How to Leverage the IoT for a Competitive Advantage
7 Ways to Leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to Gain a Competitive Advantage for Managing and Growing Your Business
As an entrepreneur, you will find yourself wondering what tech you need to help you grow your business, this post will help you leverage the IoT to gain a competitive advantage.
The corporate landscape has always depended on the latest fruits of the tech world to push forward and reach new levels of efficiency. These days, though, digital tech is evolving at such a lightning pace that the true scope and the utility of the technologies we have at our disposal are often hard to assess.
That brings us to the IoT, one of the latest powerhouse tech names sending ripples across the entire business world regardless of shape, size, and location. At the moment, there are more than 10 billion active IoT devices. By 2025 they will start generating $4-11 trillion in economic value, finally hitting the number of 25.4 billion active devices by 2030.
So, we see the tremendous potential on the table here. But how exactly can this tech be leveraged to the benefit of your company? Let us try to find out together.
Greater operational efficiency
Reaching the higher level of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) was always considered one of the highest priorities of a successful company. Now that digital transformation is taking root in all business sectors, the Internet of Things has become an increasingly important tool companies use to nudge the odds to their advantage. Using the benefit of digital sensors and AI-powered data processing, IoT eliminates a lot of idling and downtime that were usually associated with old analog systems. In the case of IoT the relevant data sets are transferred immediately and in the form that can be used by other systems.
A possibility for predictive maintenance
In the previous times, the companies weren’t able to notice various equipment deficiencies until they finally blew out of proportion and started causing serious failures or performance drops. Being able to observe the processes that are obscured to human behavior and run comprehensive diagnostics, IoT systems effectively eliminate this problem allowing the companies to run predictive maintenance and keep the more serious problems at bay. These efforts could increase your production capacity by 10% and productivity by as much as 50%. These figures can do a lot to set you apart from direct competition.
Effective inventory and supply chain management
Inventory and supply chain management are very demanding tasks that handle enormous sets of data and require on-site presence to confirm data consistency. Handling these tasks without at least a certain degree of automation would be near impossible. Keeping that in mind, it is good to know that the latest-gen IoT sensors are more than capable of sorting out the warehouse inventories and effectively eliminating the need for managers’ on-site presence. What’s even better, the digital infrastructure makes readings immediately available for processing by the supply chain systems making operations considerably faster.
The possibility for workflow automation
As we have previously mentioned, the modern business world is making big steps in the direction of digital transformation and workflow automation. One of the problems that often prevent this process from taking stronger root is that companies often rely on the existing infrastructure that doesn’t really lend itself to the integration with the latest digital systems. Fortunately, we see a growing number of experienced IoT companies capable of using the IoT to bridge this gap and perform the integration with old ERP and CRM systems without having to rebuild the company’s infrastructure from the ground up.
Refined quality control
Effective quality control can open up a seemingly endless list of benefits to one company – reduction of production costs, higher employee morale, the potential for more efficient branding and advertising, improved customer satisfaction are only some of the most important mentions that first come to mind. As you can probably guess, by being able to provide rich insights about the production process and its isolated instances, IoT can help business owners identify eventual production deficiencies and make adjustments to improve quality consistency. The higher the integration level the stronger are the results.
The foundation for constant product innovation
The comprehensive insights about the production process we have mentioned are not only important for maintaining high quality standards – they also set solid foundations for seamless and constant product innovation. Essentially, the production data we get can be used for design, detailed modeling, running tests, and troubleshooting, most of which can be performed in the virtual environment without producing excessive manufacturing and prototype costs. This gives your design experts near-complete freedom to make innovation a pillar of your company and use IoT technologies to encourage its growth.
Higher workforce security
Last but not least, we would like to remind you that using IoT sensors and AI to oversee the production processes eliminates the need for the physical presence of your employees at the premises, which, in turn, has a tremendous effect on their workplace safety. Of course, your workers are still invited to take part in the production but, in most cases, they will be able to perform a large chunk of their duties from the comfort of the VR and AR. Furthermore, wearable devices are able to detect unusual amounts of dangerous substances and environmental threats and notify the workers before accidents occur.
Final comments
These seven mentions are only the tip of the iceberg but they should give you a good general idea about the scope of benefits the IoT tech can bring to your company. Even though the Internet of Things makes an ever-growing presence, the companies that are willing to list themselves among the adopters are not always aware of all the specific use-case scenarios in which this innovative tech can improve their daily tasks so they miss out a lot of critical benefits. We hope we helped you solve at least a part of this problem.
