Thyssenkrupp North America CEO on IoT digital transformation
CHICAGO–The internet of things can do three things for you, Mike Krell, head of internet of things strategy for market intelligence firm James Brehm and Associates, said during his welcoming comments at the Enterprise IoT World event. “It can make you money. The second this is, it can save you money. The third thing it can do is keep you out of jail.”
He gave the example of elevators. “You can create new services, new revenue streams. We’ve got lots of ways of advertising. You can manage the existing elevators from a quality standpoint,” by conducting predictive maintenance. And, to the staying out of jail point, there’s that elevator safety compliance certificate that’s easily overlooked but placed somewhere in all of them (hopefully). “Elevators are a perfect example of what IoT can do for you.”
This served as a lead-in for a keynote address from Patrick Bass, CEO of Thyssenkrupp North America. Bass said the internet of things is all “about strategy. We had the idea, ‘Gee, if we could monitor our elevators remotely, we could get data and do better service. More uptime…the happier the customer. You have to have elevator service. But when we’re in the building, we’re a nuisance. We’re never someone the customer likes to see, but we’re someone the customer has to see. How can we change that dynamic?”
Bass cautioned that IoT isn’t an IT project. “It’s an end-to-end business integration process. Digital transformation has to basically go in…and bridge the gap between something that’s a risk in your business model, or something that, in the past, you couldn’t control but now you can control better.”
For Thyssenkrupp’s business model, efficiency is key. Bass said the need was to use the data the company collects to maximize uptime and “keep us out of buildings, and save costs. With the power of this data, we protect our business model.”
