Laura Viñolas, Head of IoT at Alhona, shares in this interview her perspective on the transformative role of IoT when it is incorporated as one of the fundamental pillars of business strategy.
What should be the first steps a company should take when incorporating IoT into its business strategy?
Every company is unique. Therefore, the first step is to thoroughly understand the business, its needs and the challenges to be solved. From there, there are multiple ways to implement IoT, so it is essential to select the technology solution that best fits and provides the most value in each case. For example, if we are talking about existing plants, a simple IoT is usually the most appropriate, as it requires minimal infrastructure and additional hardware. This makes implementation easy and economical, allowing value to be obtained very quickly.
What common situations do you usually encounter with customers when implementing IoT?
We usually encounter two situations. The first is the lack of a clear strategic approach. Often, companies digitalize because they feel the need to do so, because it is fashionable and everyone is doing it, but without having a clear objective, which often leads to the implementation of technology by technology without a defined roadmap and approach.
This often leads to the second problem: the inability to move beyond the pilot phase. Pilot projects are implemented that fail to scale, either because the technologies used are not the most appropriate to solve the specific need, or because the business case is not viable when trying to deploy it throughout the organization. In addition, there are pilots that are not able to integrate with the rest of the organization’s systems or that do not generate the expected value. As a result, these projects end up being isolated initiatives that do not prosper, causing frustration and loss of confidence in the organization.
They say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to change the industry. What is your opinion on this?
Without a doubt, AI will transform the industry. In fact, it’s already a reality. But at Alhona, we often say that AI is the icing on the cake. First, you have to build the cake, and that’s where the biggest complexity lies, in getting a solid foundation of useful, in-context, standardized, quality data. And this is what IoT gives you. We see many cases where people want to start the house from the roof, without having a solid foundation, and that doesn’t work. The IoT is the foundation of digitalization in industry and the enabler of AI in operations.
And finally, what would you say are the aspects of the business that IoT can impact?
IoT can impact almost every aspect of the business: improvements in quality, performance, maintenance and logistics, among others. What you can’t see, you can’t improve, and what the IoT does is provide total visibility into industrial processes. The IoT makes available a huge amount of previously unknown data that can be consumed by applications or people to improve process control and decision making in the operation and management of the company in general terms. This makes the factory “transparent”. In addition, it makes it possible to detect and improve not only known deficiencies, but also many new ones that are discovered by analyzing all process data together for the first time.