The Story of The Economist and The Programmer

Onix’ story started when our founders Bernt and Kjetil happened to meet in a hallway while working freelance. Inspired by his former job at a rigging company, Bernt had this idea about personnel scheduling software. With his background in economy and management and Kjetil’s mad programming skills, they decided to team up and give it a go. The idea of Onix People was pitched to several large oil-related companies, and oh boy did they buy it.

A few years later Bernt and Kjetil had built a successful business and expanded the software portfolio. Large customers used Onix Maintenance for data on machines and cranes, but it was not ideal for all the loose lifting accessories and assets. And one of these customers made Bernt aware of the total paper chaos from mandatory inspections of loose work- and lifting equipment.

This was a great opportunity to develop new software with the potential to save companies a huge amount of time and money and improve worksite safety. But at the same time, it was a huge risk because it meant re-allocating the resources from safe income. For this unique idea of sharing data to be a success, Bernt knew it had to be a cloud solution.

In the new The Crane Portal and The Certificate bank, inspectors and equipment owners could share data to streamline annual inspections, and this was the very first version of today’s Onix Work solution.

Not long after, these two portals were merged into one, to allow for better and more efficient collaboration between suppliers, inspectors, and owners of equipment. This second-generation software was named The Equipment Portal, and over the years a lot of features for all kinds of work equipment have been added and improved.

From 2007 to 2013 Onix played a big role in an RFID standardization project. Onix participated in meetings with representatives from all over the world, including the “Norwegian Oil & Gas” organization. After this, Innovation Norway funded a co-project with Onix and Certex to develop an RFID solution for loose lifting accessories. From this project, RFID and QR technologies were integrated into different parts of the software.

By this time Kjetil was not the only programmer anymore, and in 2012 it was time to increase the development capacity drastically. In his constant drive to improve, Bernt the economist read an article about a development environment in Vietnam. Long story short, this is where the eminent development team was built to prepare Onix for the fast-paced technological future.

In 2014, the very first Onix app was launched; Onix Inspection. Although phones are filled with apps today, this was quite ground-breaking and revolutionary at the time. This app-enabled the modern inspector to complete the documents onsite and save his customer a lot of money

Once again, it had become necessary to change technology in the cloud. This was a great opportunity to rebrand the Equipment Portal and go global with digitizing this industry. In 2016 the portal was relaunched with a new user interface, new features, new technology, new licensing, and of course a new name; Onix Work

With Onix Work, it was easier to keep developing and renewing valuable features to equipment owners, suppliers, and inspectors around the world. It was also possible to phase in features for maintenance and phase out the rather outdated Onix Maintenance software.

In 2018 the Onix Worker app was introduced, enabling the modern worker to perform operator maintenance digitally while on the go. That same year we also released Onix Tool Store, a tool crib management system to digitize rigging lofts. Each year more and more maintenance features have been incorporated into both apps and the web solution.

To focus even more on the great goal; make Onix Work an international success, Onix People was sold to a safe Canadian home in 2019.

With “hackers” constantly knowing on everyone’s doors, data security has become increasingly important. To secure all customers’ files and speed up their creation and backup of documents all of this was moved to Microsoft Azure in 2020. The goal is to move both the database and the software to the Azure platform by 2024.

In 2021 the Onix Inspection app was relaunched with new technology, a modern user interface, and a new name; Onix Inspect. The inspector can document even more inspection and job types for the customer onsite, bringing more value to everyone.

The story of the economist and the programmer continues with full steam ahead!