IoT in Enterprise- How Enterprises can Benefit from IoT?

IoT has been changing enterprises and their work. While technology leaders are increasingly focusing on the importance of automation in enterprises, even business owners agree on the effectiveness of IoT in improving their existing processes.  

• 83% of the organizations agree that IoT improves process efficiency 
• 66% of the early adopters say that IoT gives them a competitive advantage 
• 76% of the enterprises believe IoT implementation has given them insights into customer behavior 
• 66% of the enterprises use IoT to measure risks, protect assets, and improve staff security  

Source: https://dataprot.net/statistics/iot-statistics  

No wonder most enterprises are either planning IoT implementation or are maximizing their existing investments in this direction. This blog talks about the reasons that are encouraging these decision-makers. 

Let’s begin.

How can Enterprises Benefit from IoT? 

1. IoT-powered Process Automation

As businesses across the globe turn tech-savvier, enterprises are facing challenges at a higher level. Implementing IoT in their businesses has helped companies channel their skilled resources in the right direction while automation takes care of more day-to-day activities. Therefore, businesses can ensure higher efficiency and optimize the cost of operation while eliminating the skill gaps, increasing personnel costs, and decreasing product quality.  

Research has proven that: 

• 86% of the employees believe automation helps them improve efficiency, increase productivity, and fuel growth (Source). 
• Global businesses can save 749 billion hours by automating 64% of the manufacturing tasks (Source) 
• The process automation market will be worth USD 2.9 billion by 2025. (Forrester) 

IoT-powered process automation also allows enterprises to boost their compliance and mitigate operational risks. Here is how IoT-powered processes automation can help enterprises:

Automated Report Generation

IoT systems connect all the devices within the enterprises and collect data. This data can create detailed reports in minutes and identify potential gaps and shortfalls. They can also place patterns and indicate any areas of concern regarding productivity, sales, etc.

Employee Onboarding

Adding new employees to the enterprise takes a lot of energy from the HR team. There are multiple forms to fill in, and employees must undergo training such as induction, team, product usage, etc. This can be automated using IoT-based solutions where machines from the documents can capture data, and movement can be rendered with minimal human intervention.

2. IoT in Supply Chain, Fleet Tracking, and Management 

IoT allows enterprises to track and monitor their supply chain operations in real-time. They can stay updated about the current location of the products, their status on the manufacturing lifecycle, and more to make an informed strategic decision. An easy-to-use dashboard enables a detailed view of the entire supply chain, team’s efficiency, delivery status, and how logistics are working in general. 

One of the most important goals of running a business is making it future-ready. The right IoT implementation can help you ensure the same. At the same time, leveraging predictive analytics to analyze past data and current trends to identify common patterns. This information is critical to analyzing supply against demands to plan the sales funnel accordingly.  

You can also proactively plan for the supply chain cycle and detect anomalies in case of uncertain conditions like weather changes.

Also Read: IoT Consulting Services: Everything You Need to Know  

3. IoT for Asset/Plant Performance Optimization

• 40% of small businesses lack effective asset and inventory tracking 
• 80% of the employees waste half of their productive hours retrieving asset information 
• Asset theft has affected every third person in the last two years.  

Certainly, asset tracking and management is a daunting and critical task. Traditional asset tracking methods like satellite and cellular fail to deliver expectations and are technically incompetent, expensive, and don’t offer optimum asset monitoring.  

This is when IoT-based asset tracking and monitoring systems come in. Here are the top use cases of IoT in asset tracking. 

Supply Chain and Logistics

High-value assets need constant tracking for businesses to eliminate conditions like theft, reroutes, and extended delivery periods. IoT enabled real-time monitoring of these assets with visibility into the supply chain, exact asset location, delivery status, asset condition, and more.

Facility Monitoring

Smart surveillance systems keep managers and decision-makers updated about the asset conditions across floors and make informed decisions about the same. Cameras and sensors transmit data to the IoT systems that can detect any illegal activity or anything that may be a cause for concern. This allows managers to take timely action in incidents of displacement.

4. IoT- based Quality Control & Management

Product-based companies highly rely on the quality of their products. The end product’s quality is an important determinant in their success journey. For instance, if you are a brand that offers cooking products, a small mismatch in the number of constituents can lead to a big quality blunder, costing you a lot of money and, of course, reputation. 

With manual methods, you don’t have any control over these issues. The expertise, moods, and health of the staff impact the quality of deliverables and even effects efficiency. IoT-based solutions can solve this. The combination of AI and IoT enables inspection at the product lifecycle stage. This overcomes the challenges associated with the manual processes and eliminates the scrap and defect rejects. Since efficiency remains the same, the quality of products remains unchanged and results in a shorter turnaround time.

