Director Briefing with Darren Szczepanski from AqMB Holdings

Darren is the Managing Director of Salt Water and co-founder of the AqMB™ software platform. He is a chemical process engineer with over 20 years of project experience within the water sector. AqMB™ is a cloud-based water treatment software platform for process design, PLM and predictive compliance.

EdenExchange: Thanks for speaking with us Darren. Firstly, what brought you to the leadership position at AqMB? Can you tell us a bit about your background and experience?

​Darren Szczepanski: I am a chemical engineer with design/build and consulting advisory experience within the water treatment sector. My various roles have ranged from piloting, process design, project engineering, QA, programming and plant commissioning to product development and engineering leadership. Prior to founding Salt Water in 2011, I spent five years in management roles within GE Water and Pall Corp responsible for a team of engineers across Australia and New Zealand. Salt Water is a process design consultancy specialising in process design, modelling and software solutions for complex waters. It was through our work here that the AqMB platform concept was materialised, and AqMB Holdings was spun out of Salt Water to help commercialise the software.

EdenExchange: In simple terms, what does AqMB do? What triggered the idea?

Darren Szczepanski: AqMB is a cloud-based water treatment software platform for process design, PLM and predictive compliance. The first eleven years of my working life involved designing and commissioning water treatment plants in various process engineering roles for design/build companies. In the early part of my career, I would iterate calculations through numerous independent software programs and spreadsheets and hope that I wasn’t making any mistakes in excel. As I moved into leadership, I spent more time reviewing the work of others and finding mistakes that would carry over between projects.

Mistakes made in the process design impact civil, electrical and mechanical design. The magnitude of these mistakes can multiply costs on each project so I clearly understand why many process engineers are reluctant to lock in a design. During a tender phase or design period, there simply isn’t enough time to explore every scenario or check each calculation, so it’s common to apply a healthy safety margin and to price risk around meeting contract performance objectives through contingencies or ‘robust’ design measures. Understanding how to reduce process risk rather than price for it was the opportunity.

EdenExchange: How are you different from other solutions on the market?

Darren Szczepanski: AqMB Designer is the first and, to our knowledge, the only process design and PLM software in the cloud.  With AqMB Designer, engineers can collaborate with select project members for timely peer review around the clock, regardless of location. Each project team member can access all the design information in a single location. The designer can initiate an internal peer review workflow to simultaneous parties which are integrated with email. This goes against the convention of designers working in isolation on a standalone desktop waiting for a semi-formal design review setting before presenting design results and getting feedback.

This approach effectively engages domain experts early in a project design phase to optimise, lock it in and have more time to negotiate better pricing with equipment suppliers. The designer can then use the RFQ feature to simultaneously request quotations and product information from registered equipment suppliers in their region, not just the one or two at the top of their mind.

SupplierLink lets equipment vendors provide real-time price and product information directly to the designer, even when there is no existing relationship between the designer and the vendor. The vendor gets reliable design data and supporting information to minimise the need to price risk into quotations. The designer gets instant access to latest equipment information in one location including proposals, data sheets, contact details and other data required to select components and price a project. Information from approved quotations goes straight into the designer's equipment lists and capital cost templates.

We have created a virtual marketplace integrated with process design software. We have made it easier for engineers to design, review, specify and price a project from any location. Our platform has the potential to reduce costs on capital projects by providing more certainty around the process design, increased competition without any time penalty and reducing the multiplier effect of contingency on contingency applied on each project.

AqMB Prophet bucks the trend on recent artificial intelligence (AI) applications that simply process data inputs and report outputs without the support of any theoretical constraints from chemical engineering principles. Prophet uses the process models in Designer as a foundation for predicting performance and water quality on existing treatment plants. It then applies AI techniques (deep learning) to these models to calibrate them to site-specific conditions. This way there is little chance of ‘garbage in=garbage out’. The simulations provide a consistent guide to the operator on what will happen over the next 24 hours of operation if they ‘do nothing’ and also what is required to optimise the plant to meet compliance objectives.

EdenExchange: How do you generate revenue?

Darren Szczepanski: A designer is sold under a subscription as a service (SaaS) model to engineering consultants, OEM’s, EPC’s, system integrators and technology providers. Individual designers get an affordable entry into the benefits of the software. Usually they could only access this through their own searches over the internet. At an enterprise level return on investment can be high for design companies. Our longer term goals is to work at an enterprise level with the organisations the designers work through competitively priced enterprise rollouts.

The SupplierLink product connects designers with suppliers when the designer actually wants vendor engagement. It requires equipment vendors to pay for the opportunity to quote on a project they may not otherwise be aware of. Many vendors salivate at the prospect of connecting with the engineer at the exact time they are looking to specify equipment. This is what SupplierLink brings - an alignment of priorities in a competitive marketplace with no time penalty to the designer.

The Prophet forecasting product is sold on a time and material value proposition model through strategic partnerships with consulting firms. This way we leverage their existing client base - the most conservative water utilities that usually place more trust in the relationships with their advisors than they do with technology startups.

EdenExchange: What markets does AqMB focus on? Where do you expect the greatest demand for the product to be from and how has the market response been like to date? What market have you reached so far?

