Beware, IoT Is a Double-Edged Sword

This is the fourth post of a six-part blog series focused on the effects of Blockchain and the IoT Revolution on logistics and supply chain management. 

This week, we are going to evaluate how supply chain professionals should view the implementation of IoT in their work. There are countless benefits of this technology, but it is still important to be careful when investing in new solutions.

First off, the supply chain field already has been and will be tremendously impacted by the prevalence of IoT-connected devices. Many mundane tasks, such as manually counting inventory, are things of the past at modern companies. It is also not discriminatory of any industry; from food and retail to software and oil, any type of business can utilize IoT in its operations.

The world is driving towards productivity increase in many ways (e.g. autonomous vehicles, automation tools), and IoT is just another innovation that can help. According to the International Data Corporation, the end of 2018 will see digitally connected processes drive productivity for manufacturing supply chains up by 15%. With increased productivity, people will have more time to focus on other aspects of their business that are not digitized.

If IoT is this helpful, why shouldn’t companies just jump at every opportunity to incorporate IoT into their business? A pitfall that many companies will face is investing in too many different IoT solutions. Not only is that costly, it can actually decrease productivity because of the time it takes to engage with every device. It’s the same reason why people don’t download every single utility app on their phones; it’s only convenient to have the ones that you use a lot.

Now that we’ve discussed the ways that supply chain professionals can view IoT, we will move on to addressing the conflicting interests of other stakeholders in next week’s blog post.