While pain points, regulatory hurdles, and adoption rates can vary widely across industries, one challenge that impacts every IoT company is the critical need to speed the introduction of safe, high-quality products. To ensure first-mover advantage in highly competitive industries, more companies rely on a cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) or QMS solution to design, develop, test, and ship products on time.
The key to speeding development is having a cloud system that acts as a single source of truth for all internal teams and external supply chain partners. Cloud systems provide faster deployments and highly secure platforms that can be set up quickly and used intuitively with minimal training. That is critical for supply chain partners that dot the earth and have limited resources to learn new tools. “What I see most often with IoT customers is that they want to get up and running quickly with basic functionality,” says Keer. “It’s part of the lean startup mentality. And as these companies grow in size and complexity, they need solutions with the capabilities to support them as they scale—without the need to switch during a critical business ramp. The vast majority of companies do not want to be burdened with the installation, setup, and IT maintenance of on-premises software solutions.”
The speed of disruption is so fast in the IoT space, engineering teams must be rock solid in their delivery. Many failed IoT companies were unable to meet aggressive design and delivery schedules because they did not have the proper systems in place to manage product design and quality information.