Success of a business is all about building revenue while managing costs and expenses. IoT can help in both areas by providing cost reductions and expense savings. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.
IoT programs offer potential cost reductions
Operating complex manufacturing or process plants means overseeing production lines with different types of machinery and equipment that operate independently. With IoT a manufacturer can gather information throughout the whole production process and collect and analyze this information with advanced IoT data processing, analytics and machine learning tools. Using this information, production management can see where the problems and bottlenecks are and address them.
With IoT, it’s possible to collect data on how equipment and process systems are actually used and derive insights that reduce the cost of maintenance over time.
By collecting large number of process industry data parameters (flows, temperatures, pressures, volumes) IoT based applications provide long term Machine Learning based insights about how plants and systems actually perform allowing for cost reducing optimizations.
Business expense savings can be substantial
Remote monitoring is one of the basic use cases of IoT allowing support and service organizations to dramatically reduce travel and repair expenses.
Installing remote sensors connected to remotely deployed assets and products that show utilization, open/close states, locations, movement (and more) can greatly reduce expenses and save unnecessary labor.
The best expense is the expense that never occurs. By including IoT as a pre-requisite for new investments and expense budgeting, companies can start to reduce costs before new factories, production or distribution facilities are opened.
The payback of IoT solutions.
IoT solutions should be viewed as industrial automation and operational efficiency solutions. If viewed as such in a total cost/expense analysis, payback for IoT can sometimes be remarkably fast. Nothing like running the numbers, that is what spreadsheets are for!