Darren Szczepanski: AqMB is a global water treatment platform, and when software development is finished by early 2019, it will be applicable to almost any water/wastewater treatment application anywhere. Currently, we are working on integrating biological models and several physicochemical unit operation models to build on the 35+ models released to date. We have commercial software users in Australia, SE Asia, USA, UK and the Middle East. We expect the North American and European Union to be our biggest markets and we will put Sales Directors on the ground in San Francisco and Paris to service these markets together with an engineering software partner.

EdenExchange: AqMB has installed a management team. How important have these appointments been? What opportunities do they create for the Company?

Darren Szczepanski: Although we have a great team already, we are seeking additional directors to round out the skill set of the board. These might come from US or European markets. Anyone who can add considerable value to grow our business in emerging markets especially will be very welcome.

EdenExchange: What stage of development is AqMB in? How has this evolved since the Company was first launched?

Darren Szczepanski: AqMB Designer is in early-stage commercialisation and has been in development, testing and validation since early 2013. After the initial release of a minimum viable product, our development priorities were driven by our customers. By being online, we provide ways to make it easy for our customers to engage with us for software improvement, technical support or to suggest features. The Designer and SupplierLink products are now commercially stable and we will continue to release features and additional models until mid-2019.

EdenExchange: What major industry trends do operators in your sector, especially stakeholders need to be aware of? How will AqMB capitalise on these trends?

Darren Szczepanski: Safe drinking water is becoming a scarce commodity. There are ever increasing concerns about toxicity and emerging micropollutants that will require greater scrutiny on design and plant performance monitoring. AqMB Designer and Prophet are uniquely positioned to help reduce the risk to the general public in these applications. On a separate topic, regulators are legislating the use of building information modelling(BIM) for design and construction. The designer will soon bridge the gap between basic design and detailed design by providing a bi-directional sync between our software which creates intelligent process flow diagrams to CAD software for P&ID’s and 3D models. This means that if an engineer changes a pump or membrane for example in the 3D Autodesk Revit model, that change is reflected in all process design documentation (drawings, equipment lists, etc) and the impact of that change on plant performance and water quality can be easily simulated. We encourage BIM adoption by making it easy to specify major equipment much earlier in the design process and carry through this information effortlessly into detailed design. This is a very powerful feature that will save countless hours on each project.

EdenExchange: What are some of the key achievements you are proud of at AqMB? On the other hand, what challenges do you expect to face?

Darren Szczepanski: I knew we were filling a genuine technology gap in the water sector when senior execs of the largest global players showed interest in our products without any selling from our side. If the biggest companies are still primarily using spreadsheets for process design, then so are hundreds of second and third tier companies competing on water treatment projects. We have an incredibly talented team that understands water chemistry, process engineering and software development. Keeping this team together while bootstrapping development from consulting revenue has been a difficult juggling act on time and resources. It has given us the opportunity though to validate our models on some 25 or so real projects.

We now have the confidence to focus on finishing software development and commence an active sales and marketing campaign with dedicated resources. One of the challenges we face is the fact that the water sector is slow and cautious around technology adoption, and any disruption technology is met with some scepticism. We also know that engineering companies prefer to buy from established, successful software companies so finding the right global partner is key to securing enterprise sales. Referrals are also very important, and although we are consistently hearing about positive referrals between users of the software, this takes considerable time to filter through to management for widespread adoption within an organisation.

EdenExchange: What is the ideal profile of strategic partner you are looking for?

Darren Szczepanski: Our ideal partner is a company whose products are complementary and AqMB can provide growth to their user base and visibility to their existing portfolio. We come in at the beginning of the design cycle where there is no obvious brand loyalty outside of custom spreadsheets. Global engineering CAD companies are a natural fit as they can capitalise on this aspect and leverage BIM to introduce new users to their own cloud products. Process simulation software providers are also a possibility as there are no other cloud platforms yet around water treatment. There is also a play for SCADA/Process Control businesses looking for a predictive compliance product that is cloud-ready and built on solid process engineering models. We want to partner with a company that has the same existing or potential customer base whereby we can leverage their existing sales, marketing and training teams for rapid scale.

EdenExchange: Where do you see the business in three months and a year from now? What are your strategic priorities and what needs to be done before you can scale at a significant level?

Darren Szczepanski: Building and stabilising the team are my immediate priorities, firstly around Sales and Marketing and also Tech Support. In three months from now, I would hope to have secured respectable Sales and Marketing Directors for Asia and North America to spearhead the hundreds of vendor registrations we need to bring SupplierLink to life.

The SupplierLink software was launched in March. Achieving vendor signup is a relatively simple task for a Sales Director with sector experience and prior exposure to the equipment suppliers, but this does require a targeted phone campaign and exhibition hall attendance at several key conferences. In June, we aim to release our Plant 3D/Revit integration which will enable BIM for Autodesk users. We have many other development features in the works over the next year which will make the software even more applicable to conventional wastewater and biological applications. Our development goals are driven around making it easy to design, review, approve, price or operate any water treatment plant from anywhere in the world.

EdenExchange: Thank you.

About AqMB

AqMB is proud to release SupplierLink, the vendor portal providing qualified leads for water treatment equipment vendors. SupplierLink lets equipment vendors provide real-time price and product information directly to the designer, even when you've never called on them before. The vendor gets reliable design data and supporting information to minimise the need to price risk into quotations. The designer gets instant access to your latest information in one location including proposals, data sheets, contact details and other data required to get your equipment selected. Information from approved quotations goes straight into the designer's equipment lists and capital cost templates. All this on a project you may never have even known about.

 

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