Hexagon Acquires Innovatia Accelerator To Further Strengthen Its Operations Automation Solutions Arsenal

Hexagon Acquires Innovatia Accelerator To Further Strengthen Its Operations Automation Solutions Arsenal

Sweden-headquartered Hexagon has been busy acquiring dozens of data and asset management software suppliers. With more than 170 acquisitions in the past 21 years, Hexagon is a dominant player in industrial data capture, analysis, visualisation and automation markets.

Earlier this month, Hexagon acquired Innovatia Accelerator, the Canadian-headquartered knowledge management system provider of critical operational content to frontline workers. Innovatia Accelerator’s flagship solution AcceleratorKMS connected worker solution offers capabilities for high-risk operational procedure management, manage work processes and deliver training content to frontline workers. Operations and maintenance (O&M) management has seen slower adoption of automation due to greater complexity of human social systems and the unstructured nature of human-authored paper-based form data. AcceleratorKMS aims to automate most of these processes, reducing errors and increasing both the quantity and the utility of data collected through artificial intelligence by auto-filling data where similar content has been created previously.

The acquisition of Innovatia Accelerator by Hexagon is timely and will further support Hexagon PPM’s business as well as product strategy to support customers to digitally transform their activities for maintenance, turnarounds, process safety management and safe work processes (Innovatia Accelerator like some of the other Hexagon acquisitions will sit within the Hexagon PPM division). In February 2022, Hexagon acquired ETQ, an Arizona-based SaaS quality management system (QMS) focused on automation of data collection across manufacturers, suppliers and customer reports. Combined with other similar acquisitions such as j5 International in 2019, D.P. Technology in 2020 and Infor EAM in 2021, Hexagon hopes to create industrial systems, plants and factory floors that are self-sufficient, self-monitoring, self-optimising and self-repairing.

Fifty-four per cent of the respondents in the 2021 Verdantix survey mentioned the ability to configure workflows to action the insights generated from analytics as an important criterion when evaluation software applications for asset management. With this acquisition, Hexagon caters not only to this customer need but is well positioned to capitalise on the increasingly lucrative operational risk management software market which is expected to grow with a CAGR of 9% to $2.6bn globally by 2026.

More information on connected worker solutions, operational risk management and asset management software is covered in the following Verdantix reports: Tech Roadmap: Technologies For Remote Industrial Operations, Buyer’s Guide: Connected Worker Solutions, Strategic Focus: High Value Use Cases For Mobile Apps In Industrial Operations And Asset Management.