Aptean has announced the acquisition of Frontix BV, a Dutch-based cloud-based Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and energy management solutions vendor to process manufacturers. The acquisition strengthens Aptean’s presence in Europe and extends its OEE platform. Frontix has more than 200 customers in more than 12 countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK. It also claims customers in Russia, according to its website.
Frontix brings energy efficiency to Aptean at the right time
Founded in Sassenheim in 1999, it has customers across industries such as the plastics processing, metal and food industries. When linked to production machines, it monitors the progress and performance of the production process and captures the machine’s energy usage.
Energy management is a critical concern for manufacturers today with rising energy costs. In response, governments offer handouts to domestic users and lowered tax rates. For example, in the Netherlands, the government reduced VAT on energy from 21% to 9% until the end of the year. The solution collates data from sensors and delivers real-time insights to process manufacturers through dashboards. They can then take action to improve performance.
The solution is complementary to the Aptean solutions used by organisations across Europe. The inference is that Aptean will help to scale the cloud-based solution and make it available in other regions where the company has a presence. Initially, this is likely to be the Benelux region where Frontix has the greatest presence. In time Aptean will extend the integration points and leverage its global scale, resources and technological expertise to bring the benefits of Frontix’s OEE monitoring to additional markets.
Duane George, General Manager of Aptean, EMEA and APAC, commented: “We are pleased to add Frontix’s OEE solutions to our cloud capabilities for process manufacturers in the Benelux region. This acquisition builds on Aptean’s investments in the region and will deepen our partnership with many Aptean Food & Beverage ERP customers who also rely on Frontix’s OEE monitoring to improve efficiency in their manufacturing facilities.
“By extending the range of purpose-built solutions Aptean delivers to our customers, we increase their opportunity to achieve meaningful business results.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
For Frontix, this provides a huge boost, enabling it to improve its technology platform using the horizontal tools that Aptean has built, such as analytics. It can also offer access to a much larger customer base to expand into, especially in the food industry. Aptean has three offices in the Netherlands, three in Belgium and eleven in Germany. Most of these are from other acquisitions, and the leadership at Frontix will be able to leverage their relationships and extend their footprint quickly.
Jaap de Wildt, Managing Director of Frontix, founder of Patch Industrial Automation, which merged with Frontix earlier this century, commented, “Like Aptean, Frontix has always focused on delivering cloud-based, industry-specific software solutions that are easy to implement and easy to maintain and scale. As part of Aptean, we will have the resources to grow, and our customers will have access to a greater range of solutions tailored to meet their unique needs”.
This is a smart acquisition by Aptean. It extends its platform and opens up further possibilities. George says they already have many joint customers, which infers the integration is already in place and can only improve. However, the press release gave little indication of any changes to the roadmap in the near future.
