By providing machine monitoring solution to every industrial machine, Wimera Systems serves to industries of any size with every level of digitization. The company based out of Bengaluru can develop Industrial IoT solutions on-premise, Cloud or Hybrid, based on the customer requirement. Building expertise in Machine Data Acquisition and later using the data with deep analytical technologies for AI based predictive maintenance, quality improvement and predictive productivity indices. Being the CTO of Wimera, Sridhar Krishnan gives a thorough narrative on how the company helps organizations in its digital transformation.

In conversation with Sridhar Krishnan, CTO, Wimera Systems

The constant growth and development of IoT and Industrial Automation are bringing more attraction towards the customers. Being an organization started in the year 2015, what made Wimera Systems to begin its services placed on digital transformation domain?
Wimera’s leadership team comes with rich industry experience and expertise in building industrial IoT products in hardware, software and sensors. India being quicker in technology adoption, Industries started seeing the benefit of Industrial IoT/ Industry 4.0 thereby initiated digital transformation with PoC and Pilot projects. Wimera realized the potential and built the expertise on machine data acquisition and AI based analytics and generate insights which gives a quick ROI. We have our I-IoT applications for discrete manufacturing using Machine Tools and CNC machines, Plastic Injection Moulding Machines for various industries. Customers can monitor machines real-time and get alerts on their mobile phones as part of the shop floor digitization. After successful pilots with various enterprise customers and MSMEs, we are scaling up our solutions for large installations. We collect machine data for Production monitoring, Machine Condition Monitoring and Energy Monitoring. Our

USP is we can connect any type of machine, any make and any model and get the machine data.

Since it is likely to have more number of participants in the same domain, it demands to stay competitive with the offers. What kind of services do Wimera Systems provide in the field of digital transformation and IoT?
Rather than just providing a service, we partner with each customer to understand their existing system. Each service, a product or a solution is tailor made to fit the customer requirements. We have a SaaS product for MSMEs that can be used for production and condition monitoring, alerts and reports. We have also built hardware devices to acquire data from the machines if the standard interface is not available. Data logger, Edge Gateway and Smart vibration sensors are few of our flagship hardware products.

With our expertise on hardware design, we have developed a low energy Bluetooth communication board WiMonitor. The device, having size less than 4x3cm, can widely be used for different applications of data monitoring and data capturing depending on customer requirement. Our major USP is our hardware and sensor expertise, which not many competitors offer. With this expertise we commit to connect any machine any make and any type. This keeps us one level up from our competition.

And on AI and ML, we work on the real-life machine data to build models and algorithms compared to our competition using the simulated data.

The idea of having an expert team in IoT and Industrial Automation is common in every digital transformation domain. Tell us about your proficient team that helps the organization climb heights of success?
Wimera has separate teams focused in building data logger hardware, software application and on-premise and cloud solutions, along with the dedicated senior architects. Each developer is given opportunity to work with customers directly and exposed to real-time customer issues. Having built domain expertise, the team is delivering high quality and world-class products. The modular architecture and innovative IPs help the team build efficient products. We have witnessed a fivefold increase in customer acquisition as compared to the last quarter.

We use Agile methodology for development process and involve customers in the early stages of our development from pilot stage deployment.

On account of the five years of experience in digital transformation and industrial automation domain, share a success story which has made Wimera Systems to be celebrated across industries.
An automotive manufacturer, headquartered in Europe and having multiple plants in India has implemented our solution successfully. The solution involved data acquisition from various types of industrial machines, tools management, shop-floor paperless management, preventive maintenance, and integration with existing ERP application. By adding features incrementally, we customized solutions as per the requirements, validated data, and helped operators and others to adapt with the new system by conducting training sessions. They started witnessing the benefits of the application by achieving improvements in production, quality of the products, equipment and operator efficiency, reduction in breakdowns and maintenance cost.