Internet of Things | A New Era for Online Business

The future of Internet of Things is not just limited to households, IoT development has moved from pilot to production stage to drive significant business value and bring digital transformation. Today, organizations are employing intelligent products and solutions to boost business efficiency, enable customization, and augment user experience like never before.

IoT is a powerful element that businesses need today and, in the future, to respond to changing market needs and make use of data to make informed decisions.

What is the Internet of Things?

Internet of Things is the network of various internet-connected things that have inbuilt sensors, electronics, or other technology for connecting and exchanging data with other devices over the Internet. These devices range from household objects to enterprise assets, agriculture tools to manufacturing equipment, and the list goes on.

It is worth noting that the number of IoT devices is expected to grow to 27 billion by 2025 – IoT Analytics.

The statistics clearly say that IoT is going to rule the business world. The combination of sensors, communication devices, analytics, cloud, and low-cost computing is going to create a mesh of interconnected solutions and products that would bring a new age of automation to businesses.

How are Businesses Adopting to IoT?

As IoT development continues to evolve, small or large businesses will find new horizons to embed tech, ramp up productivity, and increase efficiency. Many businesses or enterprises have started to step into the digital world with IoT. For example, General Tools, a company specializing in manufacturing a full line of precision instruments, electronics, and measurement tools, has leveraged IoT to build a ToolSmart application. This mobile app finishes customer projects with fine precision and, on time & within budget. The app enables Bluetooth-connected tools to capture data and update customers about the project completion time and cost over the fly. This is bringing about a revolution in making measuring jobs smarter.

Other industry areas adopting IoT include:

• Banks are leveraging IoT technology to bring on-demand services closer to customers through kiosks, resulting in increased accessibility of services.
• Agriculture machinery companies are applying IoT to keep track of important agricultural parameters like moisture levels, air, and soil temperature, and convey the collected data to farmers. Utilizing such tools helps farmers to do precision farming which greatly increases the efficiency of fertilizers and produces good yield.
• The medical sector is also employing IoT based wearable devices to gather data, monitor patient’s health, and make their lives safer.

Considering IoT adoption on such a big level, there is no doubt that IoT is providing businesses with opportunities to achieve operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and build new revenue streams.

How IoT is Shaping the Future of Business?

Building end-to-end systems and a smart range of products is critical in this digital era. While there are a great number of ways for businesses to include IoT devices in their business model, there are five specific advantages that are particularly appealing to a majority of companies, regardless of their industry.

Asset Tracking and Inventory Management

For businesses that face problems in inventory tracking and management, applying IoT is a real game-changer. IoT applications allow companies with warehouses and storage units to monitor and track inventory by means of automatic control points operated by smart devices. This helps companies a lot to reduce manpower who are excessively engaged in inventory-related matters. Similarly, asset tracking, when done with IoT, can help businesses catch faulty assets or assets that went missing during transportation.

In addition, combining IoT products with analytics can prevent theft scenarios. For example, Amazon is using Wi-Fi robots that scan QR codes on its wide range of products and track order, hence getting an uptick in shipping capacity.

Data Sharing

A business can generate avenues of growth with predictive maintenance, automatic product upgrades, and asset tracking. A suite of sensors located in production systems, assembly lines, storage units, and vehicles produces data streams that help businesses understand the patterns in which a user connects with the device. As massive amounts of data keeps flowing in from data points, sensors, IoT applications, this real-time information helps companies get insight into productivity and performance standpoint. Thus, the learning from data and its patterns helps organizations to innovate and grow in this cut-throat competition.

Market Strategizing

As organizations are learning from a large amount of data, they can ultimately build marketing strategies on the basis of processed data to meet customer requirements. Through internet-connected devices, organizations can obtain a multi-dimensional view of customers’ preferences. After learning the preferences, they can build campaigns that yield results as per the set marketing goals. On top of that, IoT-based applications segment the customer base, generate customized offers to uplift customer satisfaction rate, and enhance customer experience.

Harnessing Real-Time Insights

In the current times, businesses work on data. The more data they have, the more informed decisions they will make. With IoT devices, they can obtain real-time data, which in turn, helps them gain visibility into what’s happening inside. Like, retailers can obtain insight about customer behaviors and their choices and can fill in inventory or stock and maximize profit with efficient sales monitoring in place.

Another key point is that IoT can work in sync with systems and smart cameras to prevent defects and respond to the issues quickly. For example, some airports are employing smart cameras inbuilt with sensors to address issues like broken escalators, unhygienic washrooms and bottlenecks within corridors.

Better Customer Retention and Service

As IoT works on collecting the user-specific data, companies can leverage this information to get insights into customer expectations and needs. This way, by serving exactly what’s demanded to the target audience, helps businesses get an upper hand in the customer retention game.  

Moreover, the data captured through the IoT devices also helps businesses track a sale, as well as helps customers track their purchases. For example, with the help of right data, organizations can facilitate follow-up emails to customers after they make a sale, such as telling them about the product or service usage, maintenance tips, steps to use, precautions, warranty periods, and other such valuable information. Such follow-ups will always result in a positive customer’s experience using that product. This way, a business can not just provide better service but also retain the majority of its customers with a shorter sales cycle.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

Enterprises are always on the lookout to achieve greater efficiency, flexibility, and productivity. The proliferation of IoT devices across various parts of the organization means digitization of process flows, which further helps reduce costs and increase time to market. Efficiency can be realized as data flows in from sensors and is processed and further changes are deployed without human involvement. For instance, vehicles are rerouted to the most optimal route to make travel faster. Drones may be deployed over an oil field to monitor the pipelines and identify issues even before humans reach them.

Build a More Connected World with IoT 

For businesses, IoT is a future-proof technology that brings more opportunities in terms of optimizing their business operations and increasing profit. By bringing data and intelligence together, it is making it possible for businesses to drive transformation. If you are ready to enable customization across your business processes and improve customer experience, IoT development with advanced analytics and cloud is the profound pick.

At Icreon, we’re here to help you navigate this shift by examining your challenges and applying IoT to make the future more promising for your business. Explore Icreon’s IoT Connected Solutions.