Industrial IoT Portfolio Definition

Company

The World’s largest IoT solution provider had just gone through a transformation and had built a new service organization.

 

Background and Challenge

The IoT market is huge. But a mere digital infrastructure play is not generating revenue. The world’s largest Industrial IoT solution provider was in the process of redefining strategy and portfolio and needed thought leadership material for their target customer segments: owners and operators of energy, water, and transport infrastructure, airports, as well as commercial buildings such offices, malls, hospitals, and hotels. Questions were: 

• What innovative solutions can the IoT solution provider offer for operating infrastructure and buildings more efficiently?
• What are key value propositions and differentiators from their competition?
• Which Industrial IoT and other emerging technologies will be key in the future? What skills and capabilities need to be developed to maintain leadership?

A strategy project was kicked off to answer these questions.

 

Results

Around a dozen of new solutions were identified and documented, each with their key value propositions, target customer segments, market potential, required capabilities and partners, etc. – very similar to the attributes described in a Business Model Canvas.

 

Especially the automation of infrastructure maintenance using embedded, as well as non-invasive sensors has turned out to be an interesting solution, in example for operators of power grids. The creation of a global knowledge base using Machine Learning allows for identification of typical issues, preventive actions, and effective countermeasures in case of an incident.

 

My Role / Impact

As an external strategy consultant, I moderated the customer and portfolio discovery process, identified several new opportunities, and described the 10 or so most compelling portfolio elements. I have created presentation material to engage with potential customers in co-creation of some of the solutions and authored a White Paper which will be published shortly.

COMPANY

World's largest IIoT solution provider

ROLE

Strategy Advisor

METHODS & TECHNOLOGIES

Strategy Consulting

Business Model Canvas

Thought Leadership Material

Industrial IoT Solution

Maintenance 4.0 solutions

Variable Message Signs and Road Side Units

Company

HMI Technologies based in Auckland is the market leader for Variable Message Signs (VMS) in New Zealand and Australia. HMI also builds road side units that collect traffic data, calculates current and typical travel times and displays this data on their VMS.

 

Background and Challenge

HMI wanted to upgrade their product portfolio and increase data quality of their existing services. Machine Learning has been identified as a key technology to do so.

The company also faced a large upcoming investment in new server hardware and had certain exposure from running their own data center. The engineering, software development and operations staff used a traditional, waterfallish way of working.

 

Results

Within only six months we reached several crucial objectives:

• A working prototype of new road side device was built that uses computervision for counting cars, trucks, cyclists, and pedestrians. The product provides traffic managers with data on network occupancy or incidents and urban planners with strategic KPIs and traffic patterns – while strictly adhering to data privacy rules.
• Existing backend services were migrated to the AWS Cloud, what not only saved the company from an upcoming investment, but also increased reliability and allowed for scalability that’s was not available before.
• Agile methods (KANBAN) and tools (Jira, Confluence) were introduced to keep everyone on track and speed up development.
• A new business model for data services was created enabling continuous revenue streams.

 

My Role / Impact

As HMI’s Chief Digital Officer and member of the board I led the software team to develop and operate the backend services. I built up a new team of AI specialists and led the organization in its shift to Agile. I drove the introduction of Cloud, assessed new wireless protocols for use in roadside equipment and created the new business model mentioned above.

Making the Digital Transformation in a small enterprise comes with all the topics that you have in large organization. But in small companies the change can be made so much faster!

 

COMPANY

HMI Technologies / ohmio

 

ROLE

Chief Digital Officer

METHODS & TECHNOLOGIES

Agile (KANBAN)

Lean Startup

Cloud

Deep Learning

Transport Technology

Intelligent Transport Solutions (ITS)

Secure Trade Lane project

When relocating from New Zealand to Germany in 1999 I have been waiting for my belongings in a maritime container to arrive for 8 months. After initial excuses for the delay due to weather, the logistics service provider at some stage admitted they had lost sight of my shipment. 6 months later it showed up in the UK from where the container was forwarded to my home in Munich.

