digital transformation

Using Data Science for Predictive Maintenance

Posted by Sandeep raut on October 15, 2016 at 5:23 in OSes

Remember few years ago there were two recall announcements from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for GM & Tesla – both related to problems that could cause fires. These caused tons of money to resolve.

Aerospace, Rail industry, Equipment manufacturers and Auto makers often face this challenge of ensuring maximum availability of critical assembly line systems, keeping those assets in good working order, while simultaneously minimizing the cost of maintenance and time based or count based repairs.

Identification of root causes of faults and failures must also happen without the need for a lab or testing. As more vehicles/industrial equipment and assembly robots begin to communicate their current status to a central server, detection of faults becomes more easy and practical.

Early identification of these potential issues helps organizations deploy maintenance team more cost effectively and maximize parts/equipment up-time. All the critical factors that help to predict failure, may be deeply buried in structured data like equipment year, make, model, warranty details etc and unstructured data covering millions of log entries, sensor data, error messages, odometer reading, speed, engine temperature, engine torque, acceleration and repair & maintenance reports.

Predictive maintenance, a technique to predict when an in-service machine will fail so that maintenance can be planned in advance, encompasses failure prediction, failure diagnosis, failure type classification, and recommendation of maintenance actions after failure.

Business benefits of Data Science with predictive maintenance:

Minimize maintenance costs - Don’t waste money through over-cautious time bound maintenance. Only repair equipment when repairs are actually needed.
Reduce unplanned downtime - Implement predictive maintenance to predict future equipment malfunctioning and failures and minimize the risk for unplanned disasters putting your business at risk.
Root cause analysis - Find causes for equipment malfunctions and work with suppliers to switch-off reasons for high failure rates. Increase return on your assets.
Efficient labor planning — no time wasted replacing/fixing equipment that doesn’t need it
Avoid warranty cost for failure recovery – thousands of recalls in case of automakers while production loss in assembly line

TrainItalia has invested 50M euros in Internet of Things project which expects to cut maintenance costs by up to 130M euros to increase train availability and customer satisfaction.

Rolls Royce is teaming up with Microsoft for Azure cloud based streaming analytics for predicting engine failures and ensuring right maintenance.

Sudden machine failures can ruin the reputation of a business resulting in potential contract penalties, and lost revenue. Data Science can help in real time and before time to save all this trouble.

Mobile enablement in Digital age

Posted by Sandeep raut on October 10, 2016 at 10:23 in OSes

Gone are the days when we used to carry big fat wallet filled with cash, coins, multiple credit cards, business cards, travel tickets, movie tickets, personal notes, papers with names, numbers and the list can go on.

Mobile technologies have transformed the way we live, work, learn, travel, shop, and stay connected. More than 80% of time is spent on non-voice activities.

The rapid growth in Mobility, Big data, IoT and Cloud computing technologies has changed market dynamics in every industry and is changing customer behavior. Digital Transformation has become the norm.

Mobile is spearheading this transformation by putting businesses on the move and by connecting the enterprises with customers, partners, employees and machines.

Businesses are fast realizing that they need to offer their customers cutting-edge mobile applications that will help them engage with the brand and its services, in near real-time.

Some innovative use of mobiles in digitization:

Payments - NFC payments, Biometric payments using finger scans, facial recognition, voice recognition, retina based check. Major players in this space are PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay etc.
Virtual or digital currency
Tsunami of Apps from Google maps, to zomato helping us throughout the day
Retailers can use targeted mobile campaigns for customer acquisition, retention
Live streaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope delivering targeted content to site-specific users which benefits both the consumer and the creator.

