Industrial and Financial IFS : Starting the journey towards true digital transformation

How the IFS IoT Business Connector brings together sensor data acquisition, analytics and business process automation.

Internet of things - why now?

Back in 2012, the Harvard Business Review estimated that 2.5 exabytes of data was being created on a daily basis and, the retail chain Walmart was generating 2.5 petabytes of customer transaction data every hour. Since then, sensors have become cheaper, network bandwidths have increased significantly and cloud storage has matured, as has our ability to perform analytics on these data streams in real time. All these different pieces of technology have aligned to make the internet of things (IoT) possible.

Getting from desired output to needed input

That's great but what does that mean for your business? Knowing that you can analyze pretty much anything is one thing, but ultimately, being able to act on what you discover is more important. Think about what would help your business provide better products and services to your customers and how to do this faster and cheaper than is possible today. Reason backward from there, decide what you would need to know to become more proactive, this will help you decide what the output of your analytics should be which in turn help in determining the data you will need to be analyzing. The quality of any IoT solution is mostly determined by the quality, speed and relevance of the analytics performed and an organization's ability to act upon what is learned.

OEM vs operator

Still a little abstract? Let's explore a bit further. In an industrial IoT setting, there are, broadly speaking, two categories of companies that use IoT. There are the OEMs that make equipment. OEMs are typically interested in understanding how their equipment is being used by customers and under what conditions they fail. This data is used to improve product design but also to predict failure, which will let the OEM offer a predictive maintenance service that ensures customers don't experience unplanned downtime. The video link in this article, however, looks at IoT scenarios from the operator's perspective. Operators will look at how equipment is used for their specific business and try to improve overall business performance.

What's next?

This video will explore a couple of different scenarios and explain how the IFS IoT Business Connector brings together sensor data acquisition, analytics and business process automation using IFS products to allow our customers to quickly start benefitting from the opportunities IoT offers.

[1] https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution

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