The IoT solutions market stood at USD 5 Bn as of October 2019. Advanced principal technologies and a proliferation of devices have fueled the growth of the IoT solutions industry. Investments are projected to grow at 13.6% per year until 2022 due to more computing power, reliable connectivity, and new sensors.
After years of steady uptake, IoT is poised to cross over to mainstream business use. The number of businesses that use the IoT tech increased from 13% in 2014 to about 25% today. The worldwide number of IoT-connected devices is slated to increase to 43 billion by 2023, a threefold increase from 2018.
The IoT solutions already number more than 200 applications in the enterprise setting, but IoT adoption is not limited to large companies. Early adopters have moved beyond pilots to scale IoT solutions across their businesses.
How Has Business Changed Due to IoT Solutions?
The primary use case of IoT is to make big data sharing and analysis fast and accurate. The sphere of operation of the business may change due to IoT integration. Here are several key aspects that have already changed.
- Takes a new approach to tracking inventory – IoT solutions applications can perform a considerable part of the work assigned to inventory managers, like managing storage units, measuring inner company resources, checking hardware health, and making a request to suppliers in any industry without making human-factor mistakes.
- Collects and interprets data – Companies work with data. Machines and applications/special software have taken over data processing and replaced humans in collecting information on buyer cycle, recording popular requirements, studying how people use your platform/solution/product, and investigating your promotional channels’ efficiency. This has made user experience improvement easy to create.
- Automates productivity and efficiency – IoT solutions can optimize tasks within enterprises automatically, calculate workflow drawbacks, and look for reasons for customer service slowing down. IoT solutions implementation can raise the efficiency of your company, help improve product quality and free up staff time for more creative tasks. HR talent management can use IoT solutions to reject low-skilled candidates in favor of retaining or hiring highly skilled ones.
- Makes enterprises autonomous – IoT solutions has allowed companies to forget about the office concept at all. Digital devices have allowed employees to interact with each other. Talent management can monitor employee performance from outside the physical boundaries of the office, saving money on rent and paying hiring specialists.
How Wide is its Adoption Today?
IoT solutions and technologies have already furthered Industry 4.0, smart cities, connected vehicles, and e-health. Due to advances in technology, affected sectors are accessing functionality that did not exist five years ago.
B2B companies, for instance, are using Industry 4.0 to maintain direct connections to their products in the field, helping them monitor, make predictive maintenance possible, improve efficiency, and ensure equipment uptime.
Use case 1 – A pest control company deployed a fully automatic solution using cellular connectivity to monitor and control pest activity. Its features enabled more practical for customers than conventional monitoring methods and made it highly profitable for the provider.
They replaced the standard physical and manual pest-control tools with IoT solutions, avoided pesticide use, and generated documents and data required for regularity compliance.
Use case 2 – A specialty chemical company used an IoT solutions suite to improve manufacturing and supply chain performance. The company was able to track overall equipment effectiveness online, eliminating bottlenecks in operations, which led to significant output improvement.
Use case 3 – Rolls-Royce, through its TotalCare program, rents out its jet engines using the ‘power by the hour’ model. It leverages IoT to monitor the usage of jet engines using integrated sensors that collect data and send it to the cloud-based platform for continuous analysis. Rolls-Royce retains the engine’s ownership and takes care of its maintenance throughout its life cycle.
The results are out there to see. Implementing IoT solutions has been generating efficiency gains of 20-30% by improving performance in delivery time and pricing for tailored opportunities. Additionally, these solutions are helping private equity-owned companies position themselves for their next phase of growth and new investors.
Service providers must prepare themselves by managing things to offer a packaged solution. They must figure out end-to-end capabilities throughout hardware (installation and management), network, software, data, security, and then create marketable solutions to represent their expertise in IoT solutions.
Draup’s sales intelligence platform provides sales teams with data on prospects’ business intentions and outsourcing roadmaps. It brings their notice to key signals and trends and converts the insights into action points, allowing sales leaders to target enterprises with IoT solutions that address certain pain points.