What are the best lessons to be learnt in Industrial IoT?

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What are the best lessons to be learnt in Industrial IoT?

Many companies are beginning to find success with IoT, but not without a few bumps along the way—you might call those “experience”. HPE wanted to take the pulse of machine-to-machine IoT implementers: We surveyed 80 IT professionals with key roles in industrial IoT deployments and asked them what went well, what didn’t, and why.

From their responses, we pulled out the six best practices for quick success—and how to avoid common pitfalls.

• Don’t neglect change management: Many organizations reported projects succeeded technically but ultimately failed because stakeholders weren’t proactively informed. Be sure to disseminate the reasons for the project, as well as the benefits and responsibilities for all stakeholders. This will help avoid surprises and ultimately prevent your implementation from being derailed.

• Avoid Internets of Things: IoT projects rely on data being shared securely between groups, processes, and people. That means you need one, committed IoT plan. Too often, groups from different regions or functional organizations deploy different projects to address the same problems but end up being inconsistent with one another.

• Start small and improve frequently: Since IoT introduces new technologies and concepts, a common mistake is underestimating the resources and the time required. To stay on track, start small, achieve continual and incremental success, and ensure that you have the resources to deliver on your plan.

Getting IoT right

Digitization can be a very powerful tool to dramatically improve efficiency, develop new products, and provide fantastic customer experience. While many things can go wrong with IoT, the rewards are worth the risk. This isn’t just our opinion; our survey respondents shared their success stories as well as their setbacks. Four business benefits of IoT came up over and over again in their responses:

• Lower CAPEX, higher capacity. The soft-dollar benefits of IoT can be huge, especially in manufacturing, energy, and utilities. Many organizations are replacing CAPEX with pay-per-use for equipment.

• Proactive maintenance is better than “Oops, it stopped working”: IoT data allows industrial organizations to switch from reactive to proactive maintenance, which reduces downtime and cuts costs.

• Make customers happier: IoT can empower skilled technical staff to do more remotely, delivering more value and innovative customer service experiences.

• Optimize asset management: Does anyone really enjoy looking for things? Knowing something’s location is a much better use of time than looking for it. IoT helps organizations coordinate inventory and identify assets—where and when needed.

IoT devices offer businesses the ability to connect the unconnected, collecting and delivering significant volumes of real-time insight—the kind of insight that can help identify opportunity, drive efficiencies, and fuel intelligent business decisions.

A core challenge OEMs face is the scale of that data: You must not only store it, but also make sense of it. Aligning with an infrastructure partner who can integrate IoT devices and enable the storage and compute required to capture their value is the difference between business innovation and missed opportunities. When developed and integrated together with HPE expertise and world-class support, IoT becomes a versatile tool that can improve industrial operations, enhance enterprise workflows, and connect across dispersed facilities.