-
Prevent Downtime.
Get Happy Customers.Smart connected products can make downtime a thing of the past,
delivering concrete financial benefit to your customer’s bottom line,
and yours too.
Downtime Prevention: Turning Frowns Upside Down
When your product fails, your customers feel it first. Operational interruptions. Reduced output. Spoilage. Schedule delays. Whatever the flavor, product downtime translates directly to cost. That means operational and financial impact for your customers, and negative repercussions for you, your brand and your business. No one wants that.
How Connecting Your Products Can Reduce Downtime
Smart connected products minimize or eliminate costly product outages by detecting impending failures before they happen. Intelligent algorithms spot problems early and can send alerts, suggest quick fixes, or automatically lighten the load to prevent breakdowns.
Downtime Prevention Can Make You More Money
Connecting your product to prevent downtime doesn’t just make your product better and your customers more satisfied. Downtime prevention is something you can charge for. In many cases, eliminating outages generates enough business value for customers for them to justify signing up to an ongoing subscription program.
Why Preventing Downtime Matters
The more important your product is, the less your customer can afford for it to go on strike! When your product breaks, some part of your customer’s operation comes screeching to a halt. Costs can mount up rapidly from lost productivity, reduced output, spoiled inventory and more.
The good news is that you and your product are suddenly top of mind for your customer. The bad news is that it’s not for good reasons. Even after the problem is fixed, the reputational damage persists. Depending on how your customer contracts are structured, you may accrue liabilities in credits or make goods. And while the impact on future sales may take a while to show up, it’s more than likely lurking below the water line.
How Connecting Your Products Can Reduce Downtime
Smart connected products can make downtime a relic of the past:
Remote monitoring
The cloud can remotely monitor your connected product’s health, watching for sensor readings that drift outside normal ranges, performance problems, and signs that something’s about to fail.
Alerts and mitigation
When the cloud detects an emerging issue, it can automatically notify appropriate systems or personnel and/or direct them on how to mitigate or resolve the problem, for instance:
- Scheduling a proactive service call
- Taking the product out of service
- Moving inventory to a unit that won’t fail
- Reducing load on the product to sustain operations until maintenance intervention
Intelligent models
Based on historical sensor data characterizing healthy vs. unhealthy operational states, AI can generate profiles for predicting different failure modes and can determine the most successful mitigation strategies.
Put these together, and you get what the industry calls “predictive maintenance.” Sounds fancy, but in reality, it just boils down to delivering on these three building blocks that you can unlock by connecting your product.
Downtime Prevention Can Make You More Money
When your connected product reduces or prevents downtime, you generate business value for your customer. No more lost productivity, reduced output or spoiled inventory. Instead, increased service continuity contributes directly to their bottom line.
The question is how best to capture some of that value you’re generating:
Improved competitive positioning
Connecting your product to prevent downtime will protect your market share against competitors making the same moves, while increasing your win rate against those who are standing still.
Reduced churn
Having a more reliable product means having happier customers. Happy customers are much more likely to stay in your lane when making future product investments. And way less likely to swap out your product for a competitor’s.
Increased pricing
A product that breaks less often is worth more to your customers, because of the incremental operational value that accrues continuously over the product’s lifetime. Your product can command a higher price point.
New revenue streams
Downtime prevention can be so valuable that you can sell it as an additional line item. Customers can often justify paying an ongoing monthly charge based on the provable return your connected product generates through reduced downtime.
How Blues Helps You Prevent Downtime
Blues helps you securely connect your products to continuously monitor their health and reduce or prevent downtime for your customers.
Go faster
Blues’ easy-to-use, all-in-one device-to-cloud system takes care of all the heavy lifting so you can focus on what’s special about your product. Get your prototype online in days. Run successful pilots. Accelerate the launch of your new downtime prevention service.
Control costs
Blues lets you cost-effectively create and operate your downtime prevention offering, with no surprises. No big upfront costs, no carrier contracts, no hidden fees. Our business model is designed to work with and supports yours as you grow.
Scale with your customers
We designed our device-to-cloud system to make it easy for our customers to manage their customers, from both a technical and a business standpoint. Scale with confidence with every machine you bring online and every customer you add.
Talk to us to see if our Idea to Market accelerator can help you chart a successful path to downtime prevention. Or just start building, so you can have your first prototype online before you know it.
From Connectivity Failures to Continuous Uptime
Lift AI develops intelligent monitoring systems that give elevator operators unprecedented visibility into equipment performance, enabling them to catch problems before equipment goes down. They initially built their connectivity solution in-house, but realized they needed a more robust and reliable solution when 380 devices suddenly went offline on July 4th, 2020. A huge over-the-air update, massive data load, hitting a credit card limit, and no rollback baked in all created the perfect storm. Lift AI had to ask customers to retrieve devices from on top of elevators, costing thousands of dollars and leaving critical monitoring systems offline. What if you could build IoT solutions that guarantee continuous monitoring uptime, so your customers never lose visibility into the equipment they depend on?
Use Cases
Downtime Prevention
Increase uptime by remotely monitoring the condition of your connected products so you can act before a failure occurs. Data-driven predictive maintenance eliminates costly outages, increases customer satisfaction and boosts everyone’s P&L.
Energy Savings
Improve energy management by connecting your products to gain real-time visibility, generate predictive insights, and enable your own automated controls. Reduce energy consumption, improve equipment efficiency and lower costs, while increasing sustainability and meeting compliance needs.
Truck Roll Reduction
Eliminate costly and unnecessary truck rolls by connecting your products to deliver real-time visibility into when maintenance or top ups are actually needed, instead of on a fixed schedule. Increase customer satisfaction with proactive, data-driven, perfectly-timed service visits. Learn more about how Blues eliminates unnecessary truck rolls.
Safety
Assurance
Connect your products to enhance safety and security through continuous monitoring, event detection, and automated alerts. Protect people, vehicles, cargo, and operations. Cost-effectively meet safety regulations and prove compliance. Learn more how Blues enhances safety and security.
Loss
Prevention
Reduce theft and eliminate spoilage by connecting your products with uninterrupted global coverage, using sensor telemetry and real-time location to protect equipment and inventory. Avoid these preventable and costly losses which disrupt operations. Learn more about how Blues helps reduce theft and reduces spoilage.
Take Your Next Step
Whether you're focused on preventing outages, maximizing uptime, or avoiding costly failures – or all three! – we're ready to chat or help you dive right in.