AoFrio has nearly 40 years' experience as a company designing, manufacturing, and supplying electrical components globally, with a special focus on commercial refrigeration and OEM customers.
AoFrio has nearly 40 years' experience as a company designing, manufacturing, and supplying electrical components globally, with a special focus on commercial refrigeration and OEM customers. Established as Wellington Drive Technologies in 1986, it was only last year that the company rebranded as AoFrio to recognise its move from solely manufacturing hardware such as its Wellington ECR motors and fans to a business that also sets up customers with IoT ecosystems and insights platforms.
IoT has been around for a while. In the commercial refrigeration space, it delivers many efficiencies for businesses, especially in servicing and maintenance planning, and a more holistic view of asset performance. This includes always-on monitoring, real-time alerts, customised parameters, and GPS location for asset recovery and optimised positioning. It also makes adjusting cooler settings according to the products being stored or displayed much easier which in turn reduces food and energy waste.
The transformation that AoFrio is undertaking has many impacts internally for the company but in this article, we look at how this transformation can benefit customers.
The first change is a broader approach to fleet management. Now when working with customers – AoFrio’s sales personnel help them identify where they can best use the combined potential of data gathering technologies such as our SCS Controller, Monitor and Network Pro to connect the dots and achieve more detailed results. This can be small wins for individual coolers or a more widespread achievement for fleet management and includes saving time, cutting costs, reducing waste, locating, retrofitting, and optimising assets. It really is an end-to-end solution that helps businesses set goals and measure results.
Another significant change is investing in a connected IoT platform rather than buying products by SKU or individually as needs arise, asset owners can upgrade their older technology through connection to the Cloud and better parameter control. If they are a smaller company, SAAS enables access to large amounts of data without having to buy the infrastructure to store and process it securely. They can ‘right size’ the appropriate level of data they need through subscription based on their usage. If they are a large organisation and have fleets of coolers, freezers or other assets they can separate out their sales and maintenance needs and make decisions and changes remotely from the back office while delegating other duties to their field teams.
The move to include SAAS in their offering means AoFrio is using its established base of understanding and technical expertise from the last 35+ years to launch new ways for customers to make more informed decisions about their fleet.
AoFrio’s VP of Engineering & IT, Rami Elbeltagi comments: “While there are many operational changes within our business that people outside won’t see, two elements I like to highlight for our customers are our growing ability to respond more quickly to change, and the feedback loop that is now enabled.”
“Hardware tends to develop in a linear way with a regular cycle of product launches and technology jumps moving ever onward. ”
“By introducing software and IoT connectivity into the mix, we have an ‘operating services’ model and can respond more dynamically to changing demands. For example, this might mean providing custom workarounds using existing hardware to meet requests or introducing firmware updates to expand the applications already permitted, or mining the data gathered through the ecosystem uncovering additional insights.”
“The feedback loop that this creates also means that our customer success and product design teams can receive requests for new features and updates from customers and then work more iteratively with our engineering teams to create new solutions. Customers will see improvements more quickly.”