The cookie experiment & SIM management

Aside from my primary role of being a Product Marketer, I'm also the standing office manager at our Cape Town office. There are a lot of fun, kind-of-fun, and not-so-fun things that I have to tick off my to-do list. One of the more fun tasks I get to do is the monthly snack cupboard shopping. What started as a couple of crackers, coffee beans and milk, has turned into a part-time job of making sure there are snacks (cookies mostly) for everyone to munch.

The order started off with one or two boxes and then quickly advanced to an order that was quite the spectacle. The most popular cookies were these funny sugar-free wafer things and then, of course, a cult classic: Jolly Jammers.

I started to observe a couple of things about the munching habits of my colleagues:

No one will open a fresh box of cookies unless it's after 3 PM.

When the box is open, everyone will eat them unless there is only one left, and then no one eats the last one.

And the most interesting...

The more boxes of cookies there are in the cupboard, the faster they all get eaten, and the quicker we run out of cookies. It doesn't matter how many boxes I buy: if I purchase on the 1st of the month, it is guaranteed that they will all be gone by the 18th of the month.

Now, there are a couple of reasons this could be happening. I think its a classic example of abundance versus scarcity. If anyone knows the actual psychological term for this phenomenon, please let me know in the comments. Whatever it is termed, it's the same phenomenon that happens on Christmas day when you'll find that your family's plates are piled higher because of the abundance of food - even though they don't usually need or eat that much food.

This is what was happening in the office. Despite no one needing to eat a box of cookies a day, they were demolishing everything I packed into the cupboard. I decided to run a little experiment to see if I could decrease the cookie budget (and try to instigate a bit of self-control back into the office).

After the cookies were delivered, instead of putting all the boxes in the cupboard, I would only unpack half. The other half, I would pilfer away in a secret place for later. And here's the thing: I didn't tell them that there were more cookies than what was available in the cupboard. Although horrified by my clear inadequacy at getting the cookie order right, they were more frugal in their consumption of snacks. By the 18th of the month, they had eaten only half the boxes available in the cupboard, decreasing their consumption dramatically.

So, how does this experiment relate to SIM management? Our SIM, APN and device management platform, Trinity Connect, has a feature that is grossly overlooked. On Connect, users can set data limits on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. This may seem obvious but having customisable limits on a SIM management platform is crucial to address, what I'll call, for now, The Cookie Effect.

SIMs are always associated with/installed in 'objects' and for most of our clients, the 'objects' are devices. These devices should have expected, consistent data usage patterns according to their function. Most devices only use megabytes of data daily, and only a couple of gigabytes maximum a month. But every so often, we have clients whose associated 'objects' are real people.

Company X, which has about a thousand SIMs loaded onto its account with Trinity Connect, uses the platform to manage its employees' data usage from multiple devices. Sometimes the SIM is in a laptop, company phone, etc. and Company X budgets, for example, 20 odd GB of data per employee per month. Based on the Cookie Effect, if you had to allocate all 20 GB of data to the SIM once-off, employees would likely use all that data before the end of the month. If you had to 'ration' data by implementing data limits, this would enable organisations to efficiently manage their data expenditure. SIMs are less likely to use more data and 'run away' with a ridiculously high data cost early in the month because they are capped on expenditure daily or weekly.

If employees reach their daily threshold, notifications can also be set up to alert not only the employee but also managers and any other relevant parties to either assign more data or to contact the employee.

It's a basic feature, but it took my hungry employees and the Cookie Experiment to show me just how valuable a small feature like that is. So, whether it's cookies or SIMs, 'rationing' and setting limits enable you to slow down consumption and reduce long-term costs.

*** AN EXTRA BIT ABOUT ME***

Only discovering the world of IoT and hardware roughly two years ago comes with a fair number of challenges: mostly related to the fact that I have next to no experience in the field, and am constantly Googling my way through every use-case scenario and setup when it comes to IoT solutions & hardware. However, what I lack in experience, I make up for in honesty, curiosity, and the absorbency of my sponge-like brain. Everyone has to start somewhere, and the reality is that the majority of the businesses needing, and undeniably benefitting, from IoT or other nifty technologies, didn't even know they needed it, to begin with. I'm here to make IoT more accessible for newbies, make technical jargon less immobilising, shed some light on some interesting use cases, and learn about how businesses can leverage their assets & data in the universe of end-to-end IoT.