Founded in 2013, Effective Solutions is an award-winning Sri Lankan company that offers innovative solutions. With several years of experience, Effective Solutions is growing rapidly and working towards enabling the industries to reap the benefits of the 4th Industrial Revolution. In doing so, turning Sri Lanka into an advanced technological hub by 2025 with innovative Biomedical, IoT and Cutting Edge Software Solutions and Services. As the company works to realize this mission, it has built a range of innovative products. One of them is ANANKE, which is a modular platform to build IoT solutions. Today, ANANKE IoT Services (Pvt) Ltd. is a subsidiary of Effective Solutions which was incorporated in 2019. Currently ANANKE IoT Services house the major IoT Products and Services of Effective Solutions, therefore ANANKE as well.
An introduction to ANANKE
Technically speaking, the ANANKE IoT platform is a very complex product where it has an inbuilt Machine Learning library, a connection protocol that is used for device diagnostics, a communication protocol library and the ANANKE Team’s very own library, named ‘ANANKE PRO’, which can be used by the developers to do device routing without even writing a single line of code. This device routing library is similar to ‘NodeBread’ which is used at IBM.
However, building such an advanced product wasn’t without its challenges. The development of ANANKE began in 2016, by Effective Solutions, more than a full two years before ANANKE IoT Services became a company. Initially, the team behind ANANKE faced challenges due to a lack of funds. Having opted to bootstrap the development of the platform, the team decided to secure faithful early adopters as customers.
Though they secured a number of clients, it wasn’t smooth sailing given how novel ANANKE was at the time. Hence, it was difficult to visualize how powerful it was. However, after utilizing it, these early adopters soon realized the benefits of ANANKE. Seeing the huge difference in profit they made, these early adopters came forward and invested more in the development of ANANKE. Its growth was further accelerated through partnerships with Japanese universities and European organizations.
From these efforts, it was possible for ANANKE to solve one of the biggest challenges with IoT frameworks, which is connectivity. For IoT systems to operate smoothly, there must always be a connection between the hardware and software. If this connection is lost, then the system grinds to a halt. However, the ANANKE team states they were able to overcome this issue with the framework capable of running diagnostics and reestablish connectivity on its own without human intervention.
Today, ANANKE is the foundation upon which several customized IoT solutions are built for a wide range of industries. The latest among these is ANANKE IoTea that has found its home in the tea industry where it plays a crucial role in the all-important tea withering process.
ANANKE IoTea
It’s no secret that tea is one of the biggest sources of foreign exchange for the Sri Lankan economy, bringing $1.5 billion. ANANKE IoTea was developed to support the industry to improve the quality of tea production. It does so by ensuring the critical tea withering process goes smoothly. In case you’re lost, tea withering involves removing the moisture of tea leaves to the required level under close control and supervision. Leaving little room for error, the process has to be done carefully as it has a direct impact on the quality of the final product.
To ensure the production of high-quality tea leaves is where ANANKE IoTea comes into the equation. With a collection of sensors, the system monitors factors like temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels that affect the tea withering process. ANANKE IoTea constantly monitors these variables and compares them to pre-set standards. If there’s a deviation from the standards, then the inspectors are instantly notified. Thereby, allowing them to take corrective measures to ensure the quality of the tea is preserved.
From its network of sensors, the ANANKE IoTea system offers tea factory owners greater levels of visibility and control over the tea withering process, ensuring this crucial process goes smoothly to not just maintain but improve the quality of tea. In turn, ensuring greater levels of profit for tea production, which translates into greater foreign exchange earnings for Sri Lanka as a whole.
What’s next for ANANKE?
Currently, ANANKE IoTea is operational in 2 Sri Lankan tea factories. Backed by these early operations and analysis of collected data, the company is now working towards quantifying the improvement in the quality of tea and the reduction in the cost of tea production. It’s aiming to do so by comparing the manually entered traditional market values with those generated by the ANANKE IoTea platform. Moving forward, the company aims to digitally transform Sri Lanka’s tea industry and allow it to reap the benefits of the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Of course, Effective Solutions and ANANKE IoT Services efforts to bring about such transformation aren’t limited to a single industry. The company has already drawn its focus on waste management as well. In partnership with Solidaridad, REDA, Coca Cola and Mobitel, ANANKE is being used to build an island-wide network of PET smart recycling bins.
This is the first large scale NB-IoT enabled hardware project in Sri Lanka. These smart bins will be fixed with sensors to notify the respective provincial and local authorities when it’s time for the garbage to be collected. Effective Solutions is also in discussions with the Colombo International Container Terminal (CICT) to deploy ANANKE as the connection gateway of Sri Lanka’s prominent container terminal.
Co-Founder and CEO of Effective Solutions and ANANKE IoT Services, Keerthi said, “The ANANKE IoT platform can be used in practically any domain. All we need to do is put in place are the relevant sensors and software. ANANKE then can be used to reshape processes and digitally transform organizations seeking to reap the benefits of the 4th Industrial Revolution. We’re looking at expanding the platform into new domains such as healthcare, transportation, supply chain and others in the near future.”