© Thinh Ngo, 2026
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04

APEC Water

A digital-transformation blueprint that gives a water-filtration company real-time control over quality, inventory, and post-sale support.

Course
RMIT — ISYS2128 Digital Business Design & Innovation
Result
Distinction
My role
System architecture, network topology, solution development
Team
4
Client
APEC Water — US RO-filtration brand (academic case study)
Stack
Oracle NetSuite, AWS IoT, Nyckel AI computer vision

TL;DR

Team consulting project (Distinction) for APEC Water, a US reverse-osmosis brand. We traced the operational bottlenecks — hand-inspected QC, blind inventory, no post-sale visibility — to a centralized system on Oracle NetSuite, AWS IoT, and Nyckel AI computer vision. I owned the system architecture and network topology.

The problem

APEC inspected every unit by hand, tracked stock manually, and gave customers no visibility after the sale — so shipping errors, quality slips, and reactive support piled up. We mapped it with Rich Picture, BPMN, and Fishbone analysis and pinned the bottleneck on quality control.

What we designed

A centralized system, not a single tool: Oracle NetSuite as the ERP hub, AWS IoT sensors streaming live filtration data, and Nyckel AI auto-flagging defects before packing — plus a customer portal for device tracking and proactive alerts. We costed it over five years with ROI and payback.

What I owned

I led the system architecture and network topology: a thin-client, cloud-based client-server design with NetSuite at the centre, and a star-plus-hierarchical hybrid topology mapping how cameras, IoT gateways, and workstations feed the cloud. I also drove the broader solution and requirements.

Honest framing

APEC Water is real, but this was an academic case study — the proposal was never sent, and the portal is a Figma prototype, not a shipped product. The value was the rigour: turning a vague “operations feel inefficient” into a costed, architected system an SME could act on.

Artifacts

Next project

SCF Protocol