Tred, a new start up company in Seattle, is turning the concept of car buying on its head by bringing the test drive to you. Why is that significant? Because now, a person can engage in every (productive) aspect of purchasing a car without having to set foot in the dreaded new car dealership.
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Prior to the advent of the internet, unless you happened to find a review in an auto magazine, you couldn’t find out anything about a car without stepping into the dealer showroom. By the late 1990s, you could look up information about cars online. Saturn pioneered selling direct to the customer online shortly after. Ebay connected millions of car sellers and buyers. And now, many car dealerships offer online sales and have dedicated internet sales managers. So as long as you don’t care to test drive a car before plunking down your money, you had the ability to do so (indeed, an internet search yielded studies that showed up to 28% of cars are purchased without test drives, and even more people test drive only the car they buy but not the competing products). But most of us are not comfortable with spending a large chunk of our savings without sampling the product.
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Enter Tred. In addition to researching, getting pricing, and purchasing a car online, with Tred you can have competing cars delivered to your home for a test drive for just $19. What does that money get you? A ride with a Tred representative (not a dealership employee), a packet of information about the car itself (including dealership forms), no haggle pricing, and best of all – no dealership salesperson. You might think that this would result in fewer sales without someone manipulating the customer’s decisions or pressuring the customer to “seal the deal.” But Tred is counting on their service to actually improve the take rate on vehicles that have been test driven. According to a Gallup poll from last December referenced in the article, “… car sales people ranked below members of congress in trustworthiness…” Therefore, the company is willing to bet that if they can remove as much contact with the dealership as possible from the process, they will increase sales for the dealership and improve the car-buying experience for the customer.

Tred’s financial backers also believe this to be the case. Some of their current investors even know a thing or two about selling cars, including Rick Wagoner, former CEO of General Motors; and Fraser McCombs Capital (their largest investor), whose equity pool includes capital from the owner of eight car dealerships in the San Antonio area. A principal from Fraser McCombs is quoted in the article saying that “A customer asking for a car to be brought to their house is in my opinion converted from a shopper to a buyer.”

What do you think about Tred’s new test drive service? Have you had any particularly bad experiences that have made you want to stay as far from a car dealership as possible?

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A wide variety of companies depend on industrial purifiers to remove particles, impurities, and other contaminants from air or water. Automobile manufactures use them to protect workers from paint fumes, oil, and soot, which can lead to sore eyes, irritated airways, and other serious health conditions. Food processing companies use them to filter out bacteria and other particles suspended in the air in their facilities, preventing contamination of their food products. Many companies also use purifiers to filter out toxic pollutants from their air and water exhaust streams in order to meet environmental regulations.

The need for industrial purifiers to perform these and other tasks has created a multi-billion dollar market. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global water purifier market size will grow from $25.71 billion to $45 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 7.2% during its forecast period.

Though markets for industrial air and water purifiers are growing, these technologies are mature. This makes it difficult for industrial purifier Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to find new ways to reduce their equipment’s downtime, lower its maintenance costs, and otherwise differentiate their products. However, the emergence of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) changes this situation. Using the IIoT, these OEMs can quickly and securely connect their equipment to the cloud, allowing them to collect the data they need for IIoT applications that provide them with a competitive edge.

What are the Benefits of Connected Industrial Purifiers?

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IIoT applications enable OEMs to extract data from their purifiers and orchestrate its transmission to the cloud, where it can be reviewed, analyzed, and acted upon. The insights delivered by IIoT applications able to collect and analyze data from connected industrial purifiers allow OEMs to:

• Improve Their Decision Making: With connected industrial purifiers OEMs no longer need to make assumptions about their equipment’s performance based on the results of manual audits. Rather, they can move from a best-guess approach to one that uses real-time and historical data. Such a data-driven approach helps them and their customers make more informed, better decisions about when to change filters, how to minimize energy consumption costs, and how to reduce downtime.

• Optimize Equipment Maintenance: The IIoT also allows OEMs to move away from scheduled maintenance visits and towards a more informed, just-in-time model for maintaining their equipment. By reviewing real-time data on their connected industrial purifiers’ status and performance, OEMs can cut costs by only sending personnel to a site when a visit is truly warranted. At the same time, when personnel do make a site visit, they come to the site with a more complete understanding of what equipment maintenance or repairs are necessary, helping them fix problems faster and reduce time spent at the site.

