An industrial business can have 20 thousand physical assets. This includes forklifts, cranes, expensive power tools, laptops, audio visual equipment, safety equipment like fire extinguishers and defibrillators, their vehicles and the facilities where employees work. Keeping track of where this equipment is, who it is assigned to, usage, maintenance schedules, purchase information, warranty and inventory can be costly and time consuming.
There are two classes of competitive solution. One is based on special purpose hardware to collect data and traditional enterprise software to manage that data. This class has expensive barcode scanning and GPS devices attached to special purpose handheld computers. Consultants are often required to configure the enterprise software that organizes the data that these devices collect.
The second class of solution is the most common. Personnel in the field record information on clipboard pen and paper. Office personnel then enter that data into an Excel spreadsheet. Reports are manually generated and emailed out to stakeholders. The paper copies are retained for several years for their signatures when regulatory compliance is concerned (e.g. hazardous material handling and safety inspections).
The first class of solution is expensive and has a high level of complexity to deploy and support. The second class of solution is highly manual, time consuming, error prone and is difficult to extract much business intelligence from.
Intelligent Loop is developing mobile enterprise software that uses a smartphone’s capability to scan barcodes, acquire GPS coordinates, collect data and take photos to eliminate the need for costly hardware on the frontend, and cloud computing to eliminate complex server configuration and support on the backend. Using a common device that many mobile workers already have, we eliminate the ad hoc and error prone practices that so many businesses follow. Businesses save time, save money, increase productivity and reduce risk.
The founders have a demonstrated history of innovation in this area have earned multiple patents in the wireless and infrastructure operations management space.
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