Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) get ready for the Internet of Things (IoT) to help your business. Enterprise-sized companies have implemented IoT for the last decade, but barriers to introducing IoT solutions are coming down. IoT options are growing exponentially as companies of every size can now take advantage of IoT capacity to accelerate processes and improve efficiency.
What’s IoT?
IoT describes physical objects with sensors, processing ability, software, and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. It is the convergence of the digital and physical worlds. And it’s one of the most important trends in digital transformation for businesses.
Three IoT Use Cases
1. IoT in Construction
Monitor outdoor assets like equipment, machinery, and trailers
You can see where your assets are located, what they are doing, and their operational status. For example, you. can get alerts for movements outside a predefined perimeter around a job or storage site, signaling potential theft.
Workers can use IoT wearables to help monitor teams near dangerous zones. These devices can offer real-time instructions on how to finish tasks safely and efficiently and determine the real-time location if a worker is injured.
2. IoT at Retail
Retailers can use IoT to implement smart shelves with weight sensors, cameras, and other devices that enable shelves to automatically recognize when inventory is low or improperly displayed. Once stock for an SKU reaches an established threshold, the smart frame notifies employees that it needs to be restocked. This helps retailers keep inventory on display and improve product visibility, ensuring customers can find what they need. Additionally, smart shelves equipped with cameras can aid in deterring and identifying theft.
IoT devices can detect how many consumers are in the checkout lines. Retailers can use this data to evaluate checkout backlogs. They can display the wait times for customers and allocate staff to reduce wait times.
Retailers can also use sensors to track the flow of customers through the store, mapping the most common paths and identifying where customers linger. This data helps optimize store layouts and determine the aisles and displays that are the most visible. It also shows retailers where consumers may need more help navigating the store to find what they need.
3. IoT in Restaurants
Restaurants use IoT solutions to optimize inventory and sales. For example, Buffalo Wild Wings installed IoT enabled flow meters on their beer tap lines to capture pour data. They use the data to switch and assign new beers to corresponding tap lines and synchronize their upcoming beer rotation with a print menu supplier and a digital beer menu displayed on both restaurant TVs and Buffalo Wild Wings’ website. Restaurant managers have access to pour and sales reports to measure the performance – in either sales or inventory yield – of each beer in rotation and gain insights to identify trends they never had access to. For example, a general manager could precisely track preferences in a region, such as a favorite beer in an area of New York.
A key goal of Buffalo Wild Wings is to provide the best beer experience possible, and IoT is making that happen.
iTelecom & IoT
We can help you realize the value of IoT and navigate the intricacies to quickly deploy your IoT solutions. Reach out to us now.
