Henkel wins BEMAS Digital Innovation Award 2023

Several companies with a stand at easyFairs MAINTENANCE 2023 submitted a dossier to compete for the BEMAS Digital Innovation Award. These candidates were judged by an expert jury on innovation content and concrete applicability, among other things. This resulted in 3 finalists: I-care Group, SOA People and Henkel.

During the fair, the members of the professional jury visited the stands of the finalists to make the final assessment. The chairman of the jury, Jos Vankevelaer, retired vice-president of BASF, announced the winners: "All jury members agreed on the high level of the finalists. Nevertheless, the choice was almost unanimous, as we were particularly impressed by the easy deployability of their innovation." 

Henkel wins BEMAS Digital Innovation Award

So Henkel gets to take home the Digital Innovation Award. Their LOCTITE Pulse is an IIoT solution designed to contribute to a site's reliability. Once installed on critical facilities, LOCTITE Pulse's sensors continuously record data on their condition. According to the jury, Henkel's entry is a very relevant innovation that is also strongly digital. Moreover, LOCTITE Pulse is a recent solution that can also be further developed in the future.

"What particularly convinced us was its particularly wide applicability," jury chairman Jos Vankevelaer tells us. Whereas other applications focus mainly on rotating equipment, LOCTITE Pulse focuses mainly on static equipment."  Moreover, it is a good example of an Industry 5.0 application, as the solution also does its bit in terms of safety, health, environment and sustainability as a whole. A concrete example of this are LOCTITE Pulse's very first programmes: smart flanges and smart steam trap programme. Monitoring the tightness of flanges is a great support for controlling fugitive emissions."

I-care Group and SOA People deserving finalists

I-care's entry bears the name "WaaS", or WiCare as a service. This innovation won the audience award. Both hardware and services are offered in a subscription model. Those Cloud monitoring tools are an additional monitoring layer that offers the customer a total solution. "The jury was impressed by the rapid developments that I-care Group shows with this," the jury chairman says. "The augmented intelligence, the operation of WaaS in various modules and algorithms, and the use of ChatGPT as a reporting tool, certainly appeal." 

SOA People participated with its enterprise asset maintenance management platform, Ready4 Asset Management. This allows the flow of maintenance activities to be simplified and digitised. "The jury was particularly impressed by the user-friendliness of work permits, check lists and the maintained interface with SAP. 

Jury chairman Jos Vankevelaer concludes: "The three finalists showed great innovativeness. Because Henkel's innovation has a broad scope and is the most innovative, we can conclude that they are this year's deserved winner of the BEMAS Digital Innovation Award."