How Equipment Manufacturers Grow Services with IoT

Digital technology helps equipment manufacturers and their trading partners extend the value and life span of their products. Asset management and field service management are already quite popular, but there’s another way digital technology helps equipment manufacturers grow. You can make your industrial products intelligent by fitting them with connected sensors in the internet of things (IoT). Sensor data can provide insight into equipment performance, wear and tear, and customers’ real-life workloads.

How IoT Helps Equipment Manufacturers Grow

What happens as a result of these technological enhancements? Your field service managers can send out replacement parts or schedule a maintenance appointment long before a part may fail or performance degrades. Your field service teams don’t have to travel to customer sites just to see how the equipment is doing since the sensors already informed them. And, to make everything work more seamlessly, you can provide your field service employees with mobile devices that give them anywhere, anytime access to information, diagrams, and documents that help them do the best possible job for your customers.

From proactive maintenance, you can take a larger step into digitally-enabled design, deployment, and repair of industrial equipment by using augmented-reality devices like HoloLens. With the HoloLens tech, engineers and technicians can collaborate and receive training in secure workspaces in the cloud. Even your customers and employees can use this technology to interact with one another as they model equipment enhancements.

Here’s a quick example of how Mercedes-Benz transforms their technician support using this technology.

Think about creating digital replicas of your equipment. These “digital twins” can emulate the physical assets and provide real-time, enhanced visibility of the equipment in operation at customer sites.

But we’re an equipment manufacturing company, not a software company.

And you’re right, you’re definitely an equipment manufacturer. However, in this day and age, being competitive means keeping software and new technology at the forefront of your minds.

Every company is a software company. You have to start thinking and operating like a digital company. It’s no longer just about procuring one solution and deploying one. It’s not about one simple software solution. It’s really you yourself thinking of your own future as a digital company.” – Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

What additional services could you offer, given that level of access and transparency? By using these technologies, you can tap into new revenue sources, strengthen customer relationships, and leave the competition behind.

Have any questions about how equipment manufacturers can leap ahead of the competition with IoT? We have a free ebook available, but we also encourage you to contact our equipment manufacturing technology experts at any time.