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The Difference A Year Makes - AWT Convention and Exposition 2019
As the cool weather starts to kick in this Fall, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the past year. Our partner Walchem just attended the America Water Treaters (AWT) conference. Last year at this time, we kicked off our project together, using the AWT conference as a fact finding mission. This year Bluefin conducted training for the sales team, who then demonstrated Fluent at AWT. The combined efforts of the two groups has led to the release of a new water treatment software product, named Fluent. Walchem makes the most reliable industrial controllers on the market and has been associated with great water treatment through their controllers. They partnered with Bluefin to create Fluent, a software that would take the information generated by the controllers to the cloud in an easy to view and organized manner. The product has come full circle, last year it was only an idea, this year it being released.
Last year we had Jay and Josh attend the AWT conference as part of the discovery phase to find out what customers need. They asked the Water Treaters of the world, how can we help you? How can we make you more effective and efficient at your job? After interviewing countless Walchem customers, employees, and industry experts Bluefin had a firm understanding of what it takes to make an impact in this market. That helped us lay the foundation of the project and set our goals that would be most important and relevant to the stakeholders. After a few months of information gathering, the team designed a modern cloud infrastructure backed mobile responsive application. With Initial mocks created as reference, technical decisions on where and how the system would be built were discussed. The AWT conference (the biggest expo of its kind in the industry) being a targeted event for Walchem, we had Fluent ready for the spotlight at the 2019 AWT expo.
The AWT conference gave Fluent great exposure to prominent water treaters. The sales team showed off Fluent’s integration with Live controllers, Data Graphing and Alarm Management features - Just some of the more popular capabilities among customers who got to experience the application. As we do with all our projects, we ensure there is adequate knowledge transfer and training of our deliverables and as a result it was the Walchem sales team that demonstrated the new offering. In the case of this project, the knowledge transfer could be a formality as the Walchem team was deeply involved in throughout all phases. During development the application was demonstrated to the Walchem team bi-monthly as part of our agile process to ensure that Walchem was in step with the progress being made. This meant that when it was time to train the Walchem sales team how to use Fluent, Walchem employees were already knowledgeable and could not only demonstrate it but speak to the detailed design decisions made.
It was exciting to see the project come full circle - from a business concept to a highly functioning and integrated Industrial IoT Solution -- all in just about 12 months. The AWT conference and its reactions were a huge validation point for Fluent and its future and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Walchem to help shape the future of industrial water treatment.
Find out more about how Bluefin helps companies navigate the complexities of building today’s connected products by building IoT products and systems that intersect with the physical and digital worlds.
https://www.bluefintechnologypartners.com/connected-products