CEO of Smart Component Technologies (SCT), Nick Koiza, shares the story of how SCT has evolved from a grant-funded R&D operation to a profitable scale-up with international presence.
Addressing critical infrastructure needs
SCT was founded in 2011 with a very clear mission in mind. The clue is in the name. ‘Smart Component Technologies’ is plural, indicating more than one product and they’re smart. It says a lot about what the company was set up to achieve in the area of industrial IoT.
The vision has always been focused on critical infrastructure monitoring, for very compelling reasons. Critical infrastructure depends on networks, with expensive assets often in remote, hard-to-reach, and sometimes extreme environments. They need to be monitored to ensure they aren’t at risk of failing. This requires costly, and sometimes dangerous, manual inspections. SCT investigated ways to revolutionise this process through remotely monitoring the assets with automation and industrial IoT technology.
Smart component technology would enable infrastructure operators – initially in the railway, energy and mining sectors – to identify where problems are and see how bad they are. If they're bad, they would be able to deal with them immediately, and if they’re not so bad, the operator could schedule their operations more efficiently.
A great deal of money goes into maintaining critical infrastructure. Automating the process helps reduce the manual element, whilst also enabling important insights on the issues and their severity to be gained. Ultimately, automation reduces cost and importantly exposes maintenance workers to less risk. It was a strong and compelling footing for a business that attracted research grants to carry out R&D.
Building the foundation
Although in the early stages, SCT was primarily an R&D company, it built up a multidisciplinary team that included mechanical engineering, electronics, software, and firmware departments.
The teams established valuable intellectual property and secured patents for our technologies, developing the industrial IoT smart components that we market today, Smart Washer and SWiX. They also explored other innovations likes rail temperature sensing.
At a point, it became clear that commercialising these products would need a different kind of operation, and that’s where I came in, in July 2021.
Commercial turning point
Nine months after I was brought onboard due to my commercial focus, technical background and industry connections, we achieved a critical milestone when Network Rail issued Full Product Acceptance Certification for SWiX.
We got through the process that typically takes two to three years so very quickly because we listened to what they needed, took their advice and did things in the way they wanted. This is the cornerstone of our approach with all of our customers – and it’s something they really value.
Because we listened and took up a position as if we were the customer, they helped us through the process. They could see that they weren't wasting their time with us, that we were doing everything they said in the way they asked us to do it.
Full Product Acceptance Certification represents a kind of ‘gold standard’ in the rail industry. This has helped us enter international markets where they recognise the significance of achieving Network Rail's approval.
So, we’ve evolved from the early startup phase where the products were designed and developed into what we are today, a successful scale-up enterprise.
Scaling up from R&D to commercial success
Our transformation from startup to scale-up has been remarkable. Recently, we have:
Doubled the team size
Increased revenues sixfold – and then some
Delivered strong profitability
Deployed numerous devices across rail networks at home and abroad
Expanded internationally with distributor and reseller agreements
Built a user base of many hundreds of customer staff accessing our portal.
We're definitely in the scale-up phase right now and are on the path to growth. That’s thanks to our high calibre team, the strong foundation of the products, the robust processes we have in place for development, testing and quality, and our secret weapon…
Customer-driven development
The thing that really sets SCT apart, I think, is our approach to customer relationships. We've built a market-led, customer-oriented organisation where building trust and responding to needs is absolutely at the heart of everything we do.
We chose not to enter the market with fully formed solutions that don’t necessarily match customer requirements. Instead, we adopted a more agile and collaborative approach. We came in with something that demonstrated the capabilities of our product and allowed the customer to direct where they wanted it to go. We’ve worked closely with customers – who are going to be using the products and, let’s be realistic, know more about how they go about things than us – to expand it to meet their needs and the way they work. We’ve built in so much more capability over the past couple of years, along the lines of what they asked for. We're now in a strong position because what we've developed has been in line with what the market needs.
Our focus on customers stretches across the whole of SCT. Rather than centralising customer contact through one person, we encourage team members across departments to liaise directly with customers, building trust and relationships at multiple levels.
And the evolution continues
The future for SCT is looking good. You can see our forward-thinking approach in our technical architecture. We've developed firmware and data management systems that are transferable across products, creating a common architecture that supports both current and future offerings.
The firmware piece, the embedded software that is applicable for SWiX, is equally applicable for Smart Washer and other products that we develop. The Smart Cloud that's managing the data and making it available to different user interfaces is shared across both products and will be used in other products in the pipeline. Our modular approach allows us to expand beyond our current offerings to address broader remote condition monitoring needs across critical infrastructure sectors.
Looking to the onward evolution of SCT, we’ll continue to expand our product lines and incorporate more AI and machine learning capabilities. Our foundation of customer relationships, pragmatic leadership, and scalable technology positions SCT for continued growth in the industrial IoT landscape.
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