Real-time Monitoring

IoT allows enterprises to monitor the process in real-time. This detects anomalies and defects during the production stage itself to avoid any problems ahead. Real-time monitoring also helps with automated defect correction. It can be seamlessly impactful in the areas where human intervention is impossible or hazardous such as heat furnaces, chemical labs, etc.

End of Line Quality Assurance

Sensors installed at the end of the line detect product defects at the end of the line automatically. This ensures less loss caused by the scraped products and even improves inefficiency by detecting microscopic inaccuracies which may be unnoticed by the human eye.

5. IoT for Predictive Maintenance 

• Unplanned downtime costs enterprises USD50 billion annually 
• Aging equipment is one of the leading causes of the unplanned downtime 
• The average cost per hour of downtime is USD 260,000. 

These figures clearly state the value of predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance is a proactive approach that helps avoid unexpected downtime and alerts the management in case discrepancies are observed. This data is also analyzed based on the specific KPIs for stakeholders to view detailed reports. It can also help them lay out which resources are scheduled for maintenance so that managers can allocate and plan load accordingly. 

Predictive maintenance helps enterprises in multiple ways:

Reduced Maintenance Costs

Untimely maintenance can be a big deal-breaker for your budget. Regular maintenance schedules ensure your resources don't run into unplanned downtimes that hamper production.

Asset Reliability

Unexpected failures and maintenance cause production efficiency to decrease significantly, which ultimately impacts production costs and profits. Advance forecasts allow enterprises to forecast machine usage in advance and hence, plan for unexpected downtime.

Improved Resource Life

Regular maintenance schedules pave the way for better resource life, eliminating frequent resource replacement costs.

Improved Plant Safety and Compliance

Having data such as temperature, RPM, voltage, etc. Allows managers to flag potential hazards and avoid them by taking the right measures.

6. Increases Safety 

Enterprises need to ensure safety on various levels. Besides ensuring workers’ safety, they also need to stay updated on the activities on the premises to avoid theft, misuse, etc. Having IoT-based monitoring and security systems installed on the organization’s premises can help you ensure comprehensive security. Here’s how:

Real-time Monitoring

IoT-powered cameras and wearables allow managers to monitor the premises in real-time. Anytime a potentially hazardous condition is detected, the managers receive an alert for them to take the right measure on time. For instance, if there is a security breach, these systems can track the location and match it against the patterns during a past security breach. Once authorities receive the notification, they can take relevant measures. Similarly, while monitoring the manufacturing floor, smart systems such as accelerometers and GPS sensors can send emergency alerts to the managers in case of workers' slips, incorrect posture, etc. This helps prevent an unhealthy work environment and regulate the working environment properly.

Improved Safety in Legacy Solutions

IoT can connect to legacy systems like suppression solutions and HVAC, which extends intended functionality to alert in case of security-related issues. These systems can also detect problems such as temperature increase, chemical release, water penetration, and the speed of spread. Managers can eliminate the risks by taking timely measures.

7. Improved Efficiency 

Enterprises are always on the lookout for ways to maximize process efficiency, whether they are being performed automatically or manually. IoT brings them the right technological stacks to achieve this goal, besides many other things. Data-driven actionable insights help decision-makers make the right strategic decisions contributing to the company’s growth.

Process Visibility

IoT-based solutions allow real-time visibility into the business processes, allowing managers to verify production quality and efficiency, even remotely. This helps them plan resources in the event of the system drop-off to ensure there is no disruption in the production speed. This visibility leads to optimized resource utilization and deployment.

Process Automation

Process automation decreases manual labor significantly and improves product quality significantly. This ensures the highest efficiency, and the workforce can also focus on the tasks that require hands-on experience.

Higher Accuracy

No matter how careful the manual resources are, there is always a chance of inaccuracies like measurement errors. Moreover, it is impossible for the manual teams to feel the same at all times. The emotional stage can hamper the quality and speed of production. This is where process automation comes in. Automated units allow for constant production monitoring to avoid manual discrepancies, short runs, and inventory mismanagement.

Also Read- IoT Software Development: A Complete Guide

Are You Ready to Transform Your Enterprise with the Right IoT Technology? 

If the answer is yes, take it from experts. Analyzing your existing structure and how IoT fits your business is extremely important. Investment in the right IoT technology can improve your overall organizational output. At Matellio, we help companies of various sizes from diverse industry verticals to take the right step initially to maximize their value in the long run. Our custom IoT development services for enterprises are tailored to help them channel the existing data and patterns in the direction they can make sense of to strategize further. 

We ensure powerful IoT projects with our strategic IoT development services, assuring supreme-level development practice. 

• Specialized IoT Teams 
• Vast industry experience with IoT products 
• Handon experience in the futuristic technology stack 
• Secure data management 
• Management for legacy and advanced devices 
• High-performance data streaming and analytics 

To know more, reach out to our team right away.