Case Study · Intelligent Asset Management

Ending "Dark Assets": Tracking 15 Million Units of Field Equipment

How Delaplex is engineering a DiAMS-powered asset intelligence platform to give a leading global beverage company real-time visibility over one of the world's largest commercial equipment estates.

The Challenge

15 million assets. Most of them invisible.

The client manages roughly 15 million pieces of commercial refrigeration equipment, including coolers, dispensers, and vending machines, placed across retail, hospitality, and food service locations in more than 190 countries. Once deployed, the majority become "dark assets": location unknown, health unmonitored, energy consumption unmanaged, and maintenance entirely reactive.

That blind spot is estimated to cost the organization billions annually in unnecessary replacements, unplanned downtime, and inefficient field service dispatch, a scale problem that ordinary point solutions can't touch.

The Approach

Three integrated layers, engineered as one stack.

Delaplex proposed a purpose-built ruggedized IoT edge device for every unit, a dedicated private network backbone to move telemetry without relying on congested public networks, and DiAMS, Delaplex's AI-driven asset management platform, as the command center that turns raw telemetry into predictive action.

Rather than assembling off-the-shelf components, hardware, firmware, middleware, cloud software, and ERP integration are delivered as a single, coherent, fully tested stack, with Delaplex absorbing engineering costs during proof-of-concept so commercial terms are tied to demonstrated ROI, not billed hours.

Scale & Performance

Engineered for global scale, field-hardened for a 12-year lifespan.

15M

Field Assets in Scope

190+

Countries Covered

<5ms

Private Network Latency

7–14 Days

Advance Failure Prediction

The Architecture

Edge hardware, private network, intelligent platform.

Edge: Ruggedized IoT Module

A multi-radio, sensor-fused device (temperature, motion, GPS/GNSS, BLE) rated IP67 with up to 12 years of standby life on a single battery, reporting location, health, and environmental condition continuously.

Network: Private Backbone

A dedicated private network isolates asset telemetry from public network congestion, using sub-6GHz spectrum with NB-IoT and satellite failover for guaranteed delivery, even inside metal-rich warehouses and bottling plants.

Platform: DiAMS

A cloud-native command center that normalizes telemetry, runs AI anomaly detection, and auto-generates work orders in connected ERP systems, with local edge instances for offline resilience at major sites.

From Reactive to Predictive

The AI engine closes the loop automatically.

DiAMS continuously correlates compressor run-time, door-open frequency, temperature recovery rates, and energy consumption to detect pre-failure patterns 7 to 14 days before equipment actually fails. When an anomaly is flagged, the platform automatically raises a work order in the client's ERP system, geo-routes the nearest qualified field engineer, and pre-orders the predicted replacement part, without a human in the loop.

Local edge filtering and compression reduce cloud data ingress and storage costs by an estimated 35%, while native bi-directional ERP integration keeps enterprise systems synchronized with field reality in real time.

Digital Identity

Every unit gets a persistent digital record from the moment it clears the dispatch gate.

Predictive Maintenance

Failure patterns detected 7–14 days ahead, converting maintenance from reactive to planned.

Energy Optimization

Power-state scheduling reduces energy costs across the fleet.

Reverse Logistics

Decommissioning and end-of-life recovery tracked through the same platform.

See DiAMS applied to your asset estate.

Explore the full solution, or talk to our team about an integrated deployment for your asset estate.

Client identity anonymized at the client's request. Figures reflect Delaplex program documentation for a proposed/in-progress global IoT and private-5G asset tracking deployment for a leading global beverage company.