The Internet Of Things –How relevant will it be for the Engineering and Project Industry?

IoT or Internet of things sees lot of value in say a hospitality domain, say helping a restaurant monitoring its customers, staff and kitchen appliances in real time and help to serve the customers better with super ‘Moments of Truth’.

Now take this to an engineering domain, where a certain input temperature data or a certain consumable data or may be a maintenance input which calls for servicing of the equipment will help you to reduce the cycle or process time.

The comprehensive data would not only help in reducing the down time for equipment but also help in improving the productivity. It could inform the organization’s entire supply chain right down to their service contractors.

By sharing valuable data and minimizing performance guestimate all the organizations involved would benefit. It’s a wish list for all organizations in the project or engineering ecosystem to have clear data inputs for better turnaround time and if one has software and sensors that can throw the data in real time basis on cloud, then the dream could be a reality. IoT then could have a greater impact on the business.

The Challenges

The sticky issue though is IoT would need a platform, where various players in the ecosystem are open to share the data. If the players are not ready to share data and would prefer to work in silos, then IoT will not see the day light.  Protecting data and information has been an industry practise and doesn’t work in the ‘open source world’. Data Analytics plays a key role in understanding and helping all the players in the ecosystem and no single player can do this.

IoT will definitely help to improve the overall customer experience, but the intention has to be there.