Tego CEO Tim Butler speaks about the company’s focus on the ‘T’ in IoT (Internet of Things) in order to make mobile assets smart, enabling embedded intelligence at source, ready to analyse and transform any manufacturing organisation’s value chain.
Tego’s Founder and CEO Tim Butler describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur”, inspired to set up Tego (his third company) following three decades in the world of tech. Butler witnessed the transition from mainframe computers to green screens and distributed computing, with systems across the globe changing the way the world was working.
“We saw a similar transition beginning to happen with ‘things’ in the same way it happened for people and processes,” says Butler. “One of the big challenges in that process was the ability to have information distributed, whether that’s on your phone, tablet or PC, wherever you may be. Today, that change for things is embodied by the Internet of Things (IoT). Our view was that for things to do that, it’s not enough to have a dumb green screen or a sensor throwing more information back at a cloud; you need to actually have smart assets so things have real data and information which people and systems can interact with, both at the edge and in the cloud, to make better decisions and be more efficient.”
Tego designed and built the first fully passive UHF RFID – a tagging device that can hold thousands-times more information and, asserts Butler, really enable an asset to be truly smart while continuing to grow information as people and systems read information from it and write information to it throughout its life. “We’ve started the revolution to enable the asset to tell its story,” he explains. “Some assets travel across the world every day, some stay in one place and have people come by on a regular basis. What we’re capturing is that information about the people, systems and environment that a traditional sensor or other operational data doesn’t.”
Tego’s biggest breakthrough was overcoming what many perceived as being a physics problem: How can you read, write and manage large amounts of data on a very small computer chip with extremely small amounts of power? “The analogy I use is that we’re putting together the PC for the thing versus the people,” answers Butler. “We’re enabling that distributed information to be securely shared and used for a range of applications and use cases particularly in the manufacturing sector.”
Tego began offering its solutions in the aviation industry to address major issues around maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) while managing the life cycle history of assets travelling around the world with different entities in different organisations. “These were virtually impossible tasks to have some back-end system to be able to monitor and manage,” Butler recalls. “However, if the asset can become a tool and synced with each of those organisations quickly with the model we have adopted and built out with our solution, which includes both the basic hardware of the chip and the OS with its basic application, it now enables you to use iOS or any android device to start to connect and read/write information on virtually any asset as it travels.”
Butler highlights the benefits to the aerospace industry of greatly reduced time and cost for being able to identify and manage the paperwork (which has been reduced by 30 times) around MRO. “This is significant because the actual maintenance work is 15-20% while the other 80-85% is paperwork – looking things up and tracking information – because you’re often dealing with assets that are several years old. By digitising we become more efficient and deliver information in minutes.”
Tego’s Asset Intelligence Platform (AIP) can transform value chains as it’s the first platform to allow the asset to become a repository for information, not just an endpoint.
