Smart products have their price

IoT failures were the subject of my previous blog post, and what particularly surprised was a “Smoke detector with integrated microphone that allows monitoring in living rooms” that a well-known manufacturer launched on the market. The question of whether this is really a design flaw or whether we don’t have to put up with it for the comfort of smart products resulted in really interesting, sometimes controversial discussions. One question that emerged is not new, but the trade-off generally concerns users of smart devices:

How many and which kind of private data do I disclose for smart comfort?

In the case of the smoke detector, the advantages are obvious: the networking of the smoke detectors in the house offers greater safety in case of fire. If one detector is triggered, all other smoke detectors are informed and the alarm sounds throughout the house. In addition, the alarm can be forwarded, for example to a mobile phone, so that users are informed at all times. This functionality, does not require a microphone that allows monitoring. However, the high-resolution microphone is required if the smoke detector is to be used in addition to voice control for a “smart home”.

Advantage: Then I only have one device on the ceiling: smoke detector with voice control
Disadvantage: I need a smoke detector in every room, but there are rooms where I don’t want any voice control elements to listen.

Maybe during design of the smoke detector this has not been taken into account or simply an existing circuit design was reused. Here it becomes clear that for the development of smart products it is important to look at the whole package from the user’s point of view:

How should a smart product behave, what is technically possible and what should it not be able to do?

For some products it is not clear whether it’s a useful and safe product, like e.g. a jogging stroller that drives autonomously in front of the running track. Is autonomous driving safer than the person holding the stroller? Because he too could stumble and the stroller could roll onto a road …

Furthermore, the Internet of Things and the ongoing digitalization of different areas of life also offer the opportunity to develop sustainable products and solutions. I would like to drive an electric car whose route planner calculates the electric filling stations needed on the way and suggests filling up at a suitable time, naturally taking waiting times into account. Or, in general, smart home applications that save energy and offer greater safety.

Very interesting are also the possibilities in the industrial area, which can be reached by the use of digital twins of plants or machines: Operating states can be recorded at a glance and the machine can be controlled via apps. Algorithms calculate optimal resource allocations, bottlenecks can be detected, and real-time control becomes possible.

The exciting challenge I see in the design of IoT products is the interaction between hardware and software. What possibilities there are to design sustainable and sophisticated products and to optimize processes, if the overall system is considered! Complexity is a big challenge for designer and  developer.  And in addition verification, testing and validation of a solution are required to make sure, that products and systems behave as required.

IoT failures and trust in technology

At the beginning of April this year I attended the building IoT in Cologne. At the conference, which was organized by heise developer, iX and d.punkt publishing house, everything revolved around applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 in lectures and an exhibition. Together with my colleague Yang Zhong, I presented modern user experience concepts (UX) for IoT solutions in a lecture.

At the end of our presentation, which showed a user’s work processes, from the data acquisition of a real “Thing” to the visualization of live data in the dashboard using a Digital Twin, there was a very stimulating discussion. Two points were particularly interesting here:

  • In many application areas, the topic of customer journeys is high on the agenda – which confirms the current trend.  
  • It is essential to develop software for users – which was also a consensus.

The evening was dedicated to Industrial IoT. As a moderator, I hosted a discussion with representatives from various enterprises and software companies, such as Miele, Dürr Dental, Codecentric or akquinet. An intensive discussion around the predominant topics of the industry 4.0 took place here. In addition to the choice of the control electronics or the wireless standard, this also includes questions as to whether an IoT solution should be operated in a cloud. The reasons for solutions in a cloud are of course the convenience and the relatively efficient and simple scalability with regard to the number of “things” to be managed. On the other hand, managing the software on your own servers (on-premise) means that confidential product or customer data really won’t leave your premises. The discussion has confirmed my assessment that both approaches have their advantages in practice and are applied accordingly.

One of my personal highlights at this year’s building IoT was a negative hit list of IoT products, so-called IoT failures: products that have massive security gaps, such as open data interfaces. Some “classic” vulnerabilities were already known, such as unaltered standard passwords that allow data misuse. Others gaps really surprised me: such as a smoke detector of a well-known brand, which is already equipped with a microphone (?!) as standard, which in turn allows unwanted monitoring in living rooms.

Why is there a microphone in a smoke detector?  We can’t say that for sure, at least it’s not in the customer’s interest and causes a massive loss of trust in technology. And that is precisely the point: acceptance of new technologies requires trust. And this is becoming more and more important with increasing digitalization.

20 years of PLM: Why do many still doubt the benefits?

In the meantime, I can look back on several years of consulting for Product Life Cycle Management. A topic whose popularity has fluctuated considerably over the years and is currently on the rise again in the wake of digital transformation.

Despite the increasing attention for PLM again, I notice that the term continues to have a large, cumbersome, tedious, and uneconomical taste. Amazing, because the effort that many companies put into ERP projects, for example, was and is significantly higher in most cases. Nevertheless, the necessity and benefits of – expensive – ERP projects are discussed, but rarely questioned, see Haribo and Lidl.

How do these different perceptions come about? One explanation could be that the benefits of PLM for management and employees in companies have not been sufficiently exploited over the years. This was mainly due to the fact that the scope and visibility of PLM projects in companies was often very limited.

A closer look shows that many of the earlier PLM implementations were in fact PDM implementations. PDM, Product Data Management, focuses on product descriptive data, primarily CAD models and drawings. “PLM” was therefore limited to the core areas of product development, very often even to Mechanical Design. Although beeing avilable in some PLM solutions for years, Change Management, Document Management, Project Management, cross-departmental collaboration or communication with external parties have not been used. Instead, solutions based on Excel, Outlook, the file system or SharePoint were often created on their own. Tools that everyone in the company knows. And for those one can very easily find someone to “optimize” these tools by macro programming. In addition to that, the negative attitude towards PLM was certainly fuelled by the overloaded, highly compressed “engineering user interfaces” of the 1st and 2nd PLM product generations.

So it’s no surprise that PLM was seen in the company as an expensive, less useful and exotic application!

In the current PLM renaissance, companies now have every opportunity to learn from the deficits of the past and to take advantage of the impressive potential of Product Lifecycle Management. Many obsolete and discontinued PDM and PLM solutions are currently or soon to be replaced by modern 3rd generation PLM platforms, which also support the use cases around the Digital Twin and the Internet of Things. They breathe life into the PLM idea by effectively and efficiently supporting processes across phases, departments and company boundaries. New, web-based HTML-5 user interfaces significantly increase acceptance among all user groups in the company by making even complex relationships clearer and handling them more efficient.

Now there is a chance to realize “real” Product Lifecycle Management! Against the background of new, digital business models, which put the use phase of products much more in the foreground, this becomes all the more important. PLM solutions play a central role here, as they lay the foundation for data relating to the Digital Twin.

But in the end, hard facts also count when it comes to benefits and ROI: If PLM is actually used company-wide with all its possibilities, high economies of scale quickly result from the significant minimization of non-value-adding activities. This alone often enables a return on investment after just one year. Regardless of the additional revenue potential from new, data-driven business models that PLM will enable in the future.