High performing IoT providers avoid these 3 common pitfalls.
1. Manual data management
For providers deploying IoT at scale, manual data management using spreadsheets (still a common “go to”) isn’t sustainable. There are too many disparate and complex data sets to aggregate manually. Typical examples include customer, financial, carrier, stock, device and product data.
Common outcomes for providers still managing via spreadsheets are finger errors, over investment of valuable time and resources, data leaks, partial or full data loss, creation of single dependency and poor business continuity.
2. Too little focus on stock SIMs
Ineffective SIM stock management can result in significant and unnecessary over spend. Many IoT providers dont realise the importance of how the mobile carrier(s) commercials apply in relation to their stock SIM’s.
Here are a few examples of generic SIM states which may apply to stock SIM’s and could incur costs:
- Active / Deployed
- In Testing
- Inactive / Deployed
- Idle / Paused
- Cancelled
3. Single dependency
It’s often the person with the most intellectual property who becomes the “owner” of a spreadsheet, process or application, by default. Whilst it’s great to have subject matter experts, the risk is when those people leave the business, a void is created. This can have severe impacts on costs, customers, operations, reporting and overall business continuity.
Conclusion
High performing IoT providers overcome these pitfalls by deploying purpose built software, designed to integrate, merge and automate their disparate data feeds. The result is a single view across the IoT SIM card estate that delivers; analytics, alerting, summary and deep-dive reporting that supports critical business processes like cost allocation, revenue assurance, onward billing, product analysis, data matching and end customer reporting.