Bredenoord is a mobile energy rental company and owns a large fleet of assets such as generators, batteries, mobile solar plants, fuel tanks, distribution boxes and more. As a rental company, there is a big operational and logistic component to the business. And with assets out on remote locations, it’s hard to keep track of the actual state of the assets. Thats why Bredenoord has been experimenting with connected services for a long time and in 2017, a project to develop custom hardware to equip the industrial assets was started.
Now, a few years later, the hardware development has finished and is being rolled out over the fleet. Time to focus on the cloud side of things and implement an IoT platform to manage the devices, process the data and make it available for the business to optimise the operational processes.
The challenge
Design and implement the Bredenoord IoT platform.
The solution
We provided interim services to design the solution architecture and then implement the solution. The solution consists of 3 components – a device management platform, data visualisation and processing platform, and long-term data storage platform.
For device management, we chose to set up a device gateway in Microsoft Azure. The device gateway keeps a register of all the IoT devices and is the linking pin between the devices and the cloud services. Devices are onboarded and configured here, and the devices talk to the device gateway which in turn relays the data to the upstream services.
For data visualisation and processing component we went with the www.blockbax.com SaaS IoT platform. The physical assets are registered in this platform and the IoT devices as the device gateway knows them are linked to an asset here. The platform has a rule engine to evaluate incoming data, can throw alarms and notifications, and users have the ability to create dashboards with the information that is important for them. The platform serves as a low-level data analysis tool to really do a deep-dive into an asset.
The long-term data storage component is a combination of Microsoft Azure components that processes incoming data from the SaaS IoT platform and stores the data for analysis and reporting. This data platform is also the connecting point for enterprise systems such as ERP and CRM, and in the future a customer portal.
With this modular setup, Bredenoord has a strong foundation for current use-cases and more importantly, for future expansions.
Are you interested in learning more about IoT solutions for your business? Contact us!