Connected products, digital services and servitization blog

Buy a Software-as-a-Service to sell a Service

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If you are an OEM and want to offer services in addition to your products, you will certainly need a software that will manage your connected products and allow digital servitization.

For this type of software, you will face with the choice “Make or Buy?”.

You may be tempted to choose “Make”, considering that a proprietary solution allows more control, lower costs or having 100% of the intellectual property of what you develop. However, by choosing “Make”, you will have to face some relevant issue, like:

Lack of experience and internal knowledge regarding servitization, with the risk to waste a lot of energy, falling into avoidable errors, and solving problems already solved by others.
High development and set-up costs, resulting from the lack of experience and knowledge mentioned above.
Release times often inadequate compared to the desired timing, with the risk of getting a result too late.
Maintenance costs to ensure the quality, reliability, and evolution of the system.
Scalability of the solution according to the growth of the business (100, 1.000, 10.000 connected products), also on a worldwide scale.

The advantages of “Make” do not always overcome these problems. Furthermore, a “Buy” solution could also guarantee the same advantages: control of the solution, sustainable costs, and the intellectual property of the solution.

Leaving aside initial costs and times that could be sustainable for you, if you want to undertake the servitization journey, the most critical part to consider, once the product is connected, is how to create services that can evolve over time, while remaining competitive, up the delivery of a “Product as a Service”.

January 31, 2020/by Sebastian Anzani

IoT-enabled services monetization

You work for an OEM manufacturing company that is defining or has already implemented an IoT-enabled “connected product” project. You are evaluating the possibilities to create new revenue streams to achieve a positive ROI. You started collecting data from your products and you want now to understand how to monetize data. In this post we have already made a comparison between the potential and the value of IoT raw data monetization and IoT-enabled services monetization. Now let’s dig into IoT-enabled services.

November 26, 2019/by Stefano Butti

IoT data monetization vs IoT-enabled service monetization

Many consider data to be the new oil. Others refute this thesis and animate a debate on the correctness of this metaphor. Try typing “data new oil” in Google and you will see the result.

Oil or not, there is no doubt data contains an enormous intrinsic value that can be exploited. Thus, let’s keep this debate aside and address a fundamental question: how can I generate revenue from IoT data?

September 17, 2019/by Stefano Butti

Connected Products and their management, the first digital step towards servitization

Thoughts & Insights

Servitization is a transformation journey that takes place in various areas of a company: organization, human resources, business model, field services, research and product development, and more. The introduction of new digital technologies is one of the areas you will have to face.

This work can be divided into steps. The first digital step towards servitization is certainly making your products “connected products”. Once this is done, you will also need to manage connected products in their after-production life cycle.

June 18, 2019/by Stefano Butti