Good article. It’s been about a year since I saw Uptake and Caterpillar join into this steel & silicon marriage. I can only assume this company could be using something from them. Data mining is indeed a way squeeze that extra fat out of operations and Caterpillar showed that they have vision by applying something people were just blurbing about without any practical application. It’s also the best way of increasing margin by decreasing costs due to prevention or efficiency increase as you mentioned. The only problem though, is that for some companies the culture holds them back instead of embracing the tech. Some rather continue with a deficient operation instead of making a little investment that will pay off in less than a year. This is the kind of tough sell, because for many it looks like an investment with low return. I speak out of my own experience. About 3 years ago I developed a platform for fleet efficiency that would monitor about 30 different parameters from the vehicle (mostly trucks) and report many actions that can increase the efficiency and decrease cost of maintenance. When you try to sell the idea, it’s all nice and shiny. But many in the transportation are cannot see past investment on the tech in order to explore the benefits. The funny thing though is.. I ended up selling the same platform as a service to the same clients to accomplish other logistics related things instead of its original purpose.