• Launch New Services and Business Models: The IIoT provides industrial purifier OEMs with an opportunity to introduce new services and business models. For example, since they can now monitor how much and how often their customers use their equipment, rather than selling purifiers to customers, OEMs can deploy them as-a-service and charge customers based on how much they use them. This gives their customers the ability to turn capital expenditures into operational expenses, while also creating new long-term revenue streams for the OEM. OEMs can also charge customers for new premium services – such as cloud-based dashboards and reports for continuous, real-time water or air quality monitoring and analysis. With these dashboards and reports customers can improve employee safety, product quality and regulatory compliance.

Industrial Purifier OEMs Are Using the Industrial IoT to Transform their Businesses

Industrial purifiers OEMs are not just thinking about deploying IIoT applications to realize these benefits – they are doing it. A major water treatment equipment OEM is currently using Octave, Sierra Wireless’s edge-to-cloud IIoT solution, to deploy a new remote monitoring application. By extracting usage data from equipment using a legacy industrial communications protocol, Octave has allowed the OEM to track filter usage, enabling them and their customers to replace these filters right before they wear out. This application has not only reduced equipment downtime – it also helped the OEM and its customers lower maintenance costs, as the OEM can schedule its maintenance visits for right before its connected industrial water purifiers’ filters need to be replaced.

Meanwhile, an industrial air cleaner OEM is using Octave to obtain real-time power consumption, fan speed, temperature, particle level and other data from its equipment. With this data the company was able to deploy an application that alerts it if there is a problem with its equipment, reducing downtime and improving performance. In addition, by analyzing this data the company can better understand its customers’ industry-specific needs, such as how often its connected industrial air purifiers’ filters are likely to need to be changed in a particular environment. This knowledge has helped the OEM develop more accurate business proposals for customers – a significant competitive advantage.

Simplifying and Scaling the Industrial IoT for Industrial Purifier OEMs

These two industrial purifier OEMs have been able to quickly develop and widely deploy new IIoT applications thanks to the arrival of new IIoT solutions and services that make it easy for them to build these applications, and then scale them across many pieces of equipment and geographies.

Sierra Wireless has been among the leaders in developing and delivering OEMs these types of solutions. For OEMs seeking an all-in-one edge-to-cloud solution consisting of edge devices, wireless connectivity and cloud-based network management and cloud APIs, it has Octave.

For other OEMs who want to assemble their IIoT infrastructure, Sierra Wireless offers a variety of edge device and wireless connectivity solutions and services. For example, for OEMs that want to integrate the IIoT into their existing products, Sierra Wireless offers:

• Rugged 3G, 4G, LTE-Advanced and 5G routers and gateways.

• Its Smart Connectivity service, which provides secure and resilient global wireless coverage across more than 190 countries.

OEMs that want to use the IIoT to embed connectivity into their industrial air and water purifiers can use the above solutions and services, as well as its:

• Embedded module solutions, which featuring 5G, 4G, LPWA, 3G, 2G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GNSS technologies for wireless connectivity

• Ready-to-Connect modules, routers and gateways, which come with pre-integrated embedded SIMs (eSIMs) and instant access to the Sierra Wireless Smart Connectivity service.

Many of the world’s leading industrial companies — such as Atlas Copco, MANN+HUMMELL, Veolia, and Girbau – are using the Sierra Wireless solutions and services described above to remotely monitor their products, extract vital data on their performance, predict maintenance needs and offer value added services on top of their products. Increasingly, industrial air and water purifier OEMs are joining them to enhance their offerings and acquire a competitive advantage.

With a variety of Sierra Wireless solutions and services available that both simplify IIoT development and allow OEMs to scale these applications across the world, the question left for those industrial purifier OEMs who are not connecting their equipment to the cloud is simple. What are you waiting for?

Read the Sierra Wireless white paper, Connected Industrial Purifiers: How the Industrial IoT is Enhancing Air and Water Purification, its industrial purifier case studies, and Start with Sierra to learn more about how Sierra Wireless can help you use the IIoT to accelerate your data-driven transformation.

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