IoT, the next big thing: Motwane

We have recently developed an IoT based smart street lighting solution that enables monitoring of street lightings through mobile, tablet or the central monitoring system.
Jitendra Agrawal, Managing Director, The Motwane Manufacturing Company

Over the years, Motwane has emerged as a key player in the field of T&M. What makes you different from others?
Motwane is a more than 50 years old company and having the domain expertise where we understand energy, its behaviour much better than others. Today we are a leading designer and manufacturer of high performance, high precision electronic test and measurement equipment in India.

Also, we are the first Indian company that started developing its own products through intensive efforts on design and development. Today, we have around 40 R&D engineers along with us and all our products are indigenously designed, developed and now being sold. Probably we are the first company who have full-fledged R&D centre for our products in India and we are competing with leading global players from the Western World. Because of our expertise along with the skills sets through R&D,we could provide the product which are sustainable in the harsh environment. So far, we have proven our expertise across setting up of 765 kV substations and 400 kV substations that require extraordinary induction and research. That’s why we can say that we are competing with all others and we are different from all others.

More importantly,I would say that we understand Indian power infrastructure very well because we have been an Indian company, we have been closely working with our customers, we have been understanding their pain areas, we have been always trying to resolve their problems. We are a kind of complete T&M solution provider for our customers.

Could you update us on the latest developments at Motwane?
In the last one and a half year, we have expanded our footprints beyond India in more than 30 countries. We have created a distribution network for overseas markets and today we are able to compete with the global players in other markets too.

We have also given a thrust on R&D in the last three years and have developed more than 100 innovative products which are end-to-end developed and designed in India only. We have set up a state-of-the-art facility in Nasik where we have world-class facilities for type testing of our products in compliance in international standards like IP rating and CE certification for safety and manufacturing as suggested by ISE and CIGRE. Our strategy is to develop the products which can be catered to the global markets. This makes us different from our competitors.

As lots of digitalisation is coming in the process, how are you preparing yourself?
The electric industry particularly has been very unchanged or constant for many years. Cables, transformers, motors, generators and few other equipment have not undergone much technological changes although there were improvements, upgradations. Now the time has come where the connected world is emerging out and there would be a huge disruption in the field of transmission and distribution segment due to digitisation.

At Motwane, we see this as a challenge and we need to transform ourselves to remain relevant in the industry. In this sense we have already developed testing software wherein one can do the testing of equipment and can enter the result of testing using mobile phones as a lot of equipment are deployed in the field. This enables avoiding of recording the testing data and entering the same with ERP systems for big equipment like transformers, generators and motors deployed at the field. We are developing a testing software wherein any one can enter testing data through mobile and as a domain expert we have included many features into that where they can easily frame a template of testing parameter they required. We have already in-built the limits of minimum and maximum level. If that crosses, then automatic alerts notification can be generated to any nominated e-mails or SMS can be generated and a person can know the things immediately.

We have also done some normalisation for units. If there are some different measurement units, we can do the normalisation. The software enables lots of inputs in terms of different parameters, asset health, their behaviour, performance analysis, and condition monitoring.

In addition, at Motwane, we consider Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing. We have recently developed an IoT based smart street lighting solution that enables monitoring of street lightings through mobile, tablet or the central monitoring system. It gives complete health monitoring analytics of the lighting infrastructure on the screen that enables pin pointing the exact issues which can be attended efficiently. It should be noted that, by doing this, up to 75 per cent of energy saving can be achieved.

Do you have any success story to share with us?
Yes, very recently, we have received order for India’s largest deployment of smart streetlights for Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Co. Ltd. (JUSCO) in partnership with Tata Communications. The new streetlights are underpinned by Tata Communications’s public IoT network based on our LoRaWAN technology. With 300 lights, JUSCO’s project in Jamshedpur is the biggest smart street lighting deployment of its kind in India. It will pave the way for a total of 15,000 lights to be installed in the city in the next 5 years.