You’re no doubt familiar with the trend for smart products - perhaps you are even reading this blog on your smartphone or tablet. But this trend for smart products is not just referring to phones and computers. It can refer to any product that has the ability to behave in a smart way.
There are many attributes that can make a product smart, including:
- Personalisation – the ability to adapt to the end user’s specific requirements
- Pro-active – the ability to anticipate the end user’s intentions and change accordingly
- Connectivity – the ability to communicate with other things or product sets
- Adaptive – the ability to respond to the end user’s tasks and accommodate them
What is the value that these attributes offer?
The benefits can be roughly divided into two groups – benefits for the manufacturer and benefits for the consumer.
With smart products able to provide real-time data, it enables manufacturers to monitor performance and use this information to optimise products. This information can also be used to identify cost-savings, opportunities to increase revenue and also risk management.
For consumers, it means they can have products that perform to their precise requirements. It also means, with products like smart meters, they can save money.
What challenges do companies need to overcome to access this value?
But smart products also make designs a lot more complicated. As a result, the need for product lifecycle management solutions is greater than ever before. With more complexity, companies need to find a way to manage this effectively. There are also some challenging design questions that arise, including:
- Where does the sensor go?
- Where do we use software?
- Where do we use hardware?
- How do the software and hardware elements connect together?
To access the benefits and value of smart products for both themselves and their consumers, companies need to have the supporting systems and processes in place to enable them to overcome the challenges that are associated with designing, developing and manufacturing increasingly complex products.
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