Predictive Analytics Intelligence Is A Gold Mine For Business Bottom Line

With the exponential expansion of our automated world, IoT devices play an integral role in enabling real-time alarming, analytics, and even triage of potential problems. While data plays a major role in our daily business operations, the real value lies in providing access not just to the “now”, but information from the historical context of this data. Historical context access through analytics allows organizations to not only learn about current events but to predict and triage upcoming problems before they occur.

With the move to the industry 4.0, enterprises are regularly now integrating IoT infrastructure and legacy systems to help lower OpEx across various verticals. Addressing risks before they become disruptive, or costly to repair, empowers businesses to use the data they already have, but for a very different and forward-thinking purpose.

The Internet of Things (IoT) redefined our automated world’s relationship with data. It transformed data into the new oil. While the first generation of IoT platforms provided organizations with real-time alarming and event management to avert critical failures and problems without requiring on-site staff; they missed out on the historical context value of the same aggregated data. This is the refined data, now available via AI and ML engines and offering added real value to what was already there in the way of data.

This redefinition enables organizations to extrapolate additional actionable outcomes. Ideally known as the second generation of IoT solutions, these solutions re-delegated IoT’s role from a merely supplementary operation to a critical business operation. The digital ‘boots on the ground’ transformed already existing data into a valuable analytical solution within a system that organizations can tap into for additional and deeper data insight through the life cycle of an installation—and all remotely.

Thanks to the marriage of data infrastructure, IoT technology, edge computing, and telecommunications advancements, a wider range of previously unavailable capabilities and analytics now allow businesses to do much more in a very predictive sense. It is important to note that this analytics revolution is not confined to facility management. The full IoT ecosystems–from edge, through fog to cloud–offer greater possibilities to businesses to monitor processes and operations for stakeholders far outside of F+M. The once undervalued facility data now plays a major role within a range of other activities beyond–spilling over to logistics, staffing, marketing, safety, and others.

It’s important to note that all this new insight is gained by simply analyzing the same data, but with a different lens. IoT ecosystems are not about replacement, but reutilization of data for a more expanded set of use cases.

Fostering Predictive Analytics For Business Insight

Using real-time and historical data together helps determine patterns and predict future outcomes. An IoT platform has the capability for pattern adaptation based on operator’s contextual understanding. No single analytics platform knows all the trade secrets to operating a specific facility or portfolio of facilities–but an IoT platform enables an easy (non-programmatic) method to allow operators to set up these privately known factors to determine trends and enable predictive results.

While IoT platforms offer various customizable approaches to create predictive analytics on the fly, it is also common for businesses to use microservice analytics–software companies which rely on the core IoT platform for data but have special knowledge in specific verticals. Whether you choose to use an external microservice analytics service is completely optional and often depends on the specific use-case of the business. It is very common for an enterprise to enter an IoT platform model to focus on facility management, and use the platform for all of its analytics, but then realize there are uses for the same data when looked at differently through external service engines which offer advantages to other stakeholders far outside of F+M. (Examples of this include common facility technologies such as indoor positioning, space utilization, and people counting technologies)  

First generation IoT platforms consolidated data from legacy systems within a building and were the key to aggregating, organizing, and harnessing insightful data intelligence on scale. (Thousands of locations).  We are now really talking about taking a second step into using that data for a more holistic purpose.

While predictive analytics aren’t a recent phenomenon, integration and automation have been the real challenge. IoT platforms offer a native path to consolidated data that is aggregated across huge footprints, without significant programming, customization, or proprietary integration. This repository offers a single location to run analytics en mass.

The Cybersecurity and the Advancement of Purpose in Data

With Cybersecurity a major concern, IoT platforms address this problem from an I.T. perspective by nature, which is far ahead of that of the building management industry. Pattern detection and behavioral analytics allow organizational network administrators to locate and detect advanced persistent threats (APT) and abnormalities with predictive analytics capabilities. Security is a staple of these systems as they are born from the I.T. industry instead of their mechanical brethren.

With this data, organizations can expand upon resource management and operations by forecasting preventive maintenance and inventory requirements. Predictive analytics capabilities heighten business operations efficiency, transforming simple data into actionable insights, offering a competitive advantage for increased profitability. It can be as simple as “Why send a truck to investigate, and another with the solution, when you can do that in one truck roll before the problem even occurs?”  

We are in a shift from system integration to insights-as-a-service. Gartner estimates that by 2022, machines, not humans, will perform over half of the data and analytics services. They additionally predict that data, analytics and supporting technologies will increasingly live in the edge computing environment. Meaning ‘at the edge autonomy’ will be the decision maker in operations.

IoT platforms are the answer to getting actionable results from geographically distributed and disjointed sites and equipment. Simply put, there is no way to manage it any other way. They offer a gold mine of capabilities that previously were unrecognized but are now essential to our growing digital environment. Like oil, unrefined it is only a muddy mess, but when processed, it offers a wealth of differing practical applications that are truly life and business changing.