How Value Criteria can keep you out of trouble

In one of my earlier articles, I made it clear that IoT brings out a lot of new opportunities for every company. The challenge for most companies is to select a good use-case to start with. A case that will give you a lot of experience and has a serious impact on the business. Choosing the wrong use case will only cost you a lot of time, money and disappointment.

To choose a good use-case, you have to use the Value versus Effort comparison. I'll explain you 3 Value criteria you should definitely use when you are preparing the evaluation.

If you want to get rich, start cutting costs

If you want to get rich, one easy way is spend less money on the things you are doing every day. In the industrial service domain, a lot of companies are thinking on predictive maintenance analytics. In stead of planning a technical check or intervention every 2 weeks, you can use predictive analytics to define when you really need to do the intervention. You're going from a 2 weekly frequency to a much lower one. Which means you save a lot of unneeded service costs. Varian is a company that saved 2000€ per intervention. If Varian reduced the interventions by 1000 per year, it would already lead to a saving of 2.000.000€

So when you're evaluating the use case, think in how much money you could possibly save.

To choose a good use-case, you have to use the Value versus Effort comparison.

If you want to get even richer, make more money

Mcdonalds is using artificial intelligence to do more up-selling. By analyzing the weather, local activities, the customers order and many other criteria, Mcdonalds is able to evaluate which kind of customer is in front and make a personalized proposition.

If someone is ordering 2 happy meals, the system would assume that a mum or dad is ordering. Mcdonalds could offer an extra coffee for the charming parent, which will have a bigger hit-rate than when you're offering this to 2 16 years old.

So if you want to get richer, think how your case could generate much more revenue.

My mom was right about "the impact effect on others"

If you're doing something good, it will not only have an effect on yourself but also on the people around you. And this is also for IoT use cases.

A real example: A customer wanted to create auto-calculating dynamic dashboards with data that was available in their company. If production data was used for the use case, it would have an impact on the production and also sales department. By having auto-calculating dashboards, there would be more time to focus on the production, resulting in more products that are sell-able.

If marketing data was being used, it would be only helpful for the marketing department. In this case it didn't had a big impact on production and sales, which was more important for the company.

So this company chose to go for production dashboards to start with.

When you're evaluating the case, think about how it impacts your own department and also what it could mean for your colleagues.

3 criteria that will keep you out of trouble

If you're using these 3 criteria, you're already on track for defining a good use case that will keep you out of the trouble of loosing time and money.