Digital transformation has made many advancements in the past few years, but the question still remains: Why do I need it? It seems obvious that to stay competitive, businesses must become digital. It is essential to keep a minimal digital standard. But the main question for businesses that should be asked is: What benefits does digitalization bring directly to my company? Let’s say your company has already identified the benefits of digitalization. Not everyone can do it seamlessly, especially considering the highly-structured nature and operations in difficult-to-reach areas, as well as increased safety requirements and little room for risk. In industries like construction, mining, and agriculture, these challenges are quite commonplace. Fortunately, the technologies behind digitalization are continuously evolving to offer you a winning combination of digital solutions for a successful digital transformation. Let’s look at how companies can successfully start or continue their digitalization through enterprise IoT solutions.
Why Digital?
Digital transformation hasn’t stopped with desktop computers. The level of a company’s digitalization now is usually determined by the level of digitalization of its assets, usage, and labor. For product companies, it can also be crucial to improve their products through digitalization, for instance, by customizing thermometers or expanding an agricultural product range with a digital irrigation system.
According to the latest statistics, almost 70% of companies have a digital transformation strategy or are working on it. These organizations define the following reasons why digitalization can be beneficial for them:
It is easy to see that many of these factors are interdependent or result from the same digital improvements. For instance, by replacing the legacy button-operated interface with the sensor interface in a tabletop printer, one company was able to enhance its final product quality, which naturally had a rippling effect on operational efficiency. We bring your attention to this particular project to show that having one clear goal is critical for building a robust digital strategy. The more comprehensive approach you follow, the more value you can get. This is true regarding both production and enterprise process improvement because digital enterprise processes can significantly improve performance while IoT can accelerate adoption.
Enterprise IoT Solutions & Digital Transformation
These four core target components describe the digital enterprise of today:
- Automation
- Efficiency
- Security
- Maintenance
IoT adopters will have seen the benefits and key points within the IoT ecosystem development strategy. IoT adoption is generally accepted as one of a company’s digital indicators, but it is much more effective to consider IoT as a tool for the enterprise organization to be transformed. This approach allows us to overcome any inflated expectations, for example, implementing IoT components and expecting the company’s revenue to soar. It is also important to ensure each tool is used strategically.
Digital Strategies
Essentially, an IoT implementation strategy is more complex than different digital strategies. That is why we call it an ecosystem, where all the components, from sensors to people, interact with each other to achieve the main business goals. In addition to their comprehensive nature, IoT ecosystems are flexible and allow companies to implement regardless of their own digital level. Therefore, we recommend considering Enterprise IoT solutions for these two main digital strategies:
- Initial digitalization: By implementing an IoT ecosystem, business naturally becomes digitized. By connecting crucial assets, such as equipment, vehicles, or cargo to intelligence, you can always see their real-time status, monitor environmental conditions, people’s behavior, track location, and so on. By implementing analytical tools in the IoT ecosystem, you can also predict when equipment might fail, create optimal routes considering more factors, or identify failures due to human factors. You also want to implement a cybersecurity program due to the potential vulnerability of the endpoints. Within this concept, a new business strategy acts like a goal while IoT solutions are the effective tools for reaching that goal.
- Advanced digitalization: Apart from the ability to show the vector for further business development, Enterprise IoT solutions are convenient to determine the further vector for the digital development of a company. For example, if at the first step you implemented machine vision for improving QA processes, you can now track its efficiency and pick up complementary solutions. When all the critical assets are equipped with IoT sensors, companies can move further to implement a digital twin and meticulously investigate data in their IoT ecosystems. Thus, you gain a strong analytical advantage allowing you to predict trends or simulate cases.
Enterprise IoT Challenges & Solutions
To realize how to accelerate transformation, we first need to understand what can slow this process down. Let’s identify the main digital issues, as well as solutions on how to overcome them:
#1: Innovations Can Cause Disruptions
Implementation of innovations definitely changes working models. This is especially true for highly structured industries like rail, mining, or construction. Therefore, they should consider digital solutions with structure in mind first. The lucky benefit is that IoT technologies are flexible and allow them to be implemented incrementally. Now, we have seen successful cases of how some industries that were traditionally unsuccessful in digital have now soared there in recent years.
For instance, in 2015, healthcare was recognized as one of the least digitized industries. However, in 2018, healthcare was called one of the top digital business strategy adopters, along with the financial and services sectors. Telemedicine, wearables, smart pharmacy, and smart hospitals are appearing around the country, meaning healthcare is successfully managing the EIoT adoption and does continue to evolve.
#2: Lack of Safety
If an EIoT integration is technically challenging for your company, we recommend performing marketing research more often. Since the statistics are open, Enterprise IoT providers are evolving their technical tools to spread the potential implementation area too. For mining operations, which are usually held in vast and difficult-to-reach areas and which suffer from a lack of connectivity, the possible solution can be implementing mesh nets to ensure a reliable IoT ecosystem. As a result – the entire area is fully monitored, and you definitely know that your mining machines won’t break in the coming months.
#3: Resistance
Line workers tend to be less resistant to innovation. Top management is usually the most resistant since they have total responsibility for the business. Essentially, it is the only right decision to approach innovations pragmatically, estimating thoughtfully all pros and cons. Therefore, higher-level leaders should get detailed and extremely precise reports on how particular Enterprise IoT solutions will influence the business processes and revenue of the company. While preparing an implementation strategy, it is critical to calculate all the situations, risks, and ROI and share objective statistics. Thus, there are more chances that a technology vital for a particular enterprise will be approved.
IoT Ecosystem for Business Goals
It is more efficient to consider the IoT ecosystem not as an end goal but as an effective instrument for reaching business goals through digital transformation. The main benefits for companies are improving operational efficiency, meeting changing customer expectations, and improving new product quality. By implementing EIoT solutions, it becomes easier to get real-time insights. Enterprise IoT solutions suit both initial and advanced digitalization as can be shown thanks to a large volume of data analyzed.
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