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Profitably Close the Circle with the IoT
âWhen wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.â
âNIKOLA TESLA1
Youâll never think of âthingsâ and their changing impact on business the same way after learning about the BigBelly, a microcosm of the emerging Internet of Things.
Behold the traditional municipal trash can! What could be more primitive a thing?
Smelly.
Dented.
Overflowing with trash (and maybe rodents).
Often lying on its side.
And dumbâreally dumbâit just sits there.
Unless, that is, the trash can is the BigBelly, a sleek, attractive, enclosed container whose solar electric-powered compacter lets it hold five times as much trash, paired with one or more recycling containers. These features alone would be a noteworthy advance compared to conventional municipal trash cans.
But the BigBelly Solar startup wasnât content to just improve the efficiency of trash and recyclable collection. In the early models, a red light turned on if the BigBelly was nearing its capacity. But with the emergence of the cloud, the company and Digi (a pioneer in the wireless Machine to Machine [M2M] communications field) added wireless communications to the bins, making them âsmart.â According to Marketing VP Leila Dillon, âWe were there before there was an Internet of Things, connecting through the cloud. Our âahaâ moment was that we suddenly realized we could work with cities to transform their waste operations.â2
Now, instead of traditional pickup routes and schedules probably based on sheer proximity (or, as BigBelly puts it a little more colorfully, âmuscle memory and gut instinctsâ), the company offers a realtime way to monitor actual waste generation, through the wireless âCLEAN Management Console.â That lets DPW personnel monitor and evaluate binsâ fullness, trends, and historical analysis, for perspective. Collection schedules can now be dynamic and driven by whatâs happening right now rather than just past averages. On average, cities using BigBelly receptacles reduce the frequency of collections by 70 to 80 percent, while increasing the amount of materials that are recycled.
BigBelly Solar offers a Managed Services option where it analyzes the data and manages the devices on a subscription basisânot unlike the way jet turbine manufacturers and other companies now have substituted services for selling products, offering their customers value-added data that lets the customers optimize performance and generating new revenue streams for the manufacturers. The same communications network can even dramatically increase recycling programsâ participation rates and efficiency.
Thatâs not all.
Most recently, according to Dillon, the company has come to realize it has a âprecious assetâ because the units âare located exactly where the people are.â Their engineering team began to think of a cityâs core needs and understood that the company could make better use of the wireless communications capability they already had. Given the rapid growth of IoT-based âsmart cityâ services, they are now working with host cities to add services such as free Wi-Fi hot spots, IoT beacons to guide pedestrians, and sensors to detect ambient weather conditions. Because the BigBelly receptacles are just placed on location, rather than being built in, installation of new functions is easy and quick, with no wiring required. They can add sophisticated small-cell technology to deal with frequent bandwidth deficits and even bring Wi-Fi to underserved residential neighborhoods.
With BigBellyâs decision to offer an open Application Programming Interface (API), smart people will be able to discover other uses for BigBelly data as well.
No wonder the companyâs website heralds BigBelly as âa platform deployed in the public right-of-way that delivers much more than smart waste and recycling. In addition to modernizing a core city service, it is optimal for hosting additional technologies. It is easy to access and can hide technology in plain sight.â
Bottom line: If something as humble and ubiquitous as a municipal trash receptacle can be transformed into a waste-reduction-recycling collection-municipal communications hub, imagine what could happen if we reexamined every conventional product and management system and found ways to make them âsmartâ through the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things (IoT), the concept that every âthing,â ranging from assembly-line sensors to light bulbs to trees in remote rain forests and cows in a pasture, can be given a distinctive name and then be linked to other things via the internet or a local wired or wireless network, is what creates this ability to uncover and use previously inaccessible information about man-made and natural things. The Internet of Things lets manufacturers and others gather data from these devices, interpret it, and act on it, all in realtimeâsomething that was impossible in the past, and that will change everything.3 The benefits range from cheaper, quicker, and better maintenance to increased manufacturing efficiency, to product design that will delight customers and create new revenue streams.
