Why do you need to apply IoT Technology in your business?
The Internet of Things, or IoT as it is popularly called, is an interconnected computing system between different devices and objects, so that they can communicate and exchange data over a network. These devices are designed to sense, collect, and exchange data without requiring human intervention. You can remotely monitor and control IoT devices. The advent of this technology has helped to increase the profit rate of most businesses by 1-5%, according to recent reports. IoT technology has been successfully applied in the consumer, infrastructure, and enterprise business sectors.
If you run a business related to stock-keeping and warehousing, IoT systems can be implemented to help you monitor and manage your stock-takings, effectively utilizing a set of automatically-controlled options.
IoT devices can record the interactions patterns of your customers. This way, you can offer your customers a better experience, while interpreting and sharing collected data.
With IoT devices, more work can be done in a shorter time. Clear insight about your consumers’ needs, as well as the market, can be obtained. This will lead to an increase in the productivity and the efficiency.
Applying IoT technology allows you to not physically be present on-site. IoT devices can be remotely controlled from anywhere by your employees, or by yourself.
Every business project or process starts with a clear definition of the plan and understanding of your business’ issues. Therefore, the first stage of the IoT workflow is interpreting the project goals, as well as the results you expect to see. The SoftElegance team will assist you in identifying the key performance indicators of your business, which can be estimated and improved with the implementation of IoT technology.
In this IoT workflow stage, existing devices and specified components are combined to become the data source for the platform. At the completion of this stage, the SoftElegance team will identify all the requirements for involving physical units with the connected platform.
The sensors connected to the IoT devices create multiple data points, which turn into immense data assets. Although this data is the baseline of an enterprise IoT solution, it is no less important to use correct data points that can influence the defined metrics.
In creating an enterprise IoT solution, lots of mechanisms and protocols are involved, as regards to its connectivity. This includes how the actuators work together with the device sensors to communicate to legacy devices. It also covers how the connected devices communicate with the edge layer, as well as the raw format of the datasets from the devices; and, finally, how the protocol translation occurs between connected devices and the gateway.
Before processing the datasets for this implementation, the datasets must be encrypted and compressed to ensure robust security. Rules will be implemented to define which persons can control the connected devices, as well as access the dashboard. To prevent third-party access to the sensitive data and reports in the system, the integrated governance model will be deployed.
In order for the datasets generated by the connected devices and sensors to be useful, the right context is applied. Regularly, this right context is derived from external datasets that possess accumulated values, historical trends, and lookup tables. The architects and data scientists of SoftElegance will cautiously look out for blind spots in the datasets to complement it with external reference data.
At this stage, an ingestion layer is designed to route a subset of any data that passes into the IoT platform. The subset passes through a channel specifically meant to handle real-time data points. This channel is referred to as the hot path analytics, and the metrics that take on this channel will be identified by the architects of SoftElegance.
It is important to acquire, combine, process, and analyze the subsets of the sensor data to discover historical trends and patterns. Cold path analytics refers to the transforming, storing, processing, and analyzing long-term data points. In designing an IoT solution, batch processing and separating of data points for long-term archival is important at this stage.
Typically, IoT solutions have a user experience layer that serves two categories of persons: operations managers and decision-makers. The operations managers manage the devices layer via the IoT solution and send commands to the control actuators, as well as monitor the devices remotely. Analysts and your business decision-makers are the other category of persons that can work on IoT solutions; they rely on data-based information for decision-making. Also, this class of users is granted access to the dashboards, as they are in charge of the policies and rules that reflect your business needs.