material conditions, operational details and location will also make it easier to assess the costs and operational impact of the timing of when machinery should be maintained and repaired, and the optimal time it should be replaced. Eventually, to the benefit of both EaaS vendors and their customers, maintenance and repair costs will decrease.

While the shift to EaaS isn’t without challenges, its enormous potential is well-recognized and the global EaaS market is expected to grow to $131 billion by 2025. Early adopters of this new flexible payment model are poised to gain a major competitive advantage over other equipment sellers.

Future Machine Design Optimization

Sensor data on equipment operations also reveals a wealth of insights for improvements and refinements in future product design. While machine engineers might develop simulation models to assess how an asset should perform on the field, its actual performance and output are highly subject to deviation as a result of various unpredictable factors. By monitoring how the same piece of equipment is functioning on different customers’ premises, OEMs can detect common part failures or bottlenecks like minor stops, long start-up cycles or high energy consumption, so relevant adjustments can be incorporated in future design specs to mitigate them. With well-designed and efficient machines that bring significant cost-saving opportunities for customers, OEMs can attain an edge in the market while enhancing customer loyalty and retention.

Redefining Aftermarket Opportunities

Aftermarket services, including selling and replacing spare parts, performing repair and maintenance or installing upgrades on the machine, not only represent a significant revenue source but also contribute to an optimal customer experience. Yet managing these services has been anything but easy. Once a piece of equipment is sold, OEMs have hardly any insight into how it is performing on the customer’s premises. Machine failures only come to light after the damage is tangible or serious. But even so, time-consuming manual inspection of individual components could still be required to trace the root cause of the breakdown.

Not knowing exactly when products need servicing after commissioning also makes inventory management of spare parts challenging for OEMs. It could result in obsolete assets due to overstocking or worse, delayed responses due to out-of-stock items. The latter would then mean added downtime and astronomical costs on the customer side.

IoT can combat these challenges by helping OEMs and their customers transition from reactive to proactive asset management. Using wireless IoT sensors that continuously capture and communicate critical asset datapoints to a cloud-based analytics platform, an OEM can easily monitor commissioned equipment from afar. Anomalies and inconsistencies can be quickly detected, and point of failures can be accurately located. This in turn facilitates spare part order and troubleshooting workflows to minimize production disruption and asset downtime. Condition-based or predictive maintenance indeed serves as an innovative value-added service that sets the OEM’s offering apart from any third-party aftermarket vendors. At the same time, digital data reporting of asset operations further elevates customer experience through improved quality controls and consultation services. For example, OEMs can use machine data for drill-down analysis of global breakdown causes to provide recommendations on how users could mitigate risk moving forward.

The potential of IoT for OEMs is enormous: it not only improves operational efficiencies in-house but also encourages a shift from a product-driven to a service-driven business model for greater value delivery. In this context, advanced sensor and networking technologies allow OEMs to unlock new floods of field data that empower creative digital offerings and future innovation. However, it is critical to remember that pervasive wireless connectivity is a major driving force behind the IoT revolution and a fundamental building block in digital architecture. The use of connectivity is not simply about getting a message to its destination; it is about doing so in a scalable, secure and cost-effective fashion. As such, selecting the right technology is paramount to the long-term success of your IoT project, and various factors need to be considered from the get-go to build a functional and future-proof wireless infrastructure.