Yokogawa pursues collaboration in cold chain monitoring

Yokogawa and Finland-based Sensire have announced that they have reached an agreement for Yokogawa to take a €6 million stake in Sensire and to begin collaborating in the cold chain monitoring field. Through this initiative, both companies aim to develop and provide new services that combine Yokogawa’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architecture, subscription-based IIoT services being developed by its amnimo Inc. subsidiary, and Sensire’s cold chain temperature monitoring solutions.

Demand for solutions that facilitate the temperature-controlled transportation of perishable items from the point of origin to the point of consumption is on the rise, and this need is particularly acute with pharmaceutical and food products that require strict temperature control.

Sensire Ltd. offers a full range of specialized temperature monitoring solutions mainly for the cold chain. Sensire’s compact and power efficient temperature sensors collect and transmit temperature data to the cloud for access from PCs and mobile devices. Supporting a range of wireless communication protocols suitable for land, sea, and air transport applications, Sensire’s solutions ensure access to continuous real-time monitoring data that delivers vital quality and compliance information when and where it is needed.

Yokogawa is developing a cloud-based IIoT architecture in collaboration with Microsoft Corporation of the United States, and based on this is starting to provide solutions for the remote monitoring of physical quantities. In addition, Yokogawa’s amnimo Inc. business unit is developing IIoT services that use this architecture to provide access to data from not only manufacturing plants but also many other types of facilities and situations, with the aim of delivering subscription-based Measurement as a Service (MaaS).

Having taken a 35.2% stake in Sensire, Yokogawa is now this company’s largest shareholder. Utilizing Yokogawa’s know-how and global network, the two companies will work together to develop new temperature monitoring solutions for the cold chain and other logistics services, and expand this business.

Tsuyoshi Abe, a Yokogawa senior vice president and head of the company’s Marketing Headquarters, commented, “Under its Transformation 2020 mid-term business plan, Yokogawa is now exploring new business models such as recurring revenue while also aiming to expand its business in the pharmaceutical and food fields. I am convinced that Sensire’s solutions will accelerate these efforts, and I trust that we will be able to deliver new value to applications where precise temperature control is critical by combining the technologies of both companies.”

JP Asikainen, founder and CEO of Sensire, added, “I believe that this collaboration with Yokogawa will provide us an opportunity to expand the business globally and ensure the transition to the next-generation of cloud architecture. We look forward to making the latest and best cold chain solutions available to customers in a broader range of industries and applications.”