FEATURE
FEATURE
A
AFRICA PREPARES FOR
IOT TRANSFORMATION
recent global survey by HP
Enterprise of 3,000+ IT and
business decision makers at the
end of 2016, found that the Internet
of things has hit an inflection point in
their minds. IoT is moving from good
to great. Expectations from IoT are sky-
high, and those who have implemented
IoT in the right way have found their
expectations surpassed. IoT it seems is
good for business efficiency, innovation
and profitability.
The business and social benefits of IoT are
gradually beginning to be understood in
agriculture, transport, healthcare, education,
mobile and utility market segments.
By Arun Shankar
Bas de Vos, Director of IFS Labs based
in Netherlands, explains that it may be
cool to connect sensors, devices and
assets and generate some analytics.
“But until you actually start doing
something with your observations
you basically have not earned a single
pound, single euro or whatever. Only
if you are able to actually take your
observations and transform that into
business optimisation then you start
earning your money back.”
Vos distinguishes between executive
dashboards presented by competitor
products that are not really what he
calls actionable intelligence. Actionable
intelligence is when the analytics being
presented on the dashboard go a step
further and are integrated with the
ERP of an organisation. Actionable
intelligence gives an indicator of the
business impact of a certain action
that is indicated based on analytics
from the data streams originating from
the Internet of things. Being integrated
with the ERP, an organisation is able
to evaluate the business impact of
executing an alert.
In order to facilitate ease of use
and efficiency into actionable
intelligence for an organisation,
IFS have created its IoT Lobby and
Enterprise Operational Intelligence.
Luis Ortega, Managing Director
MEASA at IFS, distinguishes between
the two. “IoT Lobby sits on their
transactional system and is more
focused on end-users of the ERP.
Enterprise Operational Intelligence sits
on top of that, on top of your whole
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organisation and is more oriented to
running your end-to-end strategy.”
Ortega points out that IFS’ IoT Lobby
and Enterprise Operational Intelligence,
help end-users to make the most of the
Internet of things, by providing them
actionable intelligence that is meant
for their level in the organisation. “IoT
lobby is specifically for the people that
work with that information from a day-
to-day basis and that is the operational
view. The end-to-end strategy and
end-to-end view of your business
and the impact of this technology in
your business you will see it on the
Enterprise Operational Intelligence.
One of the main drivers for how we
develop our business applications is
the information that everyone in the
organisation needs at their own level.”
IFS have segmented its IoT solution
stack into four key stages. The
first stage is the device, asset and
connectivity stage, where IFS will work
with partners rather than provide its
own products. This is also the Internet
of things stage. The second stage is
called discovery where the various
big data streams from the Internet of
things are consolidated using the cloud
based Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and
other ready to use, third-party cloud
platforms. The next two stages which
includes operations and optimisation,
is where the results of the analytics are
integrated with IFS tools. The discovery
stage and the combined operations
and optimisation stages are connected
using IFS gateways and IFS controllers.
“This gateway is really a software
component that makes sure the
customer should not be concerned
with actually getting that observation
into the ERP. The end-to-end stack will
be different by industry, but what we
are securing with the IFS IoT business
connector basically is we have a plug
and play at that boundary of the
stack,” says Vos.
IFS wraps the stages into a single
product designed to manage
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