Meet SCT's CEO – Nick Koiza

Every company needs someone with a vision to guide the mission. At Smart Component Technologies (SCT), we are fortunate to have Nick Koiza, our CEO, to keep us on track innovating, improving and engineering solutions to make critical infrastructure safer and more efficient. 

Nick, can you share with me a bit about your background and what led you to join SCT?

I started my career in the space industry after studying space science at university. It was fascinating and I learnt a lot. I worked for the European Space Agency for five years in Germany, where I was part of the mission control team for Eureca – a novel retrievable satellite that launched on the Space Shuttle. I was there for the launch, and the retrieval phases after it spent 11 months in orbit.

When I came back to the UK, I spent more time in the space sector before moving into air traffic control and running a civil aviation business. From there, I worked in a number of industries including telecoms, public safety and security – police, fire and ambulance sectors – and then I moved into transport and SCT. The common thread for me has always been wireless communications, and particularly in safety-critical environments.

Why did you pick engineering and innovation and this job? What interests you about this sector?

What really drives me is working in safety-critical environments and seeing the positive real-world impact of the technology we deploy. The railway sector, for example, is fascinating because we're dealing with ageing infrastructure that's in desperate need of maintenance and repair. Unless these assets are correctly maintained, you end up with expensive failures in the best case – broken switches and crossings requiring replacement – and in the worst case, catastrophic incidents, derailments and loss of life. There’s a lot of value I can bring to this.

At SCT, our focus is on deploying IoT devices and AI machine learning solutions that enable organisations to automate their maintenance processes. So rather than having engineers carrying out manual visual inspections, in many cases at night in the dark when it’s easy to miss issues, you can have sensors automatically find the problems, categorise them, indicate how severe they are, and guide engineers on when and how to fix them. I like that we're saving engineers for the tasks that really need them – the actual remedial work – and ultimately making life easier and safer for everyone.

What do you think makes SCT unique in the market, and why do customers choose you?

We're a Cambridge high-tech firm that does it all – we have a multi-disciplinary team with mechanical engineers, electronics people, software people, and embedded firmware experts. We also build our own devices here, which gives us complete control over product development and quality.

Our customers, some of whom are safeguarding hundreds of individual assets with our devices, tell us they can't live without them. We've had customers achieve 50% savings on their maintenance bills and get return on investment within 18 months. In the rail industry, our customers can stop switches and crossings from breaking, extend asset lifespans, and use their resources more effectively.

I think it’s really telling that we don’t have customers move away from us – instead, businesses which have adopted our technology and solutions want more of it because it's genuinely helping them do their jobs better. One customer with hundreds of SCT devices finds our solutions so valuable that they’re ready for roll out across their entire business.

What does a typical day look like for you?

No two days are the same, and while I enjoy all the aspects of my job, there's something satisfying about being confronted with a challenge, resolving it, learning from the experience, and moving forward. Having gone through that loop, you're better equipped for the next challenge.

Building the product with the team and seeing everyone get that sense of satisfaction from a successful delivery or product enhancement is rewarding as well. We've got a fantastic team here, and being a Cambridge high-tech firm that handles complete product development – from concept to deployment in harsh railway environments – makes it all the more fulfilling.

But ultimately, the most rewarding days are when there’s a successful deployment where a customer has identified a problem or issue, deploys our solution, and then enjoys the benefits. 

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in predicting and preventing asset failures?

I think data is going to become even more key: how you collect it, and importantly how you then process and make it work hard for you. This is something we know a lot about at SCT. Our data platforms process huge volumes of data from across our customers’ networks and sensors every day, using AI and predictive algorithms to monitor site degradation over time and show the data visually through scatter plots and graphs. 

The advantage is that customers can schedule maintenance interventions effectively. If an issue hasn't exceeded a critical threshold, the organisation’s teams know it needs attention but can schedule a repair for the short- or medium-term. If something's more urgent and above a certain threshold, they can get out there immediately. So it’s making businesses more effective in scheduling operations and reducing the number of people needed for visual inspections.

If we were to have this conversation in a year's time, how do you think things will have changed?

We're at an interesting point in the journey from reactive to predictive maintenance, and I think that next year there will be a much greater understanding of the value of services like ours. There’s still sometimes an education process – what we're doing is leading edge. Some customers have already deployed a lot of our technology and understand it better than most, but appreciation for this type of technology and its benefits will definitely increase over time.

I think the next year will also see greater use of our solutions overseas, from both existing customers who have initial deployments and want to take it wider, and from new customers based outside the UK. We’ve already expanded beyond rail into the mining and energy sectors, for example deploying Smart Washer onto iron ore hoppers in Australia to deal with vibration effects. We’ve already attended expos in Dubai and the Middle East, and we plan to attend more global expos in 2026 as interest grows internationally in our solutions.

Outside of work, what interests do you have? 

Even though I no longer work in the space sector, astronomy remains one of my hobbies. I have a large telescope, a massive 16-inch Newtonian, and although I live in an area with more light pollution now, I still enjoy getting out there when I can. I'd love to have met Patrick Moore – he's no longer alive, but he was very inspirational to me as a kid, a young London-based amateur astronomer. His enthusiasm was infectious, and we'd probably both get pretty carried away talking about the stars!

Thank you, Nick!