 

Background and Challenge

Similar challenges are constantly hindering manufacturing companies like automakers or food producers in their ‘on-time delivery’ performance. The lack of transparency is a huge problem for the supply chain. Many shipments are sent too early and are thus incurring huge capital cost. Those arriving late can make severe impact on core processes. IBM’s Secure Trade Lane project was initiated with Maersk in 2004 to address these challenges.

 

Results

Using a container tracking device that gets mounted to a maritime container we captured location information and sensor data and sent it (using wireless radio) to our backend services. We made thousands of shipments with Maersk, Safmarine, Heineken, Nestle, and Customs organizations in Europe, the US, and China.

The backend services we have built for this solution can receive large amounts of IoT data and analyze and visualize it in close to real-time. The backend services are also capable to store event data immutably in a distributed ledger database – in example owned by the various participants in a supply chain. The networked databases (following GS1’s EPCIS standards) can be queried from remote through a Web Services API, and data access is strictly protected.

What became clear after thousands of shipments however, was that battery life time was at that time insufficient to support the business case, so the project got shelved. A few years later, IBM and Maersk pursued this project again with new device technology and Blockchain – presumably the ideal technology for storing immutable data in a distributed ledger.

 

My Role / Impact

As the Chief Architect for the backend services I led a team of architects and developers based in Europe, India, and the US. I was deeply involved in co-creation with customers to obtain requirements, notably from Maersk, Heineken, and Customs organizations in China and Europe.

I received IBM’s global ‘Outstanding Innovation Award’ for my technical leadership, and together with two colleagues a patent for combining event and product/shipment master data. I have described architecture and experiences in this conference paper that I presented at OOPSLA in 2006. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1176617.1176732

COMPANY

IBM with Maersk,

           Customs in Europe, China, US

ROLE

Chief Architect

TECHNOLOGIES

Container Tracking Device

Wireless Radio (GSM / Satellite)

Service Oriented Architecture

GS1 Standards

EPC / EPCIS

Visibility for the Automotive supply chain

Company

German Automotive OEMs, Suppliers, 3^rd Party Logistic Service Providers

 

Background and Challenge

Logistics processes in the Automotive supply chain were not able to keep up with the speed of globalization: German automakers were sourcing parts from suppliers in China for assembly in the US or Mexico but sent them all through their consolidation centers in Germany to have visibility. Planned shipping times for long haul shipments can exceed actual shipping times by weeks, tying down huge capital cost.

And even within Germany there was a lot of room for improvement: OEMs could not leverage RFID tags and numbers on parts and loading equipment that were placed by their suppliers.

 

Results

Using RFID tags and readers in a few trials unveiled interesting facts of the supply chain and unexpected potential. A 3-digit figure million Euro amount could be unleashed for a single OEM using such digital infrastructure.

As an automaker is bringing parts and processes from many suppliers and logistic service providers together, it is not reasonable for a single OEM to make suppliers adhere to their needs. Instead, an industry standard had to be defined through the ‘Auto-RAN’ project that I have helped Daimler to kickstart.

http://www.mojix.ch/news/2011/rfidjournal-article8587.PDF

 

My Role / Impact

Working as a strategy consultant for one of the Automotive OEM I developed their supply chain visibility strategy. Beyond the business case it included the Industrial IoT architecture framework for tracking loading equipment and parts - using RFID and tracking devices, as well as backend services for data sharing in a distributed ledger architecture.

Daimler, BMW, Opel, their suppliers Bosch, Keiper, and Rehau, together with 3^rd party logistics service providers DHL and BLG, and of course IBM joined the three-year Auto-RAN project that I co-initiated. The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) adopted the key concepts from this project that the German car industry is using today.

COMPANY

German Automotive OEM

ROLE

Chief Architect

Strategy Advisor

METHODS & PLATFORMS

Strategy Consulting

Containter Tracking Device / RFID

EPC / EPCIS / GS1 Standards

World’s First Mobile Portal

Company

DNA Finland has been founded in 2000 by a group of Finnish Telecommunications companies and is today Finland’s second largest Mobile Network Operator (MNO). I joined DNA Finland as a consultant for IBM when the company had 4 staff and left two years later when we had scaled up to 400+ employees.

