Business 4.0
How To Ensure The Success Of Your IIoT-Powered Business Transformation
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s manufacturers and machinists, you're increasingly pressed to work faster and cheaper while providing better results. And your customers usually only engage with you when they have a problem or a challenge. For most businesses, the answer to higher customer engagement is through data, which through IIoT (industrial internet of things) can be accessed remotely from machines to drive insight-led decisions. This allows you to move swiftly and, more importantly, proactively, instead of reacting to customer events. At the same time, you can benefit from opportunities for new revenue streams and business models.
Determining Your Desired Business Outcomes In my experience, success is strongly tied to understanding the benefits of technology before ever implementing anything new or different to your business. Taking some time to consider how tech can impact your business outcomes can help you uncover the right changes for your situation, such as:
More Efficient Production Lines The ability to ensure your machinery has high production efficiency and is always up and available is one of the promises of IIoT-led business transformations. Through constant monitoring and analysis of your assets, you can gather real-time insights into areas of your operations that can be optimized, allowing teams to work more effectively and without any unplanned downtime.
Predictive Capabilities The output of data aggregated through connecting machinery and processes allows your business to predict events such as maintenance needs or anomalies before they occur — offering more intelligence into the machine operations. This capability significantly reduces costs related to a decrease in unplanned downtime, improving your production efficiency while making your operations agile and profitable. Furthermore, by improving reaction time to address preventative maintenance events, predictability can reduce time spent during planned outages and, more importantly, ensure lower maintenance budgets.
New Business Models And Revenue Streams While operators of machinery benefit from predictability and efficiency of the machines, one of the most exciting and
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beneficial outcomes of modern business transformations is the ability for machine manufacturers to switch to servitization financial models, otherwise known as 'equipment-as-a-service' (EaaS). EaaS is critical for various reasons, including aligning of interests between operators and machine manufacturers, cost savings for operators, and more stable and predictable revenue models for manufacturers — a necessity especially in times of economic uncertainty. Like software-as-a-service, dubbed SaaS by the tech industry, EaaS allows manufacturers to lease out production on a contractual basis. With this model, customers pay for the output as an operating expense versus large capital expenditures. One example of EaaS in action is Coborn, a company that supplies machines for the diamond tooling industry. Traditionally, its fully automatic and highly precise grinding machines would be purchased outright by its customers. Now, by making its machines “smart” and utilizing AI-based analytics, not only can Coborn provide its equipment for a usage fee, but the company can also guarantee performance, reliability, and availability targets.
