Andy Hill is an ardent thinker who began his entrepreneurial journey in the early 90’s, when he helped establish a consulting business that specialized in the optimization of maintenance spares inventory. Identifying the need for an inventory management decision- support tool, Hill focused on inventories held by asset-intensive companies and conducted extensive research on statistical profiles. This led to him co-found Oniqua Intelligent MRO, a firm whose analytics help to reduce operational costs and eradicate waste. Oniqua’s cloud-based technology platform, combined with expert consultation, makes advanced analytics simple and easily accessible. The company helps customers rapidly reduce costs and risks while achieving higher service levels through increased efficiency.

“In dynamic, asset-intensive MRO environments, materials managers squeeze in time to review tens or hundreds of thousands of items in their inventory. The sheer volume and diversity of MRO inventory, the constant change, and the time constraints make it extremely difficult to get the right materials to the right people, at the right time and at the right cost - all on a continual basis,” explains Hill.

The Meandering Journey

Over the years, Hill consulted dozens of organizations and observed that his global customers wanted to roll-out Oniqua’s solutions across their sites, giving this inquisitive entrepreneur a boost to build his company’s presence across North America, South America and South Africa, and more recently into Europe. “Developing each of these regional businesses was like launching another start-up, and it took time to understand the market dynamics and build awareness,” adds Hill. Since then, Oniqua has been working as a single global team leveraging talent effectively and efficiently.

Compelling Value Propositions

Focused on enhancing operational performance, Hill elucidates that each generation of Oniqua’s products have been created to address specific business concerns and increase market adoption. In essence, this process has revolved around making advanced MRO analytics simple and accessible to all Utilities and asset- intensive organizations by removing the barriers associated with on premise implementations, hiring in-house analysts and dealing with dirty data. The

Oniqua team works closely with end-customers to provide extremely compelling value propositions to Utilities. These include minimizing production risks and stock outs, increasing reliability and safety, reducing inventory value, spent on managing spares inventories. In addition, Hill also ensures that his team works on consolidating purchases across service territories and optimizing use of vendor-held stock and consignment arrangements to quickly identify problems and opportunities. Oniqua also improves supplier performance, procurement efficiencies and maintenance effectiveness.

Optimized Asset Performance

Oniqua's flagship offering is Oniqua Analytics Solution (OAS), which provides the unique capability to perform end to end analysis across MRO materials management and operations and maintenance. OAS uses sophisticated statistical analyses, prescriptive analytics and optimization algorithms specifically designed for asset-intensive industries. These algorithms and analytics capabilities help companies intelligently balance costs and risks across MRO supply chain and maintenance operations. They simulate different ways in which assets are managed, and prescribe adjustments that lower risk and cost. Leveraging the results, OAS also provides interactive visualization and actionable insights. “Visualization and ‘what if’ scenarios make complex data patterns, trends and opportunities easy for users to identify and comprehend, enabling them to take better decisions and effective action,” asserts Hill.

Enabling accessible and convenient cloud deployment facility, OAS allows users to get all the powerful optimization capabilities of OAS without the costs of managing software, infrastructure and resources.