The IoT actors often underestimate the stakes of the fleet management in the industrial deployments of sensors.

“Deploying an IoT system without an advanced tool for fleet management is like managing the business of an SME or a group without CRM. This is just not practicable.”

GreenCityZen’s first preoccupation as an IoT solution provider, is to estimate the value and return on investment of a business use case. This value can be demonstrated as part of a pilot with dozens of objects.

However, the next question is how do we scale to deployment.

The key questions that a fleet management tool must address in order to scale up are:

Troubleshooting: Do my devices work? If not, what are the issue cause? Battery ? Radio link? Wrong configuration? Any analysis overview? Do I receive alarms in case of dysfunction?

Management of access rights: Can I easily add a user and grant relevant rights? Can I organize devices in clusters?

Configuration: Can I, easily and remotely, declare and configure a new object? Can I change remotely the measuring frequency of a sensor?

Alert Management: Can I easily configure and modify my technical or business alert thresholds? Can I display the alerts on a map?

Inventory: Do I have a mapped view of my deployed objects? Do I know the firmware and hardware version of these objects (sensors and gateway)? Do I have a vision of the performed  maintenance operations?

Online Calibration: Can the sensors be calibrated online?

Firmware Update: Can I easily upgrade the firmware?

Interoperability: The IoT platform allows me to interoperate with new data sources if my need evolves. The platform offers open APIs that allow me to integrate it with my own information system.

The decoupling of the business use case and the questions about the fleet management is a big mistake. At the center of the use case there is “the use”, the perception of the use value can be largely degraded by a failing management tool. Costly iterations on the project or the design of the objects may be necessary if these issues are not treated before.

About Greencityzen:
GreenCityZen is a greentech pioneer in the industrial Internet of things (IoT) for industry and smart city. The HummBox is a continuous measurement solution for the monitoring of environmental data: from the sensor to the dashboard. Low energy devices, fast deployment and interoperabilty are strong assets to bring immediate benefits such as reduced costs of field trips, improved process performance and help to enrich service offerings.