“Forecasting is the art of saying what will happen, and then explaining why it didn’t!”
“It is often said there are two types of forecasts … lucky or wrong!!!!”
These are couple of funny Quotes that I read about Forecast on Internet. These pessimistic quotes did not bring any surprise to me, as we all know that having an accurate Forecast has been a never ending challenge, especially in the manufacturing industry. As the forecast / demand planning can Make or Break the future of any company, despite of uncompromising investments by companies, the results are not satisfactory even today. With the Internet of Things (IoT), now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Before going to the details of this business case, let me share one of my personal experiences that took place recently. When I was driving back to home from the office, in the middle of the night, all of a sudden I had a flat tire. After couple of hours of waiting, Mechanic has come and inspected the tire and told me that, I drove almost 31,000 KM and I should have replaced my Tires at least 500 KMs before. Until that guy has told me this, I have never thought about it and I felt that there should be some mechanism in my vehicle which should inform me well in advance to replace my tires. When I thought further to this, as a customer I was struggling to know when I need to replace the tire and on the other side, my Tire Manufacturer is struggling to predict, when I am going to place the order for the Tire. In this scenario, connecting my vehicle to Internet will solve the problems of both customer and Manufacturer.
Analysts predict that 100 % of new cars will be “connected” to internet by 2020. If every vehicle is communicating their meter readings to their Manufacturers and if this data is shared with their partnered Tire Manufacturing Companies, they can use this data to analyze and can exactly know how many customers are going to place an order for the Tires in which month and they can plan their production Activities accordingly.
We know that every tire has a life time and if we can analyze the travelling trend of a vehicle based on the data received, one can easily predict when that vehicle is going to need a replacement. For eg: if my vehicle is connected to Internet and it sends the traveled distance data every day, after few months, one can easily assess that I drive 1K KM per month on an avg. If the Tire lifetime is 30K KM, system can easily predict when I am going to need a new Tire.
All that needs to be done is, to analyze this huge volume of Data and get a consolidated report of all the vehicles that are connected. As they will receive this data from Millions of Vehicles every hour, they can leverage Powerful Database like SAP HANA and can run the analytics on that.
Thanks Vishwanath!