Utilizing the Benefits of IoT beyond Analytics

With the Internet of Things (IoT) businesses can unlock new opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and competitive advantage across a wide range of industries and applications.

Implementations usually start with connecting IoT devices to use data for simple analytics. Combined with external data and knowledge these implementations evolve to fuel optimizations and improvements. Contributing directly or indirectly to drive revenue growth and improvements of customer experience. But this is only the beginning.

McKinsey predicted back in 2015 an additional market value of up to an estimated 11 trillion USD per year. Today, in combination with the massive success in AI development, this goal is nowhere far to be reached.

Transforming products into customers

Most IoT devices communicate a state or event. The further development towards the communication of needs and requests opens the next chapter of IoT: Transforming products into business partners. The next generation of customers will be billions of devices around the world ordering products, booking services or requesting access to resources and data, paid by subscriptions, per request or by usage.

This opportunity presents outstanding benefits for businesses and product owners all around the globe:

• Efficiency. Saving time and reducing operational costs by performing decisions without human intervention.
• 24/7 Availability. Operating around the clock ensures continuous availability and responsiveness, improving customer satisfaction and enhancing service reliability.
• Faster Response Times. Services can respond to products’ needs or events in real-time. This agility allows to adapt to dynamic environments and capitalize on emerging opportunities more quickly.
• Scalability. Scale operations to easily meet growing demand or expanding markets without significant manual intervention.
• Streamlined and Accelerated Purchasing Process. Faster transactions allowing businesses to capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities and reducing administrative overhead.

This leads to a general competitive advantage, increased revenue and improved customer convenience. Autonomous capabilities enable innovation, differentiation, and the ability to deliver unique value propositions that resonate with customers.

However, while the product might address a need or request a resource, it cannot hold a bank account or become a valid legal entity in the view of the law. There are also challenges of security and limited functional capabilities of small sensors.

In addition, individual solutions between products and services with different companies or product generations are usually not cost-effective.

For this we have developed the Component4 platform. Register a digital twin of your products and services. Service requests are managed through the platform and include permission management, direct or preauthorized payment management, service rerouting based on product owner preferences or geolocation information and much more.

Flexibility in a changing environment

If the COVID pandemic has taught us one lesson, it is that reliability towards a single supplier or partner company that is involved in a significant part of the supply chain presents a serious point of failure and threat to any company. Flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations is key for a robust corporate strategy.

There is significant value in having guaranteed flexibility within a changing environment to adjust service providers and service capabilities for every sold product without the promise of being able to access the product hardware itself.

Imagine you sell a self-driving car that can autonomously purchase fuel. While the market may change and communication methods with fuel stations might evolve and change over time you have to guarantee the compatibility of your products for decades to come.

Getting started

Even if your company has just started to investigate the benefits of IoT, keeping a clear vision of the future will guarantee less friction in adapting and evolving new business fields.

The Component4 platform is specialized to allow adaptation in small steps. Just start with offering extended warranty, including spare parts that can be ordered manually or selling training and licenses. What can be ordered manually through the platform can be ordered and booked automatically by a product in a second step. Therefor allowing you to gain experience and evaluate best practices as you go while you can reflect that knowledge in your companies IoT strategy.

Whether you are a local business that just wants to start selling consumables for their product or a multi-billion-dollar enterprise where products already take actions upon specialized AI models - we have you covered.