Frequently asked questions

Start with an inventory that lists every system the business depends on, and for each one the hardware it runs on, the operating system, the database, the application platform, its integrations and the people who know how it works. Most small manufacturers have between 15 and 40 such systems once you count the PLC programming tools and the spreadsheets. The inventory is the first deliverable of our Technology Risk Assessment, and you keep it.

Every system is a stack: firmware or hardware at the bottom, an operating system, a database or data store, an application platform, the application itself, and the integrations to everything else. Each layer has a vendor, a version and a support end date. Writing that stack down, layer by layer, is usually where the surprises appear, such as the furnace control system that only runs on an operating system Microsoft stopped patching years ago.

Score each system on three things: the technology risk (unsupported layers, single points of failure, no backups), the skills risk (how many people can keep it running) and the business impact if it fails for a day. Multiply, sort, and the top of the list is where the money should go first. That scoring is what our assessment framework does objectively and repeatably.

Reinvest before a layer goes out of support, not after it fails, and in the order your risk register dictates. A plan that says "replace the plant network switches in Q2, move email to Microsoft 365 in Q3, re-platform the historian next year" is one the owners can budget for. Surprises are what cost money.

In their language: a one-page register that shows each system, its risk score, the cost of doing nothing and the cost of fixing it. Our assessment report is written for that audience first, and for the IT people second.

If you have a production floor and a handful of PCs, you are big enough. We work with owner-managed businesses and mid-sized plants, and we scale the rigour to what you can afford and maintain.

We are based in Technopark, Stellenbosch, and most of our on-site work is in the Western Cape. Remote support, Microsoft 365 work and DynamicPlantMesh projects run anywhere in South Africa, with site visits when the job needs them.

A thirty-minute conversation, then a short fixed-price assessment. You keep the report whatever you decide. Most clients then start with the single thing that hurts most: a migration, a governance gap, or DynamicPlantMesh on one line.

Standard support runs Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 16:30 SAST, through a helpdesk that tracks every issue to closure. After-hours escalation is available to support clients whose plants cannot wait until morning; we agree the response times in writing before you need them.

DynamicPlantMesh records the signals your plant produces (temperatures, power, flows, states) at high frequency and keeps them, so you can trend, compare and analyse them later. Smaller plants need that for the same reason big ones do: you cannot improve what you cannot see, and you cannot prove what you did not record. It connects OPC-UA, OPC DA and MQTT equipment, records into a historian that ships with the platform, and turns it into live trends, event timelines and KPIs your own engineers configure without a software release. See DynamicPlantMesh.

DBS Invenio is our AI harness: one self-hosted system that carries a job from a model call through to governed software running in front of the person who needs it. Agents build working applications against the data you already have, every model call is metered and attributed to a user and a project, what an agent may touch is granted rather than assumed, and nothing an agent writes goes live until a person promotes it. It runs on your own infrastructure, air-gapped sites included. See DBS Invenio.

In most cases yes, through standard industrial protocols and vendor connectors: DynamicPlantMesh speaks OPC-UA, OPC classic DA and MQTT v5 directly. Tell us what you run on the contact page and we will confirm the connector before anyone quotes anything.

You choose. Our systems run on-premises in your plant or in Microsoft Azure, including the South African Azure regions. This website itself is hosted on Microsoft Azure; see the privacy notice for what that means for your enquiry.