Concurrent Engineering Blog

Manufacturers must begin to transform existing business processes and fundamentally rethink how they create, operate, and service smart, connected products in the IoT. For those that get it right, the future represents a huge opportunity to create product and service advantage:

Transform How Products are Created

1. Plan and design flexible platforms that enable personalisation, value added services, and product enhancements to be delivered remotely before and after the product is in the market
2. Design out the complexity created by combining processors, sensors, software, digital user interfaces and connectivity, and deliver a simple user experience
3. Incorporate product usage data into R&D processes and drive new functionality, define specifications, and increase customer intimacy

If you’re the head of a company that’s been making pumps for the last 100 years, your company knows your product and knows what the definition of a pump should be. But now the definition of ‘what is a product’ is changing and it’s changing fast. So how is it that you can keep up to date and remain relevant in a world when your bread and butter product is below the price of entry in a competitive marketplace?

Over the last 10 years there’s been the trend for including embedded software and electronics (it’s almost certainly a trend that’s now ingrained in the way that you work). But now a new challenge is emerging; moving from a smart pump to a smart, connected pump. There are new technological opportunities that need embracing, but it’s hard to know where to start. After all there’s now big data, security, mobility, cloud and so on – a whole host of areas you never had to think about before.