Appliance makers and brands, both in the consumer and professional sectors, suffer the continuous pressure of hardware commoditization , which limits differentiation and ultimately erodes profitability. Moreover, appliance makers lose visibility of their products, once they are handed over to the sales channels, missing the opportunity to keep a living link with both the product and the users.
Addressing this growing issue, Hi connect’s vision is to leverage smart connectivity to help appliance makers diversify their traditional business model through combined Product + Services strategies.
To this purpose, Hi connect offers a complete end-to-end IoT solution which allows brands to control and update the appliance’s capabilities over time, and to build evolving use cases by augmenting the appliance with cloud-based intelligence: this turns the appliance itself into a platform for the delivery of services, which can be customized in the light of data analytics.
Via the Hi connect APIs and data model abstractions, brands have the opportunity to expose products to new forms of integration such as contextual e-commerce and pay-per-use: ultimately, new ways can be created to monetize on service initiatives beyond the original sales revenue, towards a concept of Customer Lifetime Value.
Hi connect allows manufacturers to build new smart services around their products to make them more distinctive and relevant to consumers. Furthermore, exploting smart connectivity enables manufacturers to keep track of their products and the way they are used by consumers, thus avoiding losing visibility of them. Thanks to Hi connect, appliance makers can implement an advanced real time IoT data analytics process and extract intelligence regarding:
Moreover, Hi connect provides specific backend-driven services to the Apps, in order to reduce cost and effort in App maintenance and evolution, as one single App manages multiple product categories with simpler code and faster development time.
One of the most interesting components of Hi connect is the Energy Management Integration (EMI), that allows connected appliances to participate to dynamic Energy Management use cases. Among other benefits, EMI increases the value and brand perception by end users thanks to the energy efficiency proposition and enables dynamic Demand Response use cases. Moreover, it allows the manufacturers to manage co-marketing initiatives with other stakeholders and to position as an intelligent smart energy feature for the brand’s appliances family.