 

Background and Challenge

DNA Finland got awarded with a 3G license, which means that the licensee needs to go live with their services within 24 months. 3G allowed for the first time that mobile phones could connect to the internet and display web pages on handsets, using stripped-down versions of HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP.

Physical telecommunications network (base stations and infrastructure), Business and Operation Support Systems (BSS/OSS), as well as the Service Delivery Platform and Mobile Internet applications all had to be built up from scratch. DNA Finland’s goal was to build a set of compelling applications that would trigger customers to shift to the new provider.

 

Results

The task of my team was to build the ‘mobile portal’ – the Service Delivery Platform connected to BSS/OSS for authentication, provisioning and billing, and a set of applications including email, calendar, chat, various content services like news, weather reports, stock prices, mobile phone specific services such as ring tones, a location-based game, and a payment service for public transport payments (which was revolutionary in 2001!). The Service Delivery Platform offered commonly used data and functions to the applications. Like most of the applications it was built in Java and operated from the data center at IBM. Platform and applications got launched in the time frame that was set by the government, and eventually gave DNA Finland an edge over its competitors.

 

My Role / Impact

Having worked as an IT Architect on the project for a while I was asked to step up and lead the project, at a moment when the project was in a crisis. The team had grown to a size of 50+ developers.

The new role was my first real leadership role and came to me as rather unexpected. I thoroughly enjoyed it and didn’t hesitate to introduce the ‘Extreme Programming’ method after I had just read the book from Kent Beck. I introduced daily standup meetings, pair programming, automated unit tests, and some other practices Kent had suggested and delivered the project in time!

This Mobile Internet project has influenced me strongly in my further career and brought me to Pervasive Computing and the Internet of Things.

COMPANY

DNA Finland

ROLE

Project Manager

Architect

METHODS & PLATFORMS

Extreme Programming

IBM GS Method

Java

3G / WAP / WML

IT FoodTrace

Companies / Organizations

Tracking meat from farm to fork was the objective of the ITFoodTrace project in which companies like Nestle, Ulmer Fleisch, and consumer associations participated. The project was sponsored by the German Ministry of Agriculture and led by University Hohenheim.

 

Background and Challenge

Where does our food come from? Where has a pig been bread and raised? When has it been brought to the abattoir and under what conditions? When and where has it been slaughtered? Where and how long for has the meat been stored? Where and when has the meat been sold to consumers?

 

Results

Throughout the project an architecture and set of practices was established to which every participant in the food chain should subscribe for sharing data. In its core a set of GS1 standards were leveraged: EPC as identifier for food items like pigs or carcasses, GRAI for ‘returnable transport items’ like shipping boxes, together with GTIN, and EPCIS as the distributed ledger even database for this digital infrastructure.

However, food traceability requires strong political willpower and is not popular with everyone. Politics and industries are moving in this direction but so far only individual companies are using such digital infrastructure. Blockchain is going to make such solutions more straightforward to implement.

https://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/informationstechnologie/neues-it-konzept-lueckenlose-qualitaetskontrolle-it-132529.html

 

My Role / Impact

As the Chief Architect of the project my role was to establish the core architecture concepts, closely work with domain experts, and by leading a small development team that built a prototype. I had the honor to present our approach in German parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) as well as to Germany’s current Minister of Agriculture, Julia Kloeckner.

Presentation at closing symposium

Project Flyer

Briefing in German Parlament (Bundestag)

Briefing for Julia Kloeckner

ROLE

Chief Architect

EMPLOYER / CLIENT

IBM

Ministry of Agriculture

Food Processing Companies

ARCHITECTURE

Distributed Ledger databases

GS1 Standards (EPC/EPCIS/ etc.)

RFID, Tracking Device, Barcode