Applications of IoT are immense, from incorporating IoT into marketing, design and maintenance to agriculture and transportation. Incorporating sensors into products allows you to establish how they’re being used. IoT is being used as temperature sensors to refrigeration units and each individual product, especially important in seafood, to help extend product lifetime for supermarket produce requirements. IoT has a major application in product manufacturing, as it allows each stage of the process to be monitored. When it is introduced on the factory floor there’s a large corresponding increase in quality.

With local authorities and companies using it to monitor car parking spaces or checking when rubbish bins need emptying, thus not deploying staff if not needed, IoT enables resources to be utilized better.

IoT is also being used extensively in predictive maintenance, seen more now in the railway systems. Smart sensors and analytics across the train engine, coaches, and tracks allow rail systems to be remotely checked and repaired before a small issue magnifies into huge trouble. Asset health monitoring through IoT insights implies less of maintenance delays and helps in extending the life of infrastructure. Preventive maintenance practices prompted by IoT are now in fact becoming more and more prevalent throughout industry practices across the globe.

Within agriculture, IoT can help monitor the level of moisture in soil to help farmers make timely irrigation decisions or apply fertiliser more intelligently, thus reducing costs and increasing yields. IoT helps events, theme parks, and concert managers optimize their events by incorporating sensors into wristbands allowing the organizers to track the movement of visitors and determine which areas, rides, and attractions are the most popular and profitable and which areas require more attention.

While every new sensor, mobile, and wireless technology are driving the evolution of the IoT, the true business value of the IoT lies in analytics rather than just the hardware. Transmitting information from a device is of little use if you don’t have analytics that allows you to extract insights from the data or transform it into meaningful consumer experiences. It is important to combine the effective use of data analytics with IoT in order to gain meaningful insights to gain a competitive advantage.

Analytics on IoT data is needed to yield actionable insights about your customers and your business’s operations and has never been so meaningful to consumer-based marketing than today. In fact, the IoT has the potential to completely rewrite how businesses think of their customers by understanding consumer product usage through analysis for marketing. The use of data analytics in IoT will allow the business to gain an insight into customer preferences and choices spurring the development of services as per the customer demands and expectations.

The IoT represents a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes and small businesses can leverage the IoT to great extent. Thanks to the decreased cost of sensors and software platforms, easily utilized through the addition of cloud on-demand computing, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are now able to easily access IoT technology.

The imaginative use IoT especially in small businesses is growing. One way in which this is happening already is by analyzing information about how consumers use a business’s internet-connected product such as in the food and drink industry. IoT can help a small business differentiate themselves better among their customers and drive additional sales through imaginative digital marketing such as adding connected technology to a bottle of produce to sense whether the bottle has been opened then sending targeted messages to a customer when the IoT enabled smart product interacts with a user’s smartphone, allowing the business owner to promote additional products and services.

At endeavit, we help our clients understand how IoT can help their businesses. We help develop a realistic approach in the use of sensors to help a company reduce cost, increase performance, and improve productivity and sales. By collaborating with endeavit, businesses can couple our data analytics and business insights with IoT to leverage data for gaining a competitive advantage. We can help small companies appreciate the importance of the growing trend of IoT and its use as a business tool and make them aware of what they should be adopting as a best practice to help them differentiate themselves and compete better.