IoT for Digital Transformation

Today, every forward-thinking company is reimagining ways to accelerate innovation and drive efficiency. In fact, many businesses have embraced Digital Transformation to push productivity and profits to the max.

As per IDC FutureScape predictions, direct digital transformation investment is expected to hit $7.1 trillion as more companies are becoming digital-at-scale future enterprises.

The accelerated pace of digital transformation has been playing a vital role in the growth of organizations. And embracing new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) is the surefire way to transform your business while keeping up with evolving customer expectations and market volatility.

So, what does Digital Transformation mean for Businesses?

The times are changing fast with every new technology. Right now, it is no longer enough to have a great range of product offerings to win your customers’ hearts and drive revenue streams. One of the promising ways to stay ahead of the competition is by embracing innovation and new digital technologies.

Digital transformation can help enterprises replace manual processes, enhance business productivity, and spare human time for more strategic thinking and creative approaches to fuel business growth. It helps businesses rethink their leadership model and create products and solutions that make a difference in the competitive market.

Together with the rising customer expectations and heavy influx of tech-enabled startups, there is a massive market pressure for enterprises to go under transformation and change the existing business processes. From the ways to interact with customers to deal with internal processes, digital transformation has a great impact on every aspect of business.

Accelerate your Digital Transformation Journey with IoT

By 2025, experts have predicted that there will be over 75 billion IoT connected devices in use. Home automation sensors, modern equipment diagnostics in healthcare, prediction-based maintenance of industrial assets, IoT is now everywhere. As we edge toward this highly customer-driven world, data generated from these connected devices are driving a huge business value to transform business processes radically.

Example of an IoT Device

General Tools, a company specialized in hand tools and instruments, has partnered with Icreon to use IoT as a major technology to develop a ToolSmart mobile application. The app uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to connect with the underlying hardware and offers users more ease to measure better. The app backend works on IoT data, which is used to calculate precise number of materials users will be needing to complete a job. In addition, the backend enables the company to keep track of orders made by customers and alert the customers about project completion time and cost over the fly. This IoT based application is a perfect example of bringing transformation in the tools industry by making the measuring job smarter.

Let’s take a look at how IoT data is driving digital transformation.

1. Creating New Business Opportunities

With the sensors accumulated data, businesses can examine their customer needs and offer products according to their needs. In addition, they can introduce new products and solutions to cater to a broader audience. IoT empowers brands with advanced analytics to uncover useful insights and opportunities. For example, better product personalization, which leads to improved conversion.

Might Useful: Is Internet of Things the Future of Business

2. Improving Monitoring of Assets

Companies can monitor and manage a network of physical objects using connected setups. IoT devices with sensor capabilities can provide insight into equipment health, whereabouts of a connected device, asset status, and other data points. Consider monitoring the whole network and infrastructure used by customers and the business itself. The data collected from an IoT gateway or onsite monitor could be enhanced with data about hardware version and firmware version for better monitoring.

3. Delivering Meaningful and Tailored Customer Experience

With the huge volume of data coming in from the connected devices, companies can tap into IoT analytics to see customer behavior trends and customize their experiences. They can look at how customers are requesting and keep a tab on the ways of providing responses. For instance, is business only responding to requests, or by harnessing IoT data, can businesses create new opportunities to fuel revenue streams.

Helpful Read: How the Internet of Medical Things Is Creating New Opportunities for Life Sciences

4. Increasing Customer Satisfaction

With the power of IoT, customer dialog can be increased which further leads to higher customer satisfaction. It also offers an estimate of what customers might expect to pay in the coming months. By using this information, marketing and business partners can create business models that would lead to increased customer dialog, trust, and retention.

5. Improving Business Efficiency

IoT plays a crucial role in increasing business efficiency through process automation. Examples can include gaining new visibility into the data to autonomous sensors that control a device or a function by leveraging IoT data, AI, and Machine Learning capabilities. Consider how businesses are figuring out gaps in data collection for each control. To avoid these gaps across various processes including inventory management, logistics, security, IoT data can be leveraged to close the gap, and improve and enhance controls.

6. Slashing down the Operating Costs

Process automation with IoT services can cut down operational costs and allows businesses to use resources wisely. For instance, predictive analytics can help enterprises to better manage their assets as they can get future outcomes based on data collected from the sensors. When technologies like Machine Learning and statistical algorithms combined with IoT, companies can do the best assessment of events that will happen in the future and optimize costs.

7. Improving Employee Productivity

Just like Cloud technology, IoT can help empower your staff, provides better productivity and agility, and makes business systems easily available anywhere, anytime. Sensor capabilities can keep employees connected at all times and deliver real-time data for better and enhanced productivity.

How does IoT Connect and Share Data?

In IoT, the collection of data is done by transmitting it from the devices or sensors to a gathering point. And the communication or data transmission between devices happen using various technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, LTE, Beacon or even satellite connections. The data can be sent over the Internet to a data center or cloud that has storage and computing capabilities. This way, organizations can leverage IoT data and perform analytics across various industrial applications.

Interesting Read: Understanding Azure RTOS for IoT Applications

According to research conducted by Ericcson, around 5 billion IoT devices will be connected to cellular networks by 2025.

Now with the emergence of 5G technology, a faster network with higher capacity can support the connectivity needs of various IoT projects. For instance, 5G implementation can support as many as one million 5G connected smart devices within 1 km range. That means you can put a large number of sensors in close proximity, making large-scale industrial IoT deployments possible.

IoT is a Game Changer

The Internet of Things (IoT), the wired web of physical objects, is a perfect tool to future-proof your business processes. As the number of connected devices continues to rise and scale, our surroundings will be covered with smart devices and products, which will surely lead to increased digital transformation.

Thinking about IoT for your next Digital Transformation project! Icreon as a leading IoT service provider agency can help you in IoT integration and development to take your transformation to the next level.