Utilising Industrial Internet in Product Management

Abstract

There has been a lot of interest in Industrial Internet of Things lately. Its applications and their benefits have generally been widely researched, but the internal applications that product management use have not been sufficiently studied. In this thesis I study how product management can use and benefit from Industrial Internet of Things. I explore the different needs of product management, as well as different Industrial Internet applications and their benefits, to find how the needs could be fulfilled with the applications. I also use lean wastes and value to measure their benefits. All of product management’s objectives require information to aid in decision making. Some of the most important available information include customer information and product usage information. Industrial Internet can be used to build monitoring level applications that produce that information. Some of the most important applications include usage based customer segmentation, product faults analysis and sales support applications. These applications have been used as case studies in this work. Lean waste categories are good way of quantifying and evaluating the benefits of Industrial Internet applications. When the traditional manufacturing type waste categories are combined with information management waste categories, the different efficiency gains are easy to categorize. By estimating the value of the wastes and additional value created by the applications, as well as the costs of building the application, it is possible to evaluate their profitability. In both literature and empirical part, it was found that some of the information needs of product management can be fulfilled more efficiently than before, leading to the application being beneficial. They also tend to use the same technology stack as Industrial Internet applications in general, making them interesting.