Faster Time to Value for a Smart Connected Products Strategy

Read Lora´s Blog: Service Your Products Better with a Connected Strategy

You made the business case for a smart connected products strategy, to transform field service or to support a new, digital business initiative. Delivering the necessary performance requires a short “time to value”, particularly in an environment of rising interest rates. That means that industrial IOT technology implementations must be as simple and quick and that the ongoing “total cost of ownership” is as low as possible—both necessary to ensure hitting the required program ROI. 

Learn how aftermarket business teams create smart connected product strategies and are achieving those goals today, all the while, growing margins and making the best use of resources. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Speaking of Service, the podcast that uncovers practical ways to grow service revenue, control costs, and improve customer satisfaction. If you're looking to innovate, gain a competitive edge, or just learn about the latest service trends, you've come to the right place. In today's episode, Chris Wolf, VP of Strategic Partnership. Joins Laura Estee, product manager at PTCs Smart Connected Products Group to discuss how aftermarket business teams are achieving their time to value and total cost of ownership goals, all the while growing margins and making the best use of resources. Welcome back. It's good to be with you again. Our topic today is smart and connected product strategies. This isn't a new topic. Many of you have been looking at making your products smart and connected for a long., but you may have struggled figuring out what are the right use cases that will get your management organization interested in investing behind smart connected strategies. Uh, fortunately for you and for me, we have a subject matter expert here, Laura Estee. Laura comes to this topic with a background in engineering as well as product management. Welcome to Speaking of Service, Laura. It's good to see you. Good to see you too. Glad to be here. So tell me a little bit about your professional background. Well, I've been at PTC for about six years and I've been working with customers that we've had. I've been in the Center of Excellence for Smart Connected products. So we meet up with customers and potential customers, and we work with them on using our technology to give them solutions to some of their. I can remember the early days that we thought smart conducted products would just happen automatically and it would be something that would roll out extremely quickly and people had a lot of big dreams. What's happened since, well, we've moved away from technology for technology's sake. You don't just put something out there cuz it's cool. You need to work on what is your use case, what are your goals, and what are you trying to do? So a lot of times it's are you trying to save money? Are you trying to get new revenue and are you trying to do more? And what is the mix that you see in when you talk to customers? Is it an even distribution across those make money, save money, deeper, less, or, well, of course they wanna do all okay, but we encourage them to really pick one. Um, a lot of times right now we're working on service and saving money. So being able to service your products quicker, faster, better. you're gonna save money. Well, it's funny, I now have a washing machine that's smart and connected, and I have, I'm assuming that if it goes haywire, somebody's gonna be able to dial in and fix that washing machine. Is that really the case? In some ways. Uh, but what about the complex machines that our customers. Support and manage. So it's a little harder with, um, machines that are more complex than a washing machine. I mean, the washing machine technology has been around for a long time. They have made great strides on the things that they've done. But what we're working with sometimes, like an M R I. Those are very new and they have newer technology in them, and it's harder to say, when this happens, do this. It's a lot more complex than that. So you need to have the technology in there to not just do the things that you know need to be done, but to be able to diagnose stuff that you don't know about yet. How do you get the information about that individual machine in order to perform a diagnosis and. Enact the smarts embedded in that machine. Well, you're gonna have the smarts embedded in it, and then you're gonna have the smarts embedded in the cervix technician. Like they're gonna know what this, um, product is, and they're gonna have a clue how to do it. And it's the combination of the person and the technology. When you talk about the service technician, I mean mm-hmm. I think whenever a service technician shows up at my house, I make them coffee. I offer them a snack. I'm so grateful to have that person there. Uh, how are service technicians responding to this kind of a smart and connected strategy? There is a broad span of service technicians. So you have the people that have been servicing these machines for years. and they just kind of like have a feel for it. They go up to it, they hear it humming. They have a feel for what they've seen go wrong in the past and what to do in the future. Like there, there's that level. The The machine whisperer. The machine whisperer, and then you have the younger people coming in the, they really don't even. Feel like they're on the same playing field with these machine whispers, it's really hard for them to even understand like, oh, well when it sounds like this, chances are you're gonna have to change the filter. Like they're, they're really struggling with that. But that's where smart connected products can come into place. So you can still have your machine whispers go out, but if that product is connected, that machine is whisper. To your servers that are collecting the data, so you don't necessarily need a human being sitting there and listening to it because your smart connected product is telling you about it. Laura, I know our Thingworks products are a starting point for our customers, but I understand we've developed some templates that help our, our partner customers get off on the right foot faster. Yes. In the field, we have seen the same use cases over and over and over again, and so these templates have been created to get you faster time to value with these same use cases. So a much easier way to connect. Assets an easier way to visualize what you need and bring that information to the service technician in a very quick way. So even though I may be in a completely different industry, the requirement is the same. They're very similar. You're gonna have telemetry that