Services
IoT and Digital Engineering
Bringing Together IoT and Digital Engineering to Create Rich Experiences
Highlights
- Traditional firms are reimagining themselves as connected digital enterprises—organizations where systems, products, and processes can ‘connect in context’.
- Digital intelligence is a must for businesses to become connected digital enterprises.
- We believe intelligent products, connected plants, connected services, and digital threads—all of which power digital intelligence—are critical levers in becoming a connected digital enterprise.
On this page
Digital intelligence
We live in an increasingly ‘context-aware’ environment where technologies such as AI, generative AI, and software-enabled products, from cars to appliances, are providing real-time dynamic connections and performance-enhancing responses.
It's a world in which digital natives and AI-first enterprises are breaking new ground every day. Meanwhile, traditional firms are seeing the need to reimagine themselves as connected digital enterprises—organizations where systems, products, and processes can ‘connect in context’, become predictive, and be self-aware.
Making this reinvention possible are digital capabilities powered by new technologies and real-time, data-driven insights that enable organizations to fundamentally transform their business and operating models. These changes are unfolding in the form of connected and intelligent value chains that are responsive, adaptive, and personalized—all of which helps organizations harness digital intelligence and accelerate their journey to becoming connected digital enterprises.
A truly connected digital enterprise is built on digital capabilities such as intelligent and cognitive operations and cloud-enabled, large-scale industrial automation. Technologies such as edge-to-cloud connectivity, industrial analytics, AI, generative AI, edge AI, computer vision, the industrial metaverse, and robotics also play a key role. Together, these have the potential to transform the enterprise value chain by making them:
- Boundaryless, enabling anytime, anywhere decision-making and supporting ‘machine first, human-in-the-loop’ frameworks that are distinct from the ‘human first, machine-in-the-loop’ operating models currently being used.
- Pervasive, with the capability to respond and serve customers 24x7 through systems run on trust-based access.
- Experience-rich, helping organizations score high on customer advocacy.
New value chains
Intelligent products, connected plants, connected services, and digital threads that bind them together across the value chain are critical levers in becoming a connected digital enterprise.
The traditional value chain envisages a flow from tiered suppliers to end customers. However, digital value chains are built around ecosystems enabled by digital platforms that can make contextual connections. To become a connected digital enterprise with an ability to drive perpetual value, companies need to invest in digital capabilities that enable them to connect and collaborate across the value chain and keep pace with evolving market demands. A transformed enterprise value chain enables companies to manage the full life cycle of their products by establishing traceability from the as-designed to as-manufactured, as-in use, and as-serviced stages.
We believe in a four-step approach for reimagining the value chain and enabling connected digital enterprises:
Step 1: Bringing life to products. Traditional or hardware-centric product development techniques, which once yielded profitable results, are no longer sufficient for manufacturers across industries to stay competitive and drive growth. Manufacturers need to embrace products with built-in digital intelligence that can sense and derive contextual information from their environment for improved data processing and self-decision making. One example is the use of smart batteries in electric vehicles, bio-medical devices, or smart meters. Unlike a traditional battery, a smart battery can alert a user about device information like remaining charging time, current voltage levels, or health parameters. Digital intelligence built into the battery can predict anomalies in performance, share relevant information to the user, and support informed decision making. While manufacturers mostly lose direct access to traditional products once a purchase is complete, the data captured and shared by smart, intelligent products can help in monitoring, controlling, or optimizing performance on the go. It can also support advanced product releases in the future, thus setting the stage for predictive and self-aware products. Bringing life to products is a foundational step, enabling organizations to create innovative products and realize new service-based models for customers.
Step 2: Bringing life to plants that can think, feel, and act. Intelligent products also need to be manufactured on demand as per personalized configurations. This requires smart and connected plants that can respond with agility to dynamic markets, supply chain signals, and personalized product configurations, while delivering the most optimal production runs in terms of cost and schedules. These plants should possess strong digital intelligence across production assets and have a neural fabric that binds assets together. This will allow for an easy exchange of information across different systems, processes, and entities across the value chain and inform decision making at every stage. A battery manufacturing plant built with ‘neural capabilities’ across its production process can, for instance, optimize throughput and outcomes by leveraging digital simulation techniques or insights gained from asset, product, or process twin data. Plants equipped with connected, cognitive, and collaborative capabilities operating in ecosystem-centric and circular value chains, along with self-diagnostic and self-healing capabilities, can help make operations autonomous and sustainable.
