Last week at the IoT Evolution Expo in Las Vegas, leading industry companies, experts, and analysts discussed the current and future challenges and opportunities in the IoT space. One of the major themes surrounded educating companies of the value of investing in IoT technologies.
If you have been following Savi’s posts over the last two weeks, you have read about the benefits of investing in operational intelligence afforded by IoT and analytics solutions. Though, for many companies, IoT is still an unfamiliar technology that appears confusing, expensive, and challenging to implement into current business processes. But with education and proven success from case studies, IoT will be viewed as a powerful business tool that yields positive growth.
In many sessions at the IoT Evolution Expo, attendees would ask, “How should my organization begin implementing IoT?”
Before I share the answer, it’s best to take a moment to understand our role in the success of IoT. Today’s internet is increasingly multimodal and engaging, which means that we personally interact as human-to-computer using all of our senses—sight, speech, sound, etc. Contrarily, IoT is not acted by us, or with us, but on our behalf as interactions take place over the Internet through machine-to-machine interactions. This is why for IoT to be successful it needs to be told what to do for your company through applied rules or scripts.
More so, at a basic level, IoT connects smart things (via sensors) and yields data. Sensors are getting smaller, faster, and more efficient with improved connectivity, but without analytics, there is no value. You need to transform data through the use of applied predictive and prescriptive analytics to gain actionable information that leads to improved overall operations growth and revenue.
For example, one of our customers in the pharmaceutical industry did not know the current routes taken between origin and destination sites and, consequently, they were unaware of specific areas of risk or loss in their supply chain.
With this business case, we were able to deliver an analytics solution while leveraging the sensor data afforded by IoT. In the end, our solution provided insight into actual routes to optimize performance and provide better understanding of risk areas. We also identified trends to allow more proactive decision-making and improve operational processes.
As a result, they’ve seen exponential operational growth from leveraging the power of IoT and analytics.
Likewise, during the expo’s analyst panel that featured major firms such as James Brehm & Associates, 151 Advisors, Machina Research, IHS Technology, 451 Research, and ABI Research, the analysts agreed that successful implementation of IoT technologies affords companies 20-30% year-over-year growth.
That’s why the unanimous response to the above question was that IoT is only successful with an applicable business case. Because what good is actionable information if it doesn’t bring value to the areas that your company needs the most? It is only with IoT and purpose-built analytics solutions that offer actionable insights within weeks that supply chains, and companies in all industries, will continue to grow and thrive in the marketplace.