COVER STORY
INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS SMART INTERCONNECTIVITY Sustainable growth hinges on the ability to optimise resources and the infrastructure backbone that ser ves communities and economies. Sean Bennett, Group Executive at NEXTEC (a proudly EOH company), expands on the Group’s smar t technologies and engineering solutions.
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ne of most significant milestones in modern history was the unveiling of the world’s first programmable digital computer in 1945, coined ENIAC. Although basic in today’s terms, it represented a major leap forward for digitalisation and the power of interconnectivity via the internet of things (IoT). “The path of change is now constant, so staying ahead of the IoT curve is essential to remain competitive and relevant as smart technologies continue to positively transform society,” Bennett explains. Within South Africa, NEXTEC’s digital transformation thrust is spearheaded by its Infrastructure Solutions and People Solutions platforms. The Infrastructure Solutions business line comprises two key service clusters, namely Digital Infrastructure and Infrastructure Consulting. The latter has two main offerings, which include environmental, sustainability and social-impact consulting solutions and multidisciplinary engineering consulting solutions. NEXTEC’s Digital Infrastructure services are designed to seamlessly integrate physical systems with digital technologies to create intelligent, resilient and high-performance systems. Areas that they specialise in include water, power, connectivity, as well as building technology, logistics and asset management. Bennett believes People Solutions, combined with the technology offering, creates a unique proposition allowing clients to move forward into a more technologically enabled age – for
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example, having the ability within the business to provide solutions that use technology to lower accident rates. In parallel, People Solutions helps clients to respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by digital transformation in terms of recruitment, learnerships, training, and functional client outsourcing of non-core processes.
NEXTOPIA “We refer to our holistic services as NEXTOPIA – the connected and increasingly digitalised world we imagine for our clients and their customers,” Bennett explains. “Technology and IoT provide amazing opportunities to raise socio-economic standards through improved service delivery, smart infrastructure and intelligent business processes, which for any country is essential to remain globally competitive,” Bennett continues. Every nation is at a different stage in the digitalisation journey. Cities like Dubai and Singapore are at the cutting-edge of the so-called smart city evolution, spurred on by robust GDP growth, IoT investment and adoption, and a highly advanced education system. South Africa still has some way to go to match this, but it’s a work in progress. The smart city concept enables the capturing of big data to analyse, interpret, predict, manage and model every conceivable process via digital twinning – a virtual rendition of the real world. Within the public sector arena, there are farreaching benefits for the management and refinement of all social infrastructure and related activities like education and healthcare.
“Our business model focuses on providing practical solutions that are scalable, improve operational efficiencies, lower costs and boost profitability, and includes close working relationships with our OEM technology partners. For public sector clients, key deliverables include improved asset utilisation, enhanced asset security and better service delivery,” Bennett expands. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the large volumes of data captured via 5G devices can be processed with a high degree of speed and accuracy, translating this information into meaningful reports and tasks.
Smart non-revenue water management An example of a NEXTEC intervention is the use of smart systems to combat non-revenue water losses. Currently, some 40% of South Africa’s potable water is unaccounted for due to one or a combination of factors, namely leaks, apparent losses (such as illegal connections and faulty meters), uncollected billing (including nonpayment), and inaccurate billing.
Sean Bennett, Group Executive, NEXTEC
