Dave Oakes Shares His Thoughts On 2024 At PowTechnology
Happy New Year! As we launch into 2025, PowTechnology asked CEO, Dave Oakes, to review 2024 and to give us a peek into the future!
“2024 was a truly exciting year for PowTechnology! There were more opportunities for digitalisation than ever and following an exceptional 2023, we were perfectly placed to partner with organisations and help them meet their operational challenges!
We exhibited at, presented at and attended a broad range of industry events. Highlights for me included the inaugural Instrumentation Live, CHEMUK, Siemens Transform, Hillhead and Transform Industry’s Digital Manufacturing Summit. The annual events are scheduled again for 2025 plus a couple of new ones to be announced, as we continue to demonstrate our expertise in sectors which are new to PowTechnology.
PowTechnology have always strived to understand market trends and anticipate industry needs. These events emphasized to me how the Industry4.0 solutions we provide have never offered greater benefits. IIoT technology can be an amazing force for good, helping to create more, whilst consuming less.
Sustainability is now a central focus for most organisations. Either legislation is forcing compliance or corporate social responsibility (CSR) holds them socially accountable to themselves and their stakeholders. PowTechnology has seen a surge in opportunities and contracts relating to sustainability, such as environmental compliance, efficient use of water, fuel, resources and better waste processing.
Traditional goals when embracing industrial digital technology have generally been to improve processes with a view to cutting costs and maximising resource by automating processes, reducing energy consumption, eliminating breakdowns and reducing waste. The great thing is … SMART manufacturing technology does not cost the Earth … quite the opposite! Not only does it boost productivity, but virtually every productivity improvement has a beneficial impact on an organisation’s sustainability.
There is no doubt that digitalization drives sustainability, but PowTechnology benefits from the fact that our products and solutions are highly scalable. Our customers don’t need to start with a fully automated smart factory to see the benefits. Our perspective is: it’s better to make a start than put it off because the project seems too daunting or because the initial investment is perceived to be too high.
PowTechnology’s superpower is that we can help organisations start simply, see the benefits & then scale up. We develop products and technology that can be easily configured to suit a wide range of applications across multiple sectors, so our clients can achieve significant and tangible results with minimal investment and little engineering resource. At PowTechnology, we work with our customers to identify where IIoT kit will have the most impact on their operations.
At the 2024 Digital Manufacturing Summit, I observed a sense of frustration that the UK is less digitally-ready than similarly developed nations. There was a recurring theme that, whilst the technology largely exists to support manufacturers in reaching corporate objectives, many organisations and their people are simply not understanding the benefits or are overwhelmed by perceived barriers.
Make UK reported that 46% manufacturers cite a lack of technical skills and 41% mention integration and data challenges as reasons for resisting digital practices.
I believe that our success is rooted in the fact that we can easily overcome both of those objections. Our remote monitoring solutions are designed to be super user-friendly, pre-configured or easily set-up remotely by us, with intuitive customer interfaces on hardware and a versatile, customisable cloud.
PowTechnology have been intelligent automation specialists for over 30 years. I feel we are uniquely positioned to help customers converge the benefits of IT and OT. The results speak for themselves. I’m delighted that our customer-focused, agile approach to product development saw us close 2024 with record enquiry levels and a very healthy order book!
Another major contributor to PowTechnology’s success in 2024 has been our partnership with Siemens. PowTechnology work with the full Siemens Measurement Intelligence portfolio as a Solutions Partner, combining their kit with ours to create end-to-end, fully-integrated, ready-to-go and customer-specific digital transformation solutions.
Essentially, we do the heavy lifting, so that our customers benefit from exceptional technology, without the need for coding or programming skills, leaving them free to focus on core business.
In 2024, PowTechnology’s IIoT solutions were also selected to be showcased in Siemens Xcelerator digital transformation marketplace, a robust ecosystem of sellers and developers with integrated hardware and software. I’m extremely proud of that endorsement of our abilities to uphold the integrity of the Siemens brand.
Our work with Siemens has extended PowTechnology’s exposure in the world of smart manufacturing, bringing in new enquiries. Robust support from Siemens experts has enabled far deeper penetration into new sectors, such as food and beverage, construction, mining and steel production. I am absolutely confident that this co-operation will continue to develop, delivering huge benefits to our customers.
The PowTechnology team strengthened yet again in 2024. We’ve benefitted from key senior management appointments, internal promotions, consolidated experience within our expanded sales team and new skills gained through continual professional development, from social media expertise to project management. I am so proud of the PowTechnology people and their dedication to continuous improvement!
Product development has progressed at a healthy pace. In 2024, we launched the MetronEx for secure remote monitoring of sensors in hazardous areas. We also completed development on the Metron5, which is launching right now! Metron5 is the latest evolution of our proven, robust telemetry device, with massively increased internal processing power for more advanced applications.
Our talented tech team have also been extremely busy with custom digital transformation solutions, evolved from versatile existing hardware and software ‘building blocks’, which dramatically reduces development time and expense. These will no doubt be appearing on our extensive case study pages over 2025!
These are exciting times with plenty of reasons to launch into 2025 with our traditional energy and enthusiasm!
The success of 2024 was a real team effort. I must take this opportunity to thank the amazing PowTechnology people and also our fabulous partners and suppliers … but most of all our customers … who keep bringing us their ideas and giving us the opportunity to bring them to life!
As always, PowTechnology welcome your applications and enquiries. We will always do our very best to help!