The impact of IoT in industry: towards a service-oriented business model

With more than 50 billion connected devices in 2020, the IoT is not finished changing our consumption habits. On the business side, we are already witnessing profound changes. Intelligent machines, machine learning, sensors, big data, the Internet of Things allows us to optimize products while offering ever more innovative associated services. Beyond this observation, let’s see how the IoT revolutionizes the current business model inside and outside the enterprise.

IoT to anticipate demand: from a product offer to a service logic

Consumers are increasingly connected and receive a lot of feedback about their behaviour on their various devices. Whether in the field of telephony, home automation or energy supply, it is indeed possible to benefit from a service that is both predictive and prescriptive.

By measuring and anticipating their customers’ habits, companies can provide a response that is as close as possible to their needs, adding real value to their initial offer.

It is easy to understand why moving from a product model to a service logic is at the heart of today’s challenges. Many sectors are already affected by this paradigm. This is particularly true of industry, but also of urban planning, real estate, health and the environment.

  • On the Smart City side, the IoT is responsible for making the city more intelligent. Thanks to all the data collected in real time, the movement of people, parking management, outdoor energy consumption, heating of buildings and public lighting are optimized. The IoT provides both collective and individual solutions.
  • In the field of health, the Internet of Things offers prospects in terms of diagnosis and personalized and individualized medical monitoring. Today there are connected inhalers, sensors or unmanageable smart pills. But also devices allowing to benefit from tailor-made care and follow-up at home, in particular for patients suffering from serious pathologies.
  • In the environmental sector, connected robots purify the air in buildings, and sensors measure the impact of a factory on its direct environment in real time and in advance. It is possible to know on a daily basis the rate of pollution of water, air and soil, or the energy efficiency of a building, a machine or a vehicle. Each company becomes responsible for its environment.

IoT to facilitate the maintenance of objects and machines

The phenomenon is also invading the heart of companies. Maintenance is adapting to today’s technological changes. From production lines to machine tools and all industrial equipment, the IoT opens the floodgates and offers new perspectives to companies that often operate in closed circuits. The data collected is now open, cross-referenced and analyzed by complex and predictive algorithms. It is possible to predict the behaviour of the machines and therefore to be one step ahead. We talk about “machine learning and predictive maintenance”. Machine learning improves business processes through analytics integrated with device activity. The life cycle of a machine, the continuous monitoring of its operation, the sending of alerts in case of failure, the intervention in case of proven necessity, the follow-up of spare or defective parts are all data allowing to improve the maintenance of the devices but also their efficiency. The idea is also to have the teams intervene when a real need arises, at the right time, neither too early nor too late.

“Bob assistant” illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. Created in 2018 by IoT publisher Cartesiam and service provider Eolane, this next-generation connected box offers manufacturers high-flying predictive maintenance. Monitoring the behavior of machines 24 hours a day thanks to embedded algorithms, Bob sends the necessary information for machine monitoring via LoRaWan radio. The tool collects, analyzes and interprets the data, in an autonomous and totally contextualized way.

Machine learning is a technology that allows the most intelligent use of all the data collected, and is now an integral part of good decisions and reflexes adapted to each situation. It is causing a small revolution in the industrial sector. It impacts both production processes and finished products. This is why we talk about a business model change inside and outside the company. The IoT is changing the way we produce and sell our products. A personalized and customized service is systematically associated with the connected objects proposed in industry as well as in the retail sector. Machine learning coupled with big data is at the heart of the digital revolution.

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