Smart Products

1. a) Why should manufacturing companies build smart products and provides smart services?

Manufacturing companies should build smart products and provides smart services to:-

To Enjoy Long-term Profits

Any industrial manufacturer that has not awakened to the fact that it must become a service business is in serious peril today. Sadly, there are many such businessesвЂ"companies that still think of themselves as builders of things and that state their gross margins, operating profits, and other measures of success solely in terms of “the product.” But even their more enlightened competitors, the ones who’ve begun to wrap valuable services around their products and, in some cases, profit directly from those services, are enjoying only a temporary advantage. They may be improving their customer relationships by taking on various burdens such as maintenance and replenishment of supplies, but that will get them only so far. A select group of companies is already upping the ante. Soon, it will not be enough for a company to offer services; it will have to provide “smart services.”

To Do What Human Cannot Do

Because it is impractical to deploy humans to gather and analyze the real-time field data required, smart services depend on “machine intelligence.” In a smart services environment, reliable and blindingly fast microprocessors do what they are very good at doing: digesting billions of data points, talking to one another about the data, controlling one another based upon the state of the dataвЂ"all in a matter of nanoseconds. Humans cannot do this, nor should they; this incessant stream of business information should be invisible to people. At the same time, all this background activity gives managers and decision makers much more visibility into a business’s assets, costs, and liabilitiesвЂ"precisely when they need or want it.

Smart services are a wholly different animal from the service offerings of the past. To begin with, they are fundamentally preemptive rather than reactive or even proactive. Preemptive means your actions are based upon hard field intelligence; you launch a preemptive strike to head off an undesirable event when you have real-world evidence that the event is in the offing. Smart services are thus based upon actual evidence that