Step 3: Bringing life to connected service ecosystems. IoT-based connected services are redefining the way businesses are run. They are giving rise to connected service ecosystems that can integrate end users, manufacturers, value-added solution providers, and platform enablers, creating value for customers while unlocking new revenue streams with pay-per-use or product-as-a-service models. An EV owner, for instance, could be guided to the nearest available IoT-enabled battery charging station. The same charging station could also alert operators to check the status of their equipment for a proactive maintenance call. Another scenario could be an EV owner leveraging a subscription-based model for battery replacements. The person could go to the nearest swapping station in a networked ecosystem and order a replacement of a discharged battery with a new one, using a battery-as-a-service model.
Step 4: Ensuring visibility and control through a digital thread. A connected digital enterprise with the ability for contextual insights and the agility to drive improved business performance must rely on a digital thread to interlink all the data related to a product throughout its life cycle. A digital thread helps reimagine the complete product development life cycle by providing:
- Product usage insights to develop next-gen products.
- Manufacturing insights for driving product and process quality.
- Field insights to optimize service operations including predictive maintenance and service life cycle management for enhanced customer experience.
- Product key attributes for traceability and compliance.
With the help of data, which is generated from each step of the value chain, a digital thread can provide a new dimension to how products are designed, manufactured, and serviced.
Maximize outcomes
A connected digital enterprise with intelligence built across the value chain can yield significant opportunities for both customers and businesses.
- New business models: With their inherent responsiveness and ability to connect in context, connected digital enterprises can rapidly adopt new, service-based business models. Choosing business models that allow customers to easily accomplish their tasks would be a natural strategy. It can allow organizations to calibrate product performance with customer needs while discovering opportunities for new revenue streams.
- Seamless customer experiences: Businesses can gain deeper customer insights and create personalized experiences by optimizing product performance across the life cycle of a product through a better understanding of usage data.
- Business agility: By understanding how customers interact with their products, and with the right strategies in place, organizations are better placed to adapt to market changes and take advantage of data from the ecosystems they participate in to uncover new growth opportunities.
- Sustainable business: With the real-time availability of data across a value chain, businesses can continuously measure and monitor their impact on the environment from emissions, energy consumption, or by-products.
The potential to create value is huge. But how do you measure the return?
Path to value
Our approach to measuring the value from a connected digital enterprise involves evaluating the gains across three dimensions.
Inspired by TCS’ Bringing Life to ThingsTM framework that emphasizes boundaryless, pervasive, and experience-rich aspects when looking at value generated from smart and unified business ecosystems, we’ve formulated an approach that looks at how to measure value from a connected digital enterprise through three lenses:
- Within the enterprise ecosystem: Real-time data availability with all stakeholders at all times helps eliminate functional silos and improves the visibility of information throughout the value chain.
- Within the industry ecosystem: Real-time integration with suppliers and partners helps ensure that every ecosystem partner is performing to its full potential and is adequately equipped to provide insights such as field performance and predictive alerts. Collaboration with ecosystem players, partners, and platform owners brings an opportunity to diversify beyond existing products and set the groundwork for adopting as-a-service models.
- Cross-industry ecosystem: Cross-industry ecosystems unite capabilities from various industries for cross-pollination and innovation. Imagine the intersection of the mobility ecosystem with a charging ecosystem, which interfaces with smart grids and distributed energy management. It’s happening and such intertwined ecosystems demonstrate how we can ‘bring life to things’. Through intelligent offerings and business models such as software-defined vehicles, batteries, and on-demand charging, smart connected plants can manufacture both vehicles and batteries that are aligned with customer needs. Or ecosystems can come together through unexpected areas like assets that drive prosumer behavior to feed excess power back to the grid, and smart microgrids that trade power from multiple sources, including non-conventional sources.
These new business models are going beyond the traditional boundaries of an enterprise, industry agnostically, to bring cross-industry ecosystem play to life via pervasive platforms.
Fig 1: Digitally connected enterprises and their path to exponential value
Sustainable by design, servitization, digital twins, circular and responsive value chains, and the orchestration or participation in multiple ecosystems and platform economies are emerging as the key themes influencing the decisions of industrial enterprises. And all of this is more achievable when a business is a digitally connected enterprise. Therefore, transforming into a ‘digital enterprise’ and being capable of utilizing digital intelligence from across the value chain is a ‘here and now’ strategic agenda for businesses to derive long-term benefits even as technology continues to advance.
