Get to Know the SmartICS Team: Refsam Maulana

Welcome to “Get to know the SmartICS team” – a monthly series where we talk with the SmartICS team to get to know the people who work with the solution, explore the challenges it helps solve, and discover the features customers need. To kick off the series, we spoke with Refsam Maulana, APAC Region Pre-Sales Engineer, who shares their experience of being a member of the SmartICS team and what makes the product an essential part of his day-to-day work.

Refsam, please complete the sentence: “I am part of the SmartICS team because …”

Because I believe SmartICS has great potential in Indonesia, and it’s also flexible and easy to use. So I want to help promote SmartICS in Indonesia—especially among students, engineers, and industries here.

What principles guide the formation of the SmartICS team? Which roles and competencies would you consider the most critical?

It’s definitely teamwork. Teamwork is what has made the SmartICS team so cohesive and allowed it to continue growing to this day.

What inspires you the most in your work? What has been the most significant moment for you over the past year?

The most memorable moments are when a partner or customer uses SmartICS and is satisfied — so they don’t just use it once; because they’re satisfied, they use it over and over again.

What have you learned while working in the team?

The main concepts we learned were the Say-Do Ratio and the 5 Whys. At SmartICS, we must not simply approve requests if we’re not certain. We only say “yes” when we’re truly confident we can execute them, and we must dig deeper with “why” questions to identify the client’s pain points and actual needs.

What makes SmartICS a true team? What is the SmartICS team’s superpower?

In my opinion, it’s teamwork and initiative. Yes, with teamwork and initiative, SmartICS will become more cohesive, and we’ll all help each other improve in the future.

Tell us about a time when you felt like a hero at work.

It was probably while working on one of the largest projects in Indonesia for SmartICS. So, I helped with the topology, design, and related tasks, as well as the POC (Proof of Concept) implementation and the full implementation. In the end, the project was a success, and to this day, they’ve continued to add new modules to SmartICS.

What surprised you the most when you joined our company?

The most surprising thing when I joined was that here, we don’t have to call older people “Pak.” We just call them by their first names.

How do you measure product success? Which metrics are the most important to you?

Okay. In my opinion, a product is successful when customers use SmartICS, are satisfied with the results, and then return to SmartICS for implementation on other projects.

Which implementation project would you consider your most outstanding case? What changed for the customer before and after the implementation?

The most memorable project was just like the one I mentioned earlier—one of the largest projects in Indonesia. There’s this major corporate group in Indonesia that owns more than a dozen plants across the country. This project was particularly memorable because I was involved from the very earliest planning stages, through the Proof of Concept (POC) phase, all the way to full implementation. The result was a huge success—even now, the client continues to expand by adding modules, tags, and other SmartICS features.

If you had to explain your product to the CEO of a large enterprise in 30 seconds, what would you say?

So, SmartICS isn’t just a SCADA web platform or an industrial IoT platform—it can also help with monitoring, controlling, analyzing, generating automated reports, and much more. We can integrate OT and IT on a single platform. In manufacturing, there are still many systems, and each one uses different software—for example, Water Treatment Software A and EMS Software B. With SmartICS, we only need one SmartICS software to manage all these platforms. So, SmartICS isn’t just a simple web-based SCADA system or merely an IoT solution; it also serves as a central hub for various systems already in place at the customer’s site or in existing infrastructure.

Describe the most challenging product implementation at a customer site. What went wrong, and how did you resolve it?

The most challenging part of implementation for a customer is when we have to integrate SmartICS with various types of hardware in the field. That’s the biggest challenge right now. We have to know what kind of hardware it is, what brand it is, what protocol it uses, and so on, to connect it to SmartICS. And of course, another challenge arises when the design timeline is extremely tight. So this is the most challenging part.

What question would you most like to answer, but no one ever asks you?

So, because I believe SmartICS is a product with great potential in Indonesia—in addition to being flexible and easy to use, this software is ideal for students, engineers in manufacturing, and other industries—there will be significant efficiency gains when using SmartICS. That’s why I’m still excited to be part of SmartICS.