Sound planning in preparation for the inevitability of the IOT in your business, will reduce risk while maximizing your outcomes. Properly implemented, it should simply allow your business to meet or exceed customer expectations, while decreasing costs and increasing revenues. It does not need to be more complicated.
1. Know Your The Starting Point
A clear understanding of where the wins are in the key areas of your business is the starting point. For example, success in the logistics industry hinges on key business levers such as clear communications, inventory management, automation of internal business processes and fast delivery of products like fresh produce.
2. Scope Applications
One popular solution is the placement of sensors to allow companies to easily track inventory items, monitor their status and create a smart warehouse system.
Another, is a mobile management system connected to internet-enabled devices that can collect critical data for the purposes of transmitting to a central system for further analysis. The data collected should then help improve business development strategies, manage critical data during a crisis and most importantly, improve driver safety.
3. Create an IOT Strategic Plan
One of Murphy’s Laws is; ‘Before you do anything, you have to do something else first.’ So before calling your friendly neighborhood IOT expert, gather a representative from each business function (including internal IT) and white board ideas and answers in the following 4 key areas. The exercise should only take a half or full day, depending on your desired outcomes. Note that I’ve used this simple framework before, very effectively with SMB’s, divisions of Fortune 500 companies and large international conglomerates. The simplicity works, regardless of the size of your company or division.
- Goals of the business in financial terms. i.e. Total revenue, ROI, unlocking value etc.
- Objectives – Ways to achieve the goals and to flesh out things like community involvement, maintaining or improving culture, acquiring new technology infrastructure etc.
- Strategies to help us get there, including marketing and (for the purposes of this article) IOT which revolves around 3 key questions;
- What devices used in our industry can we Connect?
- What kind of data do we need to Analyze?
- How and when do we Integrate?
- Plans and Activities – Monthly, weekly and daily schedules delegated to appropriate team members to achieve the above.
In our next blog, I’ll go into more detail regarding how to bring your IOT strategy to life and we’ll be joined by my colleague at Microsoft, Digital Transformation expert, Sarath Rangu.
For a FREE assessment in reference to your IOT strategy, please call me at 778.317.8064 or email me at [email protected].
