This business initiative consists in designing and offering your customers a digital, “connected” solution, based on data from connected products, that helps them use their products better and thus achieve concrete benefits, such as saving time, consumption and operating costs or increasing efficiency and productivity.
Your goal is to strengthen the relationship with your customers, reinforce the sales of connected products and, in some cases, generate a new revenue stream (see Digital Subscriptions Management below).
The vehicle for your digital services: your Customer Portal
The best vehicle for offering digital services to your customers is your Customer Portal. The Customer Portal, in fact, should be the only digital touch point between you and your customers, in which customers find all the information, functions and digital solutions you make available to them.
Do you already have a Customer Portal?
If you already have a Customer Portal, you will embed your DPS system within it.
If not, your DPS system will do the job by itself.
Digital Services are typically composed of one or more of the following elements.
Remote Monitoring and Control
This element allows your end customers to remotely monitor and control their product and receive notifications about relevant events.
Key capabilities within the DPS system:
Visualization of raw data, with period filtering
Visualization of status data
Visualization of product-specific synoptic schemes
Remote control and configuration
Alerts and notifications
Product provisioning
Key configuration activities:
Manage your product models
Manage the definitions of your product digital twin models
Manage the definitions of raw data for each digital twin model
Manage the definitions of available remote commands and configuration parameters for each digital twin model
Define and keep updated the rules for activating alerts and notifications
Define and keep updated all the needed UI templates
Product Fleet Management
This element helps your customers monitor, configure and control their entire fleet of products. It is useful whether your end customers owns and operates more than one product, especially if they are distributed across many locations.
Key capabilities within the DPS system:
Manage and monitor multiple products in multiple locations
Geo-location of multiple products
Overall overview of the product fleet
Unified alerts
Bulk controls and updates
Customer-level and location-level users management
Aided Maintenance and Troubleshooting
This element supports your customers in carrying out the necessary maintenance activities and resolving any issues that may arise.
Value for the end customer:
to save time in the event of an issue, thus reducing the impact of the issue on their operations
to reduce the risk of downtime, by following usage-based, condition-based or predictive maintenance instructions designed by the OEM
Key capabilities within the DPS system:
Regularly process streamed data and detect issues
Propose suggested remedies to help customers solve the issue by themselves
Propose the necessary maintenance activities according to usage, conditions or predictions
Keep track of executed activities and assess scheduling compliance
Key configuration activities:
Manage and keep updated the set of rules that associate detected issues to suggested remedies
Manage and keep updated the set of rules that associate maintenance activities to usage and detected conditions
Digital Performance Advisory and Reporting
This element helps your customers maximise the performances of their products.
Performance is a fairly broad topic and could be more specifically:
uptime
productivity
efficiency
sustainability
the quality of the output of your product
Key capabilities within the DPS system:
Regularly process streamed data and compute synthetic information (KPIs) about performances that are easy for your end customers to understand
Give your end customers guidance on how to increase the performances
Allow your end customers to verify and measure the positive impact of your suggested actions
Key configuration activities:
Manage and keep updated the algorithms used to compute synthetic information (KPIs) about performances
Manage and keep updated the set of rules that suggest performance-improving actions
Digital Subscriptions Management
One possible outcome of the Digital Services initiative is the generation of a new revenue stream. This is possible when the value generated by digital services is high enough to be recognized by the end customer with a payment.
In this case, the tool for capturing the sales opportunity is a Digital Subscription.
By defining which information and capabilities belong to a free plan and which to a premium plan you will allow access to premium features only to customers who activate a paid subscription.
Key capabilities within the DPS system:
Offert digital capabilities according to the subscribed plan
Let your customers activate and manage their subscriptions and pay through integrated online payment solutions
Key configuration activities:
Package your digital services offering in subscriptions plans