But neat, efficient products and services just touch the surface of what the IoT can do if we realize the true significance of realtime data sharing among everyone who needs it.
Less understood (and a major theme of this book) is that the IoT can even let you abandon outmoded hierarchical and linear processes. It will enable a radically new circular management model that was impossible in an era of limited data, one that increases operating efficiency, sparks innovation, and promotes collaboration. Thatâs because, for the first time, everyone in an organization who needs access to realtime data to make better decisions or do their job more efficiently can instantly share that data.
The Future Is Smart will provide the overview you need of the major technologies required to implement an IoT strategy, and detail the key areas such as manufacturing, maintenance, and design that it will change. Perhaps even more important, it will introduce you to the radical attitudinal shifts you must make to capitalize on the IoTâs full potential to transform every aspect of your company and its thinking.
To better understand the IoTâs potential, consider the following examples. You will notice, because they are based on accurate, realtime information never before available about how things actually work, they differ from past practices that had to work around information gaps and unconnected things. Thereâs simply no comparison to business as usual in the past.
Car insurance companies in the past had to cobble together quotes based on proxy indicators such as credit reports (âguilty of driving while poor,â in industry parlance) or teensâ report cards. Progressive Insurance can now give you an accurate quote based on your actual driving behavior because it first sends you a âSnapshotâ unit, which plugs into the diagnostic slot on your dashboard and monitors your driving for a month. If youâre a safe driver, the Snapshot can earn you a discount. Insurers are extending the same approach to building insurance by monitoring realtime data on buildingsâ systems.
Kardia, a tiny metallic unit that fits on the back of your smartphone and costs less than a hundred dollars, will give an FDA-approved accurate EKG of your heart in only thirty seconds, comparable to a $10,000 inpatient procedure. If you want, it can automatically connect you with a cardiologist who can give a professional interpretation, via that smartphone. In fact, journal articles have shown Kardiaâs results can actually be more valuable than the costly inpatient variety because the readings are taken while youâre active, rather than lying flat on your back in a hospital, and you can annotate them and share them instantly with your doctor. One cardiologist at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital now prescribes them for every patient.4
GE now builds fifty to sixty sensors into each of their jet engines. They use the realtime data from the sensors (a single 787 flight can produce a half a terabyte of data) to detect possible problems so early that the needed parts will be on hand and the engines can usually be fixed the next time the plane lands. That innovation is called âpredictive maintenance,â avoiding more costly emergency repairs and possible catastrophic crashes. Equally important as a demonstration of the IoTâs truly transformative nature, both the manufacturer and the airlines benefit in other ways: If an airline opts in, GE will send them the realtime data, which can be combined with weather and other data streams to improve in-flight economy and performance, in return for a subscription fee that enhances the manufacturerâs revenues. Itâs a far cry from the slapdash maintenance of the past.
In these and countless other examples, companies are able to make radical changes to every aspect of their operations based on the availability of unprecedented amounts of realtime data, while multiple users benefit from sharing the data.
The convergence of several technologies evolving over the past decade makes the Internet of Things possible:
⢠Cheap and low-powered sensors detect and then report, by wire or (increasingly) wirelessly, on a growing array of realtime factors, from babiesâ heartbeats to jet turbinesâ revolutions. There are now lithium-ion batteries the size of a grain of sand (created through another innovation, 3-D printing), and sensors as thin as a hair. A recent breakthrough will enable users to harvest ambient âbackscatterâ sound to power their devicesâfor free.
⢠Actuators act on that data without human intervention to fine-tune assembly lines and product operations.
⢠Changes in internet nomenclature make it possible to give distinctive internet addresses to countless things of all typesâ3.4 x 1038 things, to be more preciseâmore than the total number of grains of sand on the earth.
⢠Billions of mobile devices provide a fertile environmentâ11.6 billion of them by 2020.5
⢠Expansion of cloud storage allows ready access to massive amounts of data, coupled with dramatic reductions in cloud storageâs priceâdown to free in some cases.
⢠Development of sophisticated data analysis tools allows almost realtime analysis of the huge volume of data these s...