Before the technician arrives at an installation with a breakdown, he receives advice on what is wrong and how to fix the problem. An expert system, a form of AI, known as “The Virtual Coach” gives the technician the four most probable causes for the breakdown. The most probable cause is correct 80% of the time. Collectively, the second, third, and forth probable causes are correct 10% of the time. It is expected that the Virtual Coach will get better, over time, due to learning algorithms.

The three goals have been met. In fact, everything is working better than expected. The big winner in this story is the customer. These three goals improve customer satisfaction.

What’s next? What’s next is more difficult to execute but brings huge benefits to both the customer and the company. The two things that are most significant are as follows:

1. Product improvement
2. Changes in operations.

The monitoring of so many units lets us see what components work better than others. If many breakdowns are associated with a component, the component can be improved. If a component is substituted for a different component, one can quickly determine if the new component is equal to or better than the part it replaced.

Changing the way one does business can bring big improvements in operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. However, these changes are not easily accomplished.

When we perform maintenance and what we do when we are on site is based on experience. While experience is good, statistical data, that we now have thanks to IoT, is better. We are finding that some of the service tasks we have traditionally performed have no real value. We are also identifying tasks that we did not perform in the past, that we need to perform.

Changing the way one does business is never easy. The total change in operations that one must execute to take full advantage of IoT will be painful. Not embracing the benefits of IoT can put your company at risk. However, these changes are a win-win situation—your customers have a higher satisfaction level, and you have a more efficient operation.