By CASEY NEILL
A BERWICK small business is being nationally recognised for its ability to innovate.
Successful Endeavours was a finalist at Manufacturing Monthly magazine’s Endeavour Awards on 28 May during National Manufacturing Week.
Managing director Ray Keefe didn’t walk away with an award but will have another chance at the PACE Zenith awards in Sydney on 11 June.
Three Successful Endeavours projects will vie for four categories at the process control and automation industry awards for Australia – Waste and Wastewater, Best Fieldbus Implementation, Power and Energy Management, and Transport Power and Infrastructure.
“I didn’t even apply for these,” Mr Keefe said.
“PACE saw the entries we put into the Endeavour Awards and decided they would also be good candidates for the PACE Zenith awards and asked me if it would be OK if they entered them for us.”
Successful Endeavours was a Technology Application of the Year finalist in last year’s Endeavour Awards for a system to test electronics.
This year its ABB CQ930 three-phase power factor correction controller and Internet of Things (IoT) Monitoring Platform were up for the Australian Industrial Product of the Year.
Successful Endeavours made the controller for ABB High Voltage Division in Lilydale.
“It’s a fancy word for something that cleans up the power as it’s being distributed through the network so that you actually burn less gas or burn less coal or whatever it is you’re generating power from, to get the same amount of power,” Mr Keefe said.
“It’s an old idea but this is a really new, smart control for it.
“They’re selling them like hotcakes at the moment, mostly to the UK and the US.”
His seven-person team developed the controller over six months.
A Belgium team spent 20 million Euros in five years on a different version of the same product.
“We, basically, do it smarter,” he said.
Uses for the IoT Monitoring Platform include remote and apartment water metering.
“It talks to a cloud or a web service so you can get your data from wherever it is in the world back to somewhere central and then do something with it,” Mr Keefe said.
“These are now scattered around Victoria and New South Wales.”
Successful Endeavours’ Telemetry Host IoT web platform vied for the IT Application of the Year.
“This allows us to collect reading, send device updates and change the operating configuration of remotely deployed devices from our office in Berwick,” Mr Keefe said.
“I was really stoked. So much in manufacturing in Australia we’re just focusing on big things.
“To have small appliances like this actually get recognised is really good.”
He started Successful Endeavours as a home office business in 1997.
“By 2005 I realised I didn’t know how to make this thing grow,” he said.
Mr Keefe went looking for a business mentor and tracked down the right one in 2008. He rebranded the business, repositioned it in the market and moved out of home into commercial premises.
“Four months after that we won Casey Business of the Year,” he said.