you bring in. Is that a number? Is that a string? Does that have limits? Does that have a threshold? So while one might be in. Industrial machines and another might be medical equipment. Those bases are pretty much the same, and you're gonna wanna do that. Doesn't matter what industry, that's what you're gonna wanna do, and those templates will get you there faster. You mentioned templates, plural. Is there one that you have found to be the most successful or the first one that our clients have adopted? Well, Thingworks is technology that just has a lot of pieces in. So when I'm using the word templates, I mean you can think of it from one template or a set of hundreds of templates. So I'm really talking about this set of hundreds of templates that has many use cases. with your perspective, having worked as an engineer as well as in the product team, I, I won't ask you to share any customer names, but can you tell me some of the, the use cases that you've seen that you thought were really excellent? What we talked about before where you have a mature product out there and you pretty much know when this goes wrong, this is what you're gonna do. Um, what is really nice is with our technology, we have the ability to have new products out there and you don't know what's gonna be. Like, you know, it's new. So we have the ability to pretty much from afar, sneak our fingers in in a secure way and dabble onto that machine and really figure out what's going on, and then go back and change some of those alerts, change some of those thresholds so that we can say, when this happens again, I can apply this type fix. So it's not a., you roll out your technical solution, you roll out your SCP solution and you're done. Like it is going to grow with you. So the ones that have had the most success are the ones that put the strategy in where their SCP solution is gonna grow with them. They put just the right information in there so that they can connect with that kind like what you were talking about with your washing machine. Yeah. Where they can, you know, log in, see what's going on. Oh, she did, you know, um, the wrong kind of load. You've been in my laundry room. Right? They've, they've been in your laundry room, but not really. But that's the kind of thing that, um, we've seen being very successful. So it sounds to me that starting a little bit small Yes. And figuring out, you know, kind of learning your, learning the ropes. Right. Start small because you don't know how big it's gonna be, and you don't know exactly which piece is gonna give you the most. So learning what types of data and alerts that are coming off that machine are valuable, which ones are just noise and, and having the ability to change it. So with our Edge solution, you have the ability to update it, to get different information, to put a software update out there. There was never any product ever created that did not have. Ever. So knowing that when you put something out there and you design it to be able to be fixed, it puts you far ahead of where you ever thought you would be. I know when, in the old days when you would buy a car and drive it off the lot, it began to depreciate and lose value immediately. Yes. And in today's car market, with the over the air updates, your car gets smarter and smarter, better, and more feature rich. Over time, people are gonna keep it longer. I mean, everyone's gonna wanna keep products longer. The idea of getting a new car every two years, that's gonna go away. That's not very sustainable with our customers. They are not interested in. Having to put out new hardware every few years, that is just not an option. That's not sustainable. That's not what their customers want. They need to have the ability to update their products from afar and not have to go and physically be there. Lori, what about sustainability? It seems like the ability to update a chassis or a product or a thing over the air would add value to that product over time and maybe give it an extended life cycle. Oh, definitely. Um, I mean, what you were saying with cars. You used to have it and if it had a software, You probably were never gonna get it fixed. You were just gonna get used to, okay, well, you know, like it says that it's on empty, but I know I have 50 more miles, right? Um, now it's gonna be smart. It's gonna be able to be updated, and you're gonna be able to use it better. The other thing is, a nicely connected product can tell you what piece needs to be fixed. So not only do you not have to think of it as one big mono. asset. It can be, um, a set of assets and you can look at each piece and be like, this piece needs to be updated. You know what, if we update this, the firmware needs to be updated. So this is how we're going to update the firmware to talk to each different component. Listeners of this show have heard us talk about the cost of a truck roll and trying to avoid a truck roll, or, or even more importantly, if you're gonna roll a truck, make sure that you have the right parts on that truck, right, to fix what you're gonna encounter. And this is definitely gonna help you with that. Um, with a truck roll with the old way of doing it. Somebody calls, they said, my asset is broken. My piece of equipment is broken, needs to be fixed. I'm like, well, tell me about how you've been using it. Tell me when did it start doing this? When did that start vibrating? And now you're dealing with human beings trying to remember when something went bad or maybe like they might leave out the fact that they didn't change a filter right now. We don't need to ask the person, we are gonna ask the piece of equipment. We can find out the truth about what really was going on with that piece of equipment. And it's not that the person that was giving the information, withheld that information on purpose, they just didn't know. So now you know more, you know exactly what was going on the lifecycle of that product when it came in. You can know like what day each piece was manufacture. on that piece of equipment all the way down to how long it's been working, has it been working overtime, and you'll be able to know a lot more about what needs to be fixed on it. Well, I would imagine for the engineering team getting that trending information about particular troublesome parts. Mm-hmm. must have a big impact on their choice of suppliers and the way they make things. Yep. That's where you're able to get that information and bring it right back in. We call that the digital thread., you know how you built it, you know how it's acting, and you can bring that back in and say, you know, maybe if we changed this material, maybe if we gave it a little bit more clearance, um, the next one's going out might not have the