Nashville Round-Up

What a difference a year makes. I had the honor of chairing IQPC's Remote Monitoring conference in Nashville last week, which was a markedly different experience from last year's event in my hometown Boston.

To sum it up, the Grand Ole delegates were much more concerned with questions of "how" than were their Beantown predecessors, many of whom were struggling with questions of "why." That is, there was a collective understanding of why remote monitoring makes business sense; it’s now become a matter of how to deploy, integrate, and extract maximum value from smart service solutions. This is a great indication that remote monitoring is making its way into the fabric of our core businesses.

Also, as evidenced by Gilbarco’s “Daily Loss Advisor” fuel loss report and Avaya’s “Expert View” report, just to name a couple, OEMs are beginning to graduate from simply capturing and transmitting machine data to applying intelligent analytics and BI tools to create new value for their customers.

To sustain competitive advantage, OEMs need to stop viewing remote monitoring as a stand-alone capability. Remote monitoring ENABLES “smart services” (see inset image), and OEMs need to integrate smart services into adjacent phases of the product value chain, such as design, manufacturing, sales, service, and marketing. At the Nashville event, it was a good sign to hear some OEMs beginning to talk about leveraging smart services to strengthen service contract offerings and integrating machine data with PLM, FSA, CRM, and other enterprise systems.

To continue the conversation, join us on July 29 - 31 in San Diego for Qualcomm's 4th Annual Smart Services Leadership Summit!