The Future Is Now

Hello and welcome back to Connected Concrete, where I like to pass on what I've learned about business, operations and technology. Today I will be focusing on technology for manufacturing plants.

As many of you know, we at Idencia are committed to helping the AEC industry fullfill its productivity potential by offering software as a tool for that purpose. Our history and current focus is the precast concrete manufacturing industry.

We started by offering a tool for capturing quality control records digitally. Our founder came out of precast and saw an opportunity for serializing products with RFID tags and recording QC inspections to provide better record-keeping precision. He designed and patented a tag, then started building the software to make it all work.

Though we didn't see at the time, by starting this way we were at the forefront (very early, in fact) of a fundamental evolution in computing technology.

Do tell.

As the computer hardware industry has progressed by adding more computing power in smaller devices, the volume and value of data collected has increased. By originally focusing on product data, we started in a place where "the puck is going to be" (just about 16 years too early!).

Keep going.

When computers were first introduced commercially in the 1950s, they were large mainframes that were only affordable to large companies. Consequently, they were designed to serve the data needs of companies.

In the early 1980s. PCs were a major innovation that made computing affordable for use by business professionals, so productivity offerings like Excel and Word were introduced.

In the mid- 2000s Apple introduced the iPhone, so consumers could walk around... as it was famously said... with more computing power in their pocket than was used to fly a man to the moon.

As these hardware advances took hold, software development shifted accordingly. More data could be collected with greater precision from a greater number of users.

The value of this technology shift is reflected in the market capitalizations that investors ascribe to the companies that led this progression:

As of this date, the value of the least valuable company targeting individual users, Meta (Facebook), is almost 4x greater than Oracle, the highest valued software firm targeting the corporate market!

Okay, but how does this relate to your puck?

In the same manner that data collection and dissemination has been progressing to the individual level, this is now happening at the product level in companies.

In precast concrete, for instance, there have been software solutions offered for years. The longest standing solutions are ERP offerings, providing great breadth but little depth. More recently, there have been some offerings targeted to the plant, which provides better precision for users requiring more insight than an ERP solution will offer.

Idencia started at the product level and we are now taking full advantage of this good fortune.

What does that mean for your customers?

As I like to say, a precise picture of each product is like a pixel in the bigger picture of what is happening in your plant. If you can capture data easily at the product level, you get the greatest insight to how your plant is performing.

We're very excited to be completing a major overhaul of our software that will position Idencia to capitalize further on the tech industry's progression to product-level data tracking.

When we release we will be providing state of the art web- and mobile-software that will:

• Enable much faster data exchange;
• Provide a modern foundation for integration with best-of-breed communication software, engineering software, plant software, batch mix software and ERP systems; enabling customers a seamless experience of world class offerings down to the product level.
• Enable automated product data exchange with fixed RFID readers, sensors and even digital twins.

In short, it will provide us with the back-end foundation for leading in data collection at the product level.

Stay tuned for our press release in late May announcing more details and the re-branding of our flagship software!

If you are looking for something to keep you occupied while you wait, check out the most recent edition of our Pardon the Dust podcast.

In this episode, Caitlyn Knezevic and Jillian Guthrie Powell interview Nick Rhoad , president and CEO of the National Precast Concrete Association !

Next up, what I promised last week.

In wrapping up last week's post, Don't Be the Boiling Frog, I said I would next write about the "new Idencia". However, it occurred to me that it might be more effective to first provide a description of the industry landscape driving our thinking (as I did here today). So, next time, the new Idencia!

(This time I really mean it.)

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend everyone!

Jeff