Data, Competition and the Evolution of Product Identity

Digital Identities

Everyone is talking about the massive volumes of new data available to businesses as a result of digitizing  just about everything, but I believe we are just getting started.   Every business process, piece of equipment, building, product, customer if they don’t already, will have a digital twin – a unique digital identity.  This digital identity is necessary because traditional relationships between manufacturers, brands, products and consumers is rapidly changing?  A business’ recognition and response to these digital identities will determine whether they will be digital winners or losers.

Today, everything is generating data – websites, smartphones and apps, vehicles, manufacturing processes, home automation systems, smart cities, etc.  However, as much as technology enthusiasts like me talk and write about digital transformation, many products and processes still remain analog, but that’s changing.

It seems every week we read about another retail chain filing bankruptcy or administration.  The struggles retailers are having today are significantly impacting their suppliers – the manufactures.  Think about the problems toy manufacturers are facing!  All the largest toy retailers are gone.  How then do toy manufacturers sell toys to consumers without the retailers?  The answer is manufacturers must get to know, and better communicate with their end customer.  That doesn’t mean removing retailers from the mix, but rather a changing of roles and responsibilities.  Manufactures need to take on more of the responsibility of promoting their products and directing buyers to locations where they can purchase their products.

Products, and data about them, can generate an incredible amount of value if they have unique digital identities and are tracked and traced as the following example demonstrates.  This list, of major steps in a typical product lifecycle, summarizes where data could be generated as a result of having a unique digital identity, tracked and shared.

1. Design – a new type of product is designed, diagrammed and patented in a digital format
2. Source – capture data about materials, ingredients, sustainability data
3. Digital press releases, marketing and training material are all tracked for location, use and effectiveness and associated with the unique digital identity
4. Manufacture – When, where made, batch, production line, packaging components
5. Distribute – logistics details, stock location and quantity, 3rd party logistics (3PL) performance
6. Retail – Which store, shopper engagement, product authenticity
7. Consume – who, when, where, consumer patterns, consumption data
8. Operate – live usage data, proactive data monitoring, replenishment, subscriptions
9. Recycle – where recycled, sustainability data, change of ownership
10. Responsibly disposed – how were the components disposed, when, where, how
11. Patent protection – monitor business terms for use, and any violations

All of the major steps in a product lifecycle, if the product has a unique digital identity, can be tracked, documented, archived and shared to generate value.   In fact, apps, new business ventures, products, services and business models can all be created based on the data.

Let’s now walk through a product lifecycle scenario together.

1. You develop a new innovative type of automotive battery.  You give each battery a unique digital identity.  The digital identity is associated with its design and patent.  It comes with an embedded sensor.
2. You issue press releases, produce product information and training materials in digital formats that can report their use and effectiveness.  Resellers are trained, tested and certified all online.
3. All the materials used in the battery are identified, tracked and documented including their source, ingredients and sustainability data.  This information can be used to be compliant to regulations, and in marketing and educational material to attract buyers and to create brand loyalty.
4. The battery is manufactured in Lexington, KY USA.  All the information concerning when and where it was made, the batch, production line and packaging components are documented and tracked for quality and safety.  All the steps that were taken to make the process sustainable can be reported and shared and have marketing and loyalty value.
5. The batteries are distributed to automotive parts stores, and the inventory levels and locations are documented and tracked from factory to retail stores.  These inventories can show up on Google Location search, Paid search and Inventory searches for all locations.  The manufacturer did not wait for resellers to effectively load their products, digital content and update their inventory amounts, rather the battery manufacturer did it – it was that important.
6. Some retail stores allowed battery inventory levels to be monitored by the manufacturer for replenishment purposes, product and brand authenticity, sales levels, pricing and marketing campaign effectiveness.
7. The consumer is encouraged to register the battery with the manufacturer.  They are rewarded with special performance guarantees.  The data is now monitored – who bought it, for what purpose, when, how is it working, is the customer happy, etc.
8. The product is monitored in real-time for quality and performance.  Any recognized issues are noted, the user is alerted and issues are tracked and resolved proactively.
9. When the battery’s lifecycle has been completed, the battery is delivered and registered at a recycling location.  The battery ownership changes to the recycling service provider.
10.  The battery components that no longer have value, or are too dangerous to reuse, are disposed according to regulations.  The details of when, how and where are documented and reported.
11. Even after the product lifecycle is complete, the design and patent may live on.  These must be tracked and protected to extend the product’s value.

The above scenario, although fictitious, describes real capabilities, real processes and active trends.  Consumers want to do business with companies that are transparent and can guarantee and document how they do business.  They want proof that their vendors source and operate legally, ethically and sustainably.  They want to better understand their products and have a reason for buying them.  Manufacturers in turn want a closer relationship with their end customers.  They want to know who has their products, how they are being used, and how they can support their customers better to increase brand loyalty.  These desires mean both parties are looking for more data.

Companies that cannot capture accurate data and report effectively on their products and product lifecycles are blind, and will be unable to respond to these trends and the desires of their customers.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

AI and Marketing Mix Modeling

In the course of my research on the impact of artificial intelligence on sales, marketing and customer experiences, I have been learning about Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM).  If you are not familiar with it, here is a quick description from our friends at Wikipedia.

"Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a way to optimize advertising mix (where money is spent on advertising) and promotional tactics with respect to sales revenue or profit.  It is an analytical approach that uses historic information, such as syndicated point-of-sale data and companies’ internal data, to quantify the sales impact of various marketing activities." 

As I dug deeper into MMM I saw both the value and the complexity involved.  However, my liberal arts degree, in no way prepared me for it.

The ideas and concepts around MMM have been used in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) industry for decades, but little outside of that industry.  The reason - it required massive volumes of data and greater computing power than was available at an affordable price.  Today, however, with digital transformation, increasing numbers of digital customer interactions, the abundance of data, algorithms, analytics dashboards, artificial intelligence and everything-as-a-service, MMM is rapidly expanding.

Digital Expert Interviews: VMware's CMO Robin Matlock

In this series we have spoken with a lot of different experts on the impact of digital transformation on enterprises and industries – usually from a  backend IT system perspective. In this episode, however, we dig deep into the impact of digital transformation on marketing with VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer, Robin Matlock.  She shares her insights on how VMware embraces digital transformation, how marketing in general is impacted and how she approaches her job as CMO.  Enjoy!

Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Next Gen Digital Transformation Shakes Things Up Again!

What if you could closely measure your retail competitor’s in-store sales every day?  What if you could be alerted when competitors were increasing or decreasing production at different factories or ordering more materials?  Would that be valuable?  If it were possible, how would it change your strategies and the way you operated?

Intelligence capabilities that in the past were available only to nation-states are now available to commercial organizations through services provided by companies like Orbital Insight.  They partner with a wide range of satellite and other geospatial data collection companies to aggregate and analyze data, using artificial intelligence and data science to provide near-real-time insights. One of their products monitors over 260,000 retail parking lots from space. They use artificial intelligence to count and measure the number of cars in the lots and analyze time sequences to understand how the number of cars fluctuates over time.  This helps them understand if sales are increasing or decreasing in a particular location.  Isn’t that crazy to think about?  But think about it we should.  This is the next generation of business intelligence.  Put on your James Bond suit or dress, order a drink, and prepare for the next generation of digital transformation.

Satellite imagery can also help monitor fleets of trucks, warehouse activities, crops, plant health, highway traffic, construction projects and activities, oil field operations and oil storage levels, mines, logging, shipping and much more.  It’s important for business leaders to understand what is possible today, and what is being used by other digitally-mature competitors.  Intelligence gathering and analysis methodologies first developed by military and intelligence agencies, such as activity-based analysis and patterns of life analysis, will soon be critical skills for businesses.

All of these capabilities are being productized and/or offered as subscription services.  What makes it possible?  The commercialization of space as a result of massive numbers of new satellites being launched, producing massive volumes of new data, transmitted across incredibly fast wireless networks and then analyzed and interpreted by artificial intelligence.

It is also important to know that satellites support many different types of sensors.  They can include infrared thermal sensors to detect different heat signatures.  They may include hyperspectral sensors to detect different minerals, terrestrial vegetation and man-made materials.  Each new generation of satellite includes new types of sensors capable of collecting new forms of data.

The real insight here is the way combinations of newly-available data sources plus artificial intelligence will make possible new and additional waves of digital transformation.  Digital transformation is most certainly a journey not a destination.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

IT Leadership Series: SAP's Christine Ashton, Global CDO, Digital Office, Cloud ERP

I have the honor of hosting the CIOWaterCooler.com's IT Leadership Series, and this week I had the privilege of interviewing Christine Ashton, SAP's Global CDO, Digital Office, ERP Cloud.  In this interview, we dig deep into her insights on digital transformation, AI, automation and the economic case for running ERPs in the cloud, plus what it takes to win in a fast changing technology environment.  Enjoy!



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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Digitally Transforming the Customer Experience

We have been traveling a lot lately. Why? Here at Regalix, we help large global companies with their customer success and sales enablement initiatives, which include things like digital marketing, knowledge management, customer experiences, sales operations, customer service and support, rewards and loyalty programs, etc., all of which are critical to the business and are today being digitally transformed. While helping businesses transform themselves in these areas we have seen and learned a great deal. Let me share some of the lessons we have learned.

Is Silicon Valley Worth It?

Have you ever wondered why technology start-ups aggregate in Silicon Valley like moths to a flame?  Office space is expensive.  Hiring employees in the valley is costly.  Competition for talent is fierce.  Buying a home is cost prohibitive and traffic is horrible.  Yet start-ups continue to locate here.  What are the attractants?  Let's consider the following:

Traditional consulting practices promote the fact they have decades worth of accumulated business processes, system designs, economic models, methodologies and experiences from years of providing IT and business strategy consulting to large multinational companies. The problem is the large legacy S&P 500 companies are not the models for agility and digital acumen today - think about the trouble GE is in.  Today the average number of years a company can stay in the S&P 500 is predicted to be only 14 years.  Today, agile Silicon Valley companies are the ones commanding the most attention.

Having Silicon Valley DNA today is more important than archives full of historic processes and decades of experience deploying legacy systems.  Silicon Valley is the very epicenter of digital transformation and the companies here think and act differently.  Silicon Valley DNA is a digital mindset, a paradigm, a culture, a perspective and an operational strategy.  It assumes there are competitive advantages to be found in change and innovation - just waiting to be exploited.  It aggressively pursues new business models and innovations based on the belief there is value in learning, whether the experiment is a success or a failure.  It seeks examples of successful proof of concepts across all industries, and then seeks ways to apply those findings to other business problems and situations.

Consulting companies with Silicon Valley DNA are not attracted to projects involving the implementation or deployment of legacy technologies and business models.  They may do them, but only as a means to an end, which is to get more challenging and transformative projects and business. They seek opportunities to help companies advance, in leaps and bounds, rather than in small risk-free iterations.  

Businesses with real Silicon Valley DNA are located in the Silicon Valley.  It means they are surrounded by innovative people both inside and outside the company that are working with and learning about emerging technologies and business and economic models every day.  It means they are collecting and working with new ideas every day - assembling and reassembling them to form new products, services and businesses.  It means they have unleashed their employees’ creativity to integrate and test unique combinations of technologies in search of additional value. 

Being located in the Silicon Valley and having Silicon Valley relationships also benefits new start-ups seeking to fund interesting ideas and new ventures.  In addition, start-up teams benefit from being in close proximity to experienced technology leaders, investors and advisors. 

Consulting companies with Silicon Valley DNA, are made up with people that think differently.  They thrive in an environment and culture that attracts ambitious, competitive and driven innovators and entrepreneurs.  They are not seeking status quo, but rather they are trying to make a positive impact through change.

Where many traditional businesses struggle with change and experience a deep-set institutional and leadership resistance to it, businesses with Silicon Valley DNA recognize change as an opportunity to capture additional competitive advantages and deliver more value.

Businesses with Silicon Valley DNA also look at risk differently.  Where traditional businesses might fear risk and see it as something to avoid, Silicon Valley companies are willing to work with it.  They see risk as a gateway to potential opportunities and competitive advantages that are worth exploring.

Silicon Valley consulting companies often have an abundance of knowledge and experience on how to take an idea from a concept to a new business ventures.  Often within leadership teams they have the accumulated experience of having worked in dozens of different start-ups.  This experience has shaped them into entrepreneurs.  Their natural approach to any project is from a business start-up perspective.  This mindset is missing from many consulting companies that focus primarily on staffing and long-term ERP implementations and deployments.

Another Silicon Valley DNA character trait is a healthy disrespect for how things have been done in the past.  Traditional market rules and behaviors, business model norms, institutional and industry practices are often not respected.  In fact, they are often viewed as mere artificial limitations created by incumbents for the purpose of protecting their own status quo and limiting customer choices and options.  In the Silicon Valley rewards are given most often to those that think out-of-the-box, not to those trying to fit in it.

Silicon Valley consulting companies and entrepreneurs often believe in fuzzy math.  They believe that 2 + 2 does equal 5.  They have witnessed firsthand entrepreneurs networking independent car drivers together with ubiquitous wireless broadband, maps, mobile apps, mobile payments and a demand for transportation into – Uber!  They have experienced the value of collecting concepts, ideas, technologies and best practices from many different industries and combining them into new business models that thrives and add exponential business value!

Businesses with Silicon Valley DNA by their very nature also look beyond technologies.  With an entrepreneurial mind they consider competition, markets, regulatory environments, industry trends and much more.  This is a requirement for start-ups and these considerations are embedded in their approach to consulting.

We have of course generalized in this article.  Not every business with Silicon Valley DNA is geographically located in Silicon Valley, but having this DNA is a huge advantage.  

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President, Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.