It’s our favourite time of year again! No, not the drizzle-fest that passes for a British summer. The time when we get to meet the fantastic winners of the Digital Revolution Awards and find out how they’re making a positive impact on our world through cloud technology.
In this Meet the Winners blog, we caught up with Michael Skurla, Chief Product Officer at Radix IOT, to hear about the project that netted them the Digital Revolution Awards 2024 Global Digital Transformation of the Year prize.
When choosing contenders for the Digital Transformation of the Year award, our judges are always looking for organisations that have carried out a transformative piece of work that has made a profound impact on their own operations or those of customers.
Sometimes, these projects address a complex, business-critical need. Sometimes they help clients revolutionize their customer experiences. Sometimes they deliver a standalone application that generates incredible ROI.
Whatever the goal of the project, they always lead with digital innovation and utilise technology to make things better.
In the case of this year’s Global winners, the result was not only transformative but also life-saving.
By deploying its intuitive Mango OS software, Radix IoT empowered Silulumanzi Water Utility to overhaul its operations and deliver better services to its customers.
Using Mango, the company consolidated disparate systems, updated its legacy technology, and migrated its daily operations to the cloud for more efficient, cost-effective, and pre-emptive operations risk management.
The outcome? A daily delivery of 120 million litres of safe drinking water to the City of Mbombela’s 450,000 residents, up to 100 working hours saved every week, lower fuel costs, and less wear and tear on company vehicles—which no longer need to drive up to 80 kilometres each way to monitor multiple sites.
This project is an outstanding example of a company using technology to solve a pressing, and very human, problem. And it’s a solution that will hopefully enjoy a wider application in the battle against a country-wide challenge.
Since 2015, South Africa has experienced continuous water shortages as climate change delays rainfall and leads to falling dam water levels and droughts across the country of 60 million.
To compound the problem further, up to 30% of the country’s clean, drinkable water is lost every day to its leaking piping infrastructure.
Silulumanzi, a subsidiary of South African Water Works (SAWW), needed a data processing solution to help it overcome these issues and deliver water to the City of Mbombela’s 450,000 residents. The company opted to implement Radix IoT’s Mango, becoming the first to deploy the product in the African market.
Mango helps buildings unify disjointed systems and technology into a single, centralized database, bringing together critical information and giving users access to outcome-based analytics.
With an integrated database featuring both historical and real-time data, Silulumanzi was able to tap into actionable, up-to-date insights. This meant better oversight into their sites, infrastructure, and asset health, allowing them to significantly reduce waste and boost operational efficiency.
With Mango at its fingertips, the company achieved:
- Over 100 hours per week saved
- Reduced fuel costs and less wear-and-tear on service vehicles
- Better fault detection through preventative and predictive maintenance measures
Proactive systems monitoring - Elimination of wasteful 50-kilometer drives each way to monitor sites
- Mobile access to real-time data for field service teams, which allows them to determine if a situation needs a site inspection or can be triaged remotely
- Significantly reduced downtime
- Unprecedented real-time access to actionable analytics on sites spread across nearly 520 sq. km., data alerts of malfunctioning pumps or load reduction, and water conservancy measures
- Better monitoring of power consumption, water volumes, and major water sites
According to company executives, Mango has made a world of difference to Silulumanzi’s operational methods. The system has enabled the team’s continuous monitoring of reservoir levels via mobile phones, mobilised teams to sites needing service, and helped meet significant customer increases.
Following Mango’s success, the system was rolled out to new sites by other local city councils.
But the work didn’t stop there. To help Silulumanzi operate more sustainably, Radix IoT partnered with Vangard Projects to develop a Mango pilot energy conservancy dashboard. Through this dashboard, the team can access predictive maintenance and real-time metrics of power consumption and daily flow, helping to get leaks repaired more quickly so that water service can resume for customers.
The boost in the sustainability of its operations has heightened Silulumanzi’s reputation and helped showcase the City of Mbombela as a haven of corporate social responsibility, economic empowerment, and skilling projects designed to alleviate unemployment and enrich local economic growth.
Michael Skurla, Chief Product Officer at Radix IOT, has this to say about the company’s big win.
How do you feel about winning this year’s Digital Revolution Awards?
It’s fantastic. We’ve been involved in so many different styles of projects recently, and it was really fantastic to be honored for one of them that we finally got credit for. We find ourselves in a huge array of different markets, and it was a great honor to finally be recognized for one of the projects we were working on.
What impact will this award have on your team?
The impact is going to be pretty interesting. We have a team that’s really geographically diverse; we have someone just about everywhere in the world, or at least most continents, except for Antarctica.
So since we are a completely remote company, it is really neat to be able to say that we’ve won something together and be able to use that as a rallying point for our team to continue to grow and to continue to make innovations that are important not only to our customers, but to society at large.
What would you say to anyone considering entering the 2025 Digital Revolution Awards?
It’s worth the effort. It’s worth entering and getting involved. Awards are a great way to boost not only exposure, but also internal camaraderie. You get to say, ‘Hey, we’re going into this and we’re really trying to make a difference. And let’s show people what we really do.’
We’re not just a company that’s here to make money, but we’re here. We’re a part of something that’s trying to do something bigger than that.