Impact of mobile enablement:

With mobile enablement, a merchant can enhance your payment experience and boost operational efficiency
Real time communicating with the customer, can be greatly enhanced through mobile enablement. Businesses can quickly respond to customer complaints or questions through social media, or the apps
By analyzing the data generated by mobiles using Big data Analytics, businesses can give personalized experience to consumers
Digital assistants like Google Now, Siri are helping everyone

Here are some well-known industry examples:

Starbucks processes over 8 million mobile transactions each week, this data of mobile user behavior to customer preferences, is then analyzed by a team of data scientists for insights.
Coca Cola is using mobile apps for field sales folks, equipment service teams and knowledge workers and commercials like get free coke on mobile
The emergence of hyper-local startups like Jugnoo, Zopper, Grofers and PepperTap using mobile first strategy
Virgin Atlantic, Bank of America, Delta, Chipotle have their industry leader apps for fantastic customer experience

As the penetration of smartphones and internet is increasing with 5G and beyond, along with the changing shopping behaviors, the mobile revolution is here to stay and impact the Digital Transformation further.

Customer 360º view in Digital age

Posted by Sandeep raut on October 3, 2016 at 3:44 in OSes

In today’s digital age of customer hyper-personalization, organizations identify opportunities for real time engagement based on data-driven understanding of customer behavior.

Customers have taken control of their purchase process. With websites, blogs, Facebook updates, online reviews and more, they use multiple sources of information to make decisions and often engage with a brand dozens of times between inspiration and purchase.

It’s important that organizations collect every customer interaction in order to identify sentiments of happy & unhappy customers.

Companies can get a complete 360º view of customers by aggregating data from the various touch points that a customer may use, to contact a company to purchase products and receive service/support.

This Customer 360º snapshot should include:

Identity: name, location, gender, age and other demographic data
Relationships: their influence, connections, associations with others
Current activity: orders, complaints, deliveries, returns
History: contacts, campaigns, processes, cases across all lines of business and channels
Value: which products or services they are associated with, including history
Flags: prompts to give context, e.g. churn propensity, up-sell options, fraud risk, mood of last interactions, complaint record, frequency of contact
Actions: expected, likely or essential steps based on who they are and the fact they are calling now

The 360º view of customers, also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data (data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database), with unstructured data (data like audio files, video files, social media data).

Many companies like Nestle, Toyota are using social media listening tools to gather what customers are saying on sites like Facebook and Twitter, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next.

What are the returns of Customer 360º:

All customer touch point data in a single repository for fast queries
Next best actions or recommendations for customers
All key metrics in a single location for business users to know and advise customers
Intuitive and customizable dashboards for quick insights
Real time hyper personalized customer interaction
Enhanced customer loyalty

Customer 360º helps achieve Single View of Customer across Channels – online, stores, marketplaces, Devices – wearables, mobile, tablets, laptops & Interactions – purchase, posts, likes, feedback, service.

This is further used for customer analytics – predict churn, retention, next best action, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, profitability, life time value.

Global leaders in customer experience are Apple, Disney, Emirates.

A word of caution though - Focus & collect only that customer data, which can help to improve the customer journey.

Why Data Science Is The Top Job In Digital Transformation

Posted by Sandeep raut on September 26, 2016 at 6:58 in OSes

Digital Transformation has become a burning question for all the businesses and the foundation to ride on the wave is being data driven.

DJ Patil & Thomas Davenport mentioned in 2012 HBR article, that Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the century, and how true! Even the latest Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist at 1 ^st in top 25 best jobs in America.

Over the last decade there’s been a massive explosion in both the data generated and retained by companies. Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Wallmart, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter all process tons of data every minute and use that for revenue growth, cost reductions and increase in customer satisfaction.

Most industries such as Retail, Banking, Travel, Financial Sector, Healthcare, and Manufacturing want to be able to make better decisions. With speed of change and profitability pressures on the businesses, the ability to take decisions had gone down to real time. Data has become an asset for every company, hence they need someone who can comb through these data sets and apply their logic and use tools to find some patterns and provide insights for future.

Think about Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, smartphone apps, in-store purchase behavior data, online website analytics, and now all connