IoT data can enable companywide transformation by improving factory operations, providing a new level of supply chain visibility, and offering a digital feedback loop for engineering. Sales and marketing can drive targeted campaigns and upsell new products based on real-time customer data.
The service arm of the organization can use IoT data to provide more proactive or better-targeted services to customers. Many manufacturers are assessing how they can offer their products in a services-based model moving forward; IoT also serves as a key enabler of this DX goal. Manufacturers can reap benefits from IoT throughout their organizations, but they need to take a methodical approach that includes considerations across people, processes, and technology.
An organized approach to IoT is important given the range of use cases it can enable, the large number of stakeholders involved, and the various layers of enterprise and operational technology on which it depends.
Organizations should consider how the technology choices they make will impact their time to value, TCO, and risk posture. When organizations embark upon new technology projects, one of the first questions that come up is whether to build or buy the desired capabilities. For an industrial IoT project, enterprises should consider how they will gather data from the various IoT "things" in the environment, how they will integrate the data, and where they want to process and analyze data (for many companies, it will be both at an edge location and in the cloud).
They also need to think about modeling the data so applications can use it, storing the data, managing all of the disparate IoT devices, and building engaging application logic and workflows. This kind of reusable application base with parity across the edge, core, cloud, and multicloud is challenging to create and maintain, even for a software company. In addition to technical complexity, the do-it-yourself route exposes the business to various risks that can seriously impact the overall TCO and ROI of the project. For many organizations, choosing to rely on trusted technology partners to handle this complexity will allow them to apply more focus to their own core competencies.