Client Stories

Tribosonics

Making manual data validation digital

Tribology – the science of wear, friction and lubrication – plays a huge role in global energy (over!) consumption. Automation and enterprising tech could be the key to managing this.

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The Company

Tribosonics uses unique sensing technologies to drive transformation at a large scale. A staggering 23% of the world‘s energy consumption originates from tribological contact, tribology being the science of wear, friction, and lubrication (Holmberg & Erdemir). Their technology tackles this head on.

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The Challenge

Tribosonics develops and manufactures novel ultrasonic sensing systems that  monitor the status and wear of machinery and components over time, as well as monitoring process parameters and product quality. Their unique software then collates the data from these sensors to ensure machinery and processes are running with optimal energy efficiency and minimal product waste.

The sensors, many of which go into extreme environments, must be validated through the design, development, production and certification phases to ensure performance to specification before installation at their customers’ premises. This entailed a labour intensive process for Tribosonics’ team of expert Engineers and Data Scientists who were doing this manually via signal generators and oscilloscopes – and that was the challenge!

Thousands of readings = thousands of expert-led validations, done manually.

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The Solution

Automation! We were tasked with developing an automated validation tool to ensure all data was read quickly and accurately. 

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The Process

We kicked off with a Tech sprint. With tight budget restraints, we applied the Lean principles: “creating needed value with fewer resources and less waste”.  

Over several workshops with the Tribosonics team, we mapped out and defined their minimum viable product (MVP) – improving the speed and efficiency of their validation workflow.

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The Result

With Tribosonics’ wish list of features in hand, we developed as many as possible. We ensured critical features like drivers and functions were close to production ready, whereas ‘nice to have’ features such as a scheduler, were delivered in an MVP state.

Having proven the value of automation in speeding up their processes, we are now assessing the requirements of the project’s next phase to deliver even greater returns. A job well done!

Tribosonics’ fantastically enterprising MVP was born from a highly ambitious and trusted partnership – proving that collaboration is the foundation of impactful, game-changing tech.

Glenn Fletcher

Glenn Fletcher

CEO at Tribosonics

This collaboration between Razor and Tribosonics is inspiring on a number of levels. Two awesome Sheffield tech businesses working together on a solution that will have a global impact. A combination of hardtech+software+science being used to powerful and game-changing effect. Looking forward to the next phases of this project and seeing these two Tech Titan businesses shooting for the stars.