IOT & Smart City Consulting

1. Planning


At the planning stage, our IoT consulting team will help you in the following ways:

    • We will demonstrate the transformation potential of IoT to business management by analysing the peculiarities of your business to develop plausible IoT use cases, outline the benefits they can drive in your business environment, as well as forecast potential long-term savings.
    • We will study the peculiarities of your business, the specific challenges you want to address and the benefits you intend to gain with IoT to determine the functionality and capabilities your future IoT solution should deliver.
    • We will break the desired deliverables into specific tasks to create a structured visual representation of when and how an IoT solution will be implemented.
    • Depending on the requirements to the functionality of a future IoT solution, we will design a flexible and scalable IoT architecture tailored to support your specific business objectives.
    • We will help you choose the technology stack required to address your business needs efficiently and cost-effectively, as well as select reliable technology vendors.
    • Our experts will leverage their best practices gained with many years in information security to prevent data misuse at every level of the IoT ecosystem: device security, data security, operational technology security, and more. We will make sure your data collection and use are consistent with relevant standards and regulations (e.g., HIPAA in healthcare, ISA99/IEC 62443 in manufacturing, etc.).
    • We will assist you in validating the effectiveness of the solution’s architecture design and the competences of selected vendors. Implementing a PoC will allow you to test the solution before deploying it across your business environment.
    • Our consulting team will interview project stakeholders and potential users about their demands and desired use cases, carry out feasibility studies and analyse existing service descriptions, as well as consider legal, regulatory, environmental and other requirements to create a complete and valid description of an IoT solution.
2. Implementation


At the implementation stage, we render the following services:

  1. Tweak IoT project management
    • With consistent and efficient reporting on project status, resource workload, and expense tracking, we allow you to have the benefits of sound coordination of resources, clear formulation of goals, persistent process coordination, and end-to-end process transparency.
  2. Facilitating collaboration between business project stakeholders and an implementation team
    • We propose ways to coordinate multiple stakeholders and engineering teams to ensure fruitful internal (senior management, operations, IT and security managers, R&D, support, legal departments, etc.) and external (hardware and software vendors, connectivity providers, etc.) collaboration.
  3. Helping with missing IoT-specific technical knowledge and skills 
    • Our IoT consultants and engineers are ready to join your team at any stage of an IoT solution’s planning and implementation to provide help in the areas where expertise may be missing: big data, IT security, artificial intelligence, etc.
  4. Taking on any part of implementation
    • Our skilled IoT engineers are ready to take on any part of implementation: from enabling the communication between smart things and the cloud software to integrating IoT solutions with other enterprise systems.
3. Operations and maintenance

At the operations and maintenance stage, we are able to:

  1. Examine problems of an existing IoT solution: 
    • the lack of benefits, questionable ROI, long development process, high operational and maintenance costs, functional and security issues, etc.
  2. Plot an IoT solution’s evolution: 
    • improving the solution’s architecture, enhancing its functional capabilities, integrating new use cases, and more.
We Advise on a Wide Range of IoT Solutions

We bring our knowledge, experience and novel ideas to aid you in planning, designing, implementing and evolving the following IoT solutions:

Smart, connected products

Our team helps product manufacturers to get a better understanding of the customers’ needs, optimize product functioning and use, and create new revenue models. We help define smart, connected products’ capabilities and set them in tune with your and your customers’ IT strategy.

Industrial IoT

We help manufacturers to ride the wave of digital transformation and optimize equipment utilization, reveal bottlenecks in the manufacturing process, reduce downtime, timely detect potential equipment failures, improve production quality, and increase employees’ safety. To achieve that, we closely cooperate with project stakeholders, analyse their business objectives, determine Industrial IoT system’s capabilities, create a detailed solution roadmap and bring it in line with your enterprise’s IT and business strategy.

Smart maintenance

We help businesses drive improvements in predictive maintenance and service productivity. Our IoT consultants analyse the specifics of your business and study the objects to be maintained to reveal operational parameters signalling about potential failures, design a solution architecture, choose an appropriate technology stack, etc.

Smart cities, smart utilities

We help municipalities, policymakers and other stakeholders by developing smart city use cases, creating a smart city vision and a roadmap, selecting technology vendors, launching PoC’s, creating servicing strategies, etc. With our vast knowledge and hands-on experience, we will help you plan, design and implement smart city solutions capable of enhancing urban infrastructure, optimizing energy management, reducing environmental pollution, and establishing more efficient communication between residents and urban facilities.

While the use of advanced technology has been focused on major urban areas to this point, we’re also seeing the application of smart city type projects in small towns, suburbs, and rural areas as well. For example, there are currently works in progress in rural areas to help farmers work more efficiently; suburban areas are testing the waters with projects like smart water meters and water reservoir monitoring to better manage the water supply; and islands are trying out smart grid initiatives that will provide valuable information for reducing energy use. Whatever the size or challenges of your municipality, the strategic and creative application of IoT solutions often produces good results.

What is included in a Smart City Ecosystem?

A vibrant and sustainable city is an ecosystem comprised of people, organisations and businesses, policies, laws and processes integrated together to create the desired outcomes shown below. This city is adaptive, responsive and always relevant to all those who live, work in and visit the city. A smart city integrates technology to accelerate, facilitate, and transform this ecosystem.

Governmental Efficiency

Effective governance & ease of doing business

Sustainability

Environment, energy, water & air quality management

Health and Wellness

Mental, Physical and social well being

Mobility 

Transportation, transit & traffic management

Economic Development 

Business, employment and productivity

Security & Public Safety 

Welfare and protection from crime, hazards & disasters

Quality of Life 

Standard of living , satisfaction & happiness

Four types of value creators

There are four elements to creating value in the smart city ecosystem. They create and consume value around one of the outcomes listed above.
When people think of a smart city, they automatically think of services provided by municipal and quasi-governmental agencies, services such as

    • smart parking
    • smart water management
    • smart lighting, etc

In fact, there are three other value providers and users that co-exist in the smart city ecosystem, these are

    • businesses and organizations
    • communities and
    • residents

Businesses and organizations may create services that use and create information to create outcomes for its stakeholders.
Communities are miniature smart cities, but with very localised needs. Some examples of potential smart communities include university campuses, office parks, airports, cargo ports, multi-dwelling units (MDU) or apartment complexes, housing developments/neighbourhoods, business districts and even individual “smart” buildings.

They all have needs for smart services that may be tailored specifically for their stakeholders.

Residents or individual citizens can also be smart services providers in the smart city. A resident living near a dangerous street intersection can point a camera at the intersection and stream that information live to traffic planners and police.

Residents place air quality measurement sensors on their properties to monitor pollution and pollen levels during certain times of the year, and make that information to other community members.

Residents can also choose to make these smart services temporary or permanent, and free or fee based.