Double the Return for Your Industrial IoT Investment
Most of IoT83's customer's urgency build meaningful differentiation from a Smart Products and Applications perspective as their main driver for their Industrial IoT investments. And this certainly makes sense given the new value they bring to their customers when they deliver rich Remote Asset Monitoring & Management and Predictive Maintenance, and especially when they integrate this with their Field Service capabilities.
Not only does this give them a huge competitive advantage versus product lines without these capabilities, but this also moves their product line from being a collection of devices from the same company to being a system of assets that all work coherently together – significantly increasing “solution sales”. But also, for the most part, once these companies establish a threshold value for these services, they provide them to customers via an annual subscription – driving a substantial new and high margin source of recurring revenue.
But the second highest priority customer focus area is on modernizing and digitizing their manufacturing processes using IoT. This also makes sense. With the costs of sensors, processors, and programmable process management tools all dropping, deploying such a manufacturing digital edge framework has become far easier and cost effective. And, once these "digital edge" assets are deployed, they come to us to build out the Application side of the equation to collect all the data into a central, secure, scalable, and normalized framework, build custom process-oriented analytics and automations, and create the end-user dashboards and reports different roles need to optimize their work. And, by using modern and flexible tools like IoT83’s Flex Platform that already provide so many built-in functions for process optimization, these Applications can be built quickly and very cost effectively – even should their use-cases require significant customization to deliver exactly what they want.
But the Return on Investment magic happens when customers implement both of these IoT solutions. When a business does this, the investments they make on the “Smart Product” side are quickly inherited on the manufacturing side as well. Further, features needed on the manufacturing side that may not needed on the product side are easier to implement when building into a framework that already “understands” the products as a result of the “Smart Products” investment.
For example, we have customers making extensive investments in both the Smart Product / Smart Application across their product lines as well as investments in manufacturing optimizations, but both investments are entirely paid for – already – by savings that they are realizing on the manufacturing side.
This “Doubling Investment Value” scenario works like this:
• The same sensors and digital framework used in the product to enable Remote Monitoring and Management, Predictive Maintenance, and optimized Field Service used for fielded assets are re-purposed to identify faulty or mis-configured in-process goods, accelerating problem resolution.
• These same Analytics are also used to provide extensive end-of-line diagnostics and analytics for advanced quality controls, and to accelerate product defect repair.
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• And, by adding the deeper level of component fault detection that makes manufacturing so efficient to the fielded IoT Application itself, Service Optimization is further increased as Service Agents have detailed knowledge of faults (or predicted faults) prior to any truck roll or customer engagement.
• Finally, over time, as more and more data is collected from fielded assets, this data can be correlated with manufacturing data to provide far more accurate predictions of warranty and SLA costs, for further business optimization and cost management.
The following diagram shows the extensive opportunity to re-use IoT Application components in both “Field” and “Manufacturing” IoT optimization solutions:
Bottom line, most OEMs can nearly double the value of their Industrial IoT investments by leveraging the investments they make against “Fielded Smart Products” competitive advantage as well as “Manufacturing Smart Processes”.
And with leading-edge solutions like IoT83’s Flex Platform this “Value Doubling” path to success is extremely effective. If this all makes sense to you, please reach out for a discussion on how we can help. We can engage directly with your key stake holders to build a pragmatic plan for fast iterations to drive a powerful Digital Transformation success, and then work side by side with your team for a streamlined execution.