, construction companies, and logistics firms. We’re excited to explore solutions for monitoring non-powered assets, such as building materials, and how we can use Perspio™ to improve our client’s risk management strategies.”
Max Girault,
Chief Commercial Officer at Inauro
Why Inauro chose Thinxtra’s cellular IoT network for connectivity
Inauro chose to partner with Thinxtra for network connectivity because the company believes in the strength of partnership. A customer-centric organisation, Girault is sensitive to meeting his client’s requirements and needs through a proven partner network.
He says, “Every customer is cost-conscious, and no single solution solves every customer problem. That business reality means we need a flexible, cost-viable network connectivity partner to enable us to provide the best solution for each unique customer case. Thinxtra’s connectivity service is extensive, reliable, and available at a compelling price. Its easy-to-use central management console works perfectly with our solution and lets customers add, pause, or remove services on-demand. Our customers also enjoy that our solution doesn’t rely on a single operator.”
Girault says, “A complete view of an operation in one integrated system that is easily accessible helps businesses deliver higher service levels in a more efficient way because they have more meaningful and actionable information about all aspects of the operation. However, siloed data and legacy systems create a lot of complexity. Inauro’s Perspio™ is the ultimate data fusion platform, simplifying and automating the collection and integration of data and conclusively providing insights needed to create tangible value.”
Tangible customer value
Inauro’s many customers share one commonality: they’ve all experienced tangible business value after deploying the Perspio™ solution. Benefits vary according to specific use cases, and business challenges, but most customers experience cost savings from greater insight into their operations. Cost savings include recovering toll monies, anticipating vehicle breakdowns before business disruption, optimising resource utilisation of fuel, labour, water, electricity, and much more.
Insights into asset location and utilisation let operators provide safer working environments and improve asset utilisation down to the exact unit. Customers better utilise equipment by moving from time-cycle to on-demand plant asset management. Real-time insight into what assets are available, where they are, and when needed reduces purchase and hire costs and cuts waiting times.
Customers can leave manual, error-prone paper-based processes in the past with IoT-enabled automated construction management workflows. Automation improves team and equipment productivity and reduces on-site risk.
One customer used Inauro technology to track the location of an extensive hire vehicle fleet. The firm had no visibility into the location of its fleet and incurred fees when driving along toll roads. They had very little recourse to claim money after the fact from customers for toll charges received weeks later. Delivering visibility into each asset’s location and connecting that data to the ERP system let the customer link vehicles to a specific hirer and their invoicing details. Within months, the customer moved from experiencing a three percent recovery rate of tolls fees to a ninety-seven percent recovery rate.
Data makes the future bright
With deep connections to Australia’s construction and equipment hire industries, the Inauro team is committed to extending its positive impact on the equipment hire and construction industries.
Nicholas Lambrou, CEO of Thinxtra, says, “Transformation is an overused term, but operational transformation is what Inauro delivers its customers. The Inauro story is an insightful real-world example of how the power of partnering with Thinxtra enables partner solutions both with services out-of-the-box and the potential to unlock adjacent services. The combination empowers partners like Inauro to build long-standing customer relationships which continue to deliver incredible operational outcomes year after year.”
About Inauro
Inauro was born from a desire to be a leader in the technology ecosystem, working to advance industries and their operations. We wanted the IoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to evolve how the world does business, delivering to scale and reach and make people’s lives easier. Our vision was to create an industrial IoT platform that was simple, understood business, and improved operations in real-time. We started Australia’s most innovative IoT company, Inauro, and built Perspio™, to do just that.
For more details about Inauro’s services, please visit their website.
