Why Do I need IoT? – Understanding

‘The value is in the data’ has been the clarion call of IoT since the beginning the data from solutions, systems, products, devices, and sensors. Massive amounts of data that if only stored and harvested by big data analytics will render unique insights. While it is true that many successful corporations have implemented huge data collection efforts from their connected products and business systems and invested 100s of millions in these efforts, there are thousands of use cases where a modest investment in IoT will provide understanding about how your customers use your products and how your business is working. Let us look at these two respectively:

Understand how my products are used

Many products are loaded down with product attributes and systems features that have been added over the years. It happens with when new features are added to new models and releases. Unfortunately understanding how these are used is often limited as is knowledge of how and where customers use your products. A well designed IoT solution can fix this problem and lead to better designed products and happier customers.

Incorporating IoT chips and devices incorporating sensors, GPS and connected to existing control electronics will generate data that effectively shows where and how and when a product is used.  Want to know where, look at the GPS feed. Want to know how, look at equipment data augmented by sensors to get detailed knowledge of us. Want to know when, synchronize with time and weather data.

Adding IoT and processing the IoT data will give you enhanced understanding how your products are used.

Understand my business

Most businesses have many unknowns. Why are sales down, why is customer traffic up, why am I having warranty issues, why is my latest product not succeeding. Some answers will come from experience and available data from company IT systems and reports. Where IoT will help is to augment this information with real measurements from product usage, system information, customer traffic, asset tracking and a myriad of other data sources made possible with IoT. Analytics is the part of IoT that makes this possible. Using not only advance analytics tools but incorporating Machine Learning deployed at the edge and in the IoT data gathering/processing platform you will be able to ask questions about your business and receive answered based on real data.

One of the reasons you need IoT is to increase understanding about the products/systems/services you are offering but also how your complete business is functioning.