same problem. Laura, having been in this market for a while, I'm sure you've seen many customers. What's your favorite customer story about a smart, connected product? So, I'm not gonna say which customer this is, but it was one where they created a product and it had a lot of., which I mean, we're engineers, we love features, we love gadgets. And you're sure that the engineering team loved their features and their gadgets, so they put a smart, connected product out there and they got to find out that all of this engineering effort that they put for one of their features, was never used.. No. So think about how much money and time it takes, not just to develop something like that, but to maintain it and keep it working. And every time you have a new product, you're going as being like, well, it needs to have such and such. Um, and then to find out it's never used one, it's probably disappointing. Maybe they can go back to marketing and be like, do people even need this?, maybe you can just say, we don't need to do that anymore. We can cut the cost of this feature and have something for a customer and they're never gonna know because they never used it. Is it Mark Twain? I said if I had more time, it would be shorter.. Yes, exactly. So by, uh, amputating that never used feature, you save all that downstream cost and you may improve customer experience. Right, exactly. Laura, if I wanted to learn more about how to accelerate my journey to smart and connected products, do you have any recommendations or anything I could be reading? Whoa. You can start by reading my blog. That was a shameless tea. Yes, it was a shameless, but I'll go into it. We're going into smart, connected products, faster time to value and lower cost of ownership. Um, I go into how you can do that using our product and some of, um, our templates that we have out there. So you mentioned faster time to value. What does that mean in. Um, in English, that means in the world of internet of things, it's kind of like the world is your oyster. You can do everything right. And what we've found is when people try to do everything, it will take all the time in the world. So we're pretty focused on what you can do, what you can do fast, and we give templates that will help you get there. So that will get you to what we have seen as value from a start of nothing. So you helped me. being in purgatory of not knowing where to begin, right, and never having anything that ends. You're not gonna do technology for. You're not gonna do technology for the sake of technology. One of the things people love about Thingworks and also hate about Thingworks is that you can use this tool to do just about anything. Yes, you can get very overwhelmed if you just go into Thingworks from nothing and just start creating things. Um, what we have is an accelerator and it gets you to., the point where you have all of the menus, you have all of the users, you have all of the roles. You can create those pretty much in minutes. And then from there, you're not taking your time to create an application in Thingworks. You're taking your time to say, what is the information that. I need from my machine. So instead of becoming an expert in Thingworks, we're gonna use your experts on your assets to be able to connect and get that information. So all of the work that you're gonna do isn't necessarily gonna be on the platform. It's gonna be much more focused on your products and your use cases, not just the. So less time doing development discovery, more time turning up the solution and tuning it to the machine and the requirement, right? We're gonna use the experts of your machines and bring that information in.. Laura, I've heard a lot about our smart Mm-hmm. that help our customers get to value faster. What does that mean? So that means that we actually have these templates that are created and we have them available to customers through our partners where it. Pre bakes their application. It gives a lot of the structure that everyone uses and creates over and over and over again. So rather than somebody working to create the menus, the users, the roles, um, and the dashboarding that's there so they can spend their time, instead of baking all of that in, they're spending their time configuring. is needed to be connected, so they're gonna spend their time on the asset. What are the properties that are needed? What are the thresholds? And that gets brought in. And the way we've done it is actually much more with configuration rather than customization. So we've already put that into this accelerator where for the most part, you're not doing coding. You're picking and choosing which are the assets you wanna see, which are the models you wanna see, and um, what way do you wanna see them? And do you wanna have alerts on any of those proper? So given you've seen so many smart and connected product strategies, I imagine it would be easier for PTC to set up a framework or a template to get somebody started than for somebody to build that from scratch themselves. Yes. There are things that we have seen people do differently hundreds of times, and you're really not getting any value out of that difference. You're just creating it a different way because, the way you created it. So by providing the, the template that represents our learnings mm-hmm., we give our mm-hmm. customer the chance to focus on the configurations that are unique to their business. Right. We're using their expertise to be on their products, not expertise on something that they're really not gonna, um, gain anything from. I'm excited to see these templates. If somebody wanted to learn more about them. I assuming these will be on display at liveworks? Yes. We're definitely gonna be showing the s e p Accelerator Smart Connected Products Accelerator. Thank you for joining me. Speaking of service, it's been my pleasure having Laura Estee, our expert on smart and connected products, and the accelerators that she mentioned are detailed in the blog that's here on this post. I encourage you to join us at liveworks, this coming May, where you'll see Laura and her. Have a chance to participate in many of the demos, including seeing how these smart and connected product accelerators work. Until then, I wish you. Happy service. Thanks for listening to the Speaking of Service podcast, brought to you by ptc. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And leave a rating or review, and be sure to check out other episodes to hear new perspectives on improving life for aftermarket professionals, service teams, and the customers they support. If you have a topic of interest or want to provide feedback, email us at speaking of service ptc.com or visit us at ptc.com/speaking of service.