1) How did you come up with your idea? How did you start-up your business? Is it a partnership?
It is all about time and quality, especially for manufacturers to survive in the highly competitive market. As a team of engineers with various backgrounds, we thought it would be a great idea to integrate the web technology with hardware and software solutions so that manufacturers in N.A. can save time and money and thus will have an edge in the market. With our solution, it is possible to measure, monitor, control and manage various equipment (e.g. in a product manufacturing line) over internet at home virtually anywhere any time.
2) How did you get involved with the EPICentre?
We started by brainstorming the technical aspect of our idea. Once we made sure we could figure it out and make it happen, we needed to advance to the business level. Business world is quite different than engineering, with challenges we had never face before. Tackling those challenges, we realized that EPICentre is one of the best facilities in Windsor and offers great help to entrepreneurs.
3) What stage is your business currently at?
Currently we are at prototype-validation stage. We are looking for interested customers to let us know their challenges at their workplace, whether in manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, power and water utilities, or energy management. We would challenge their problems with our innovative solutions and run our platform for them for free. It will be a win-win game, I encourage all interested parties to challenge us and let us bring innovative solutions to them.
4) What sets your company apart from other companies providing a similar service?
We offer our solution as SaaS “software as a service”, with low upfront cost and a monthly subscription fee. Our solution is fully customized for each customer, so that implementation and training time is minimized. All these aspects allow companies to lower their risks with a smooth transition to new technology. We are also developing a mobile app for our solution so that supervisors and managers can understand the overall condition of their facility at a glance, while at the same time engineers can dig up the details to understand their system behaviour and root cause problems and improve their process.
5) What advice would you like to share with local tech entrepreneurs?
Develop a vision, step up, try hard and make a difference. It is not going to be easy, but it’s worth the try, and there are people and programs to help you along the “entrepreneurship journey”. Windsor has been a manufacturing hub for decades. Now it is different. The future of Windsor area, and in a broader sense Ontario, is not traditional manufacturing and industries, I believe it is “innovation”.