Location Data: IoT Applications and Benefits
Accurate and precise location data is the foundation of numerous IoT applications. Understanding the end-to-end nuances of your use case is a crucial first step.
Location, location, location. You’ve heard the phrase before. Location has always been important to businesses. It’s a vital piece of intel that informs a range of questions. Where should I open my next location? Where should I market my products? How can I develop lasting bonds with my customers as they move through their everyday lives?
Although location has always been an important metric for informing business decisions, the modern world has created a need for something new:radical granularity at a massive scale. The data revolution has made it both possible and necessary to make business decisions based on hard data. Business leaders can no longer afford to guess how customers experience the business’s brand and services.
Stakeholders need to know that you are relying on more than intuition and experience. They want to know that you’re a data-driven expert on your customers. Being knowledgeable in modern business means untangling a mess of digital and physical assets, processes, and operations, to generate actionable insight.
Location data is how many modern businesses make sense of their processes, their products and/or services, and how people interact with all of the above. It enables businesses to track assets across oceanic black holes. It allows them to map customer journeys seamlessly. It is the tool they use to optimize the routes of swarms of vehicles weaving through smart cities. The tricky part is understanding your specific business goals and leveraging the right kind of location data technology for the task.
You no longer need excel sheets or manual databases to manage supply chains. It’s unnecessary because Internet of Things (IoT) solutions providers are able to create scalableasset trackingsystems that obviate the need for people doing the majority of menial supply chain tasks. Operators can now track each individual asset in a supply chain while visualizing at scale how all assets are moving collectively through the world.
Asset tracking IoT solutions have been a rising trend in supply chain management for one reason: they work. Imagine this: on Mother’s Day, American consumers spend about $2.6 billion on flowers. How do producers and suppliers ensure that the flowers you give to your mother are reliably beautiful while also turning a profit?
“The flower industry cold supply chain is complicated and relies heavily on everything going smoothly. Flower’s are often grown in places like Colombia and then have to travel by plane to the United States, go through customs, and then get sent to a refrigerated warehouse before even reaching a flower shop, grocery store, or the end consumer. This process leaves a lot of room for error since flowers are so delicate and rely on being at the right temperature at all times.” —Brittany Dervan
There’sa staggering 40 percent waste marginin the industry and according to David Bairstow, SVP of Product at Skyhook, “If introducing IoT into the cold supply chain leads to decrease in waste by even 10 percent, that would result in more than $100 million of savings.”
Knowing where expensive flower shipments are at all times, what temperatures they’re experiencing in transit, and whether they’ll arrive at a loved one on time, are all critical to the industry. And location-driven IoT—i.e.asset tracking—isthe most promising avenue for optimizing supply chain logisticsthereby amplifying ROI for industry stakeholders and passing on savings to you when next Mother’s Day rolls around.
Wearables make substantial use of location data.
