How Behavioral Analytics Is Changing Manufacturing, Transportation, and the Home
Traditionally, data streams in from just a few places.
Maybe it’s user activity on your website. Maybe it’s an internal log of orders. The point is, to get a full picture of your company’s data you used to only have to link up a couple of databases.
But that’s all changing now. Valuable data is being generated not just on the web and mobile but also on IoT devices, bots, and more.
We’re moving toward a time where everything will be capable of transmitting data. In the future, every aspect of your product will generate data and use that data to change. In many industries, like manufacturing, transportation, and home technology, this is already happening.
Goodyear takes data collection seriously — so much so that its vision for the future looks more like a telematics company than a tire manufacturer.
That’s because IoT is changing the entire business model of Goodyear, moving it from a product-only company to a service-based one. Goodyear’s new programs range from simple tire modifications to moving beyond tires altogether.
On the simple end are initiatives like adding RFID (radio-frequency identification) tracking to their NASCAR racing tire in order to prevent thefts and improve the accuracy of inventory. However, location is far from the only information their tires are generating — sensors can measure temperature, tread depth, tire pressure, and more.
When this data is transmitted to the cloud and analyzed, it enables a new class of Goodyear tire services:
Goodyear is even offering services that have nothing to do with tires. Since they’re already selling telematics to vehicle fleets, they’ve also built value-added applications on top. For example, they have a driver scoring application that measures behavior like harsh braking and fast acceleration, which causes fuel inefficiency and vehicle wear.
The concept for the Goodyear tire of the future (Source: Motortrend)
And Goodyear isn’t stopping there. Their vision for the future is an AI-powered, spherical tire that can alter itself physically as it gathers information from its surroundings — like growing small dimples to increase friction if it senses a wet road.
This is the future of the manufacturing industry. Products won’t just be objects anymore — they’ll be data generating, data ingesting, and adaptable.
For years, airlines have been using data on travel demand to determine which flights to offer between which cities. But to really analyze a flight, you need to know so much more than just how many passengers are on it — there’s fuel usage, temperature, turbulence, and so much more.
Southwest Airlines is now getting this sort of data through the industrial Internet, a digital network linking on-plane hardware like engines to the cloud. And one of the biggest opportunities this new data has provided is saving money on fuel.
Southwest spends about $5 billion on fuel each year, meaning even a small improvement in efficiency can lead to some hefty payoffs. But so much of that fuel is wasted. In 2014, airlines altogether lost $4.3 billion in fuel just from idling on the tarmac. And since flights need to account for so many factors, they often carry a much larger fuel load than needed — the weight of which limits the number of passengers and amount of cargo a plane can hold.
But with their new streams of data, Southwest can get a much more precise understanding of how much fuel planes will need for different routes and weather conditions.
