siliconindia | | July - August 201719operational areas. For companies managing or owning fleets, having additional real-time data such as GPS location information and engine data provides for more efficient fleet management, such as in-transit visibility, efficient dispatching and reduction of unscheduled downtime. For example, it can be extremely costly if heavy equipment goes down on a mining project. By RFID tagging key components in the heavy equipment, operational and service personnel can get more accurate, granular knowledge of the usage of each component beyond the higher-level metrics such as engine mileage data. For a component that has been transferred between different machines, tracking at a component-level by linking together its actual usage with each and every machine's engine hours it has been on, provides accurate usage of that specific component. This usage might have increased that specific component's level of wear compared to other components on that same machine. This insight drives the decision for replacing or servicing that specific component earlier than the other components on that machine, thus preventing a failure which in some cases could have catastrophic implications.Increased and actionable data, if analysed correctly and on time, leads to better decision making. It can also open up new opportunities and enable businesses to launch new products and services. IoT provides real-time granular and actionable information. Once customers start seeing the rich, actionable and high-fidelity information they receive through their initial IoT investment, they start reimagining how to run their operations and making them more efficient by enabling new use cases. Think big, Start small, Scale fastTo take advantage of these opportunities, operations and information technology executives need to find a comprehensive IoT platform that can incorporate various technologies and devices, is scalable across users, business units and enterprises; and is flexible enough to enable new use cases. This can be done by investing in a comprehensive IoT solution stack. Starting at the bottom of the stack are the devices­being device agnostic is important­then followed by connectivity­local and wide area connectivity that prevents any "dark spots"­the next layer is device management­the ability to manage the lifecycle of an IoT device. The following two layers include application enablement­which means that you can take the information that is being generated to enable use cases which can take the form of purpose built SaaS applications and that can be integrated with your existing enterprise systems­and finally analytics, which can be descriptive, predictive or prescriptive. Picking the right vendor is crucial to ensuring return on investment and cost of ownership benefits. Future proof is also a key consideration. You need a platform which is open, standards-based and agnostic, where you can incorporate IoT technologies and rapidly enable new use cases. The key to this is execution. Our philosophy is to think big, start small with a PoC or pilot, but to scale fast with the infrastructure, platforms and tools.With the right vision, right technology and the right vendors in place, the IoT has the potential to become central to a customer's supply chain or service operations, driving value and generating ideas for new business services. Companies that embrace it today will give themselves an important competitive advantage over rivals, who prefer to rely on legacy systems and traditional models. With the right vision, right technology, and the right vendors in place, the IoT has the potential to become central to a customer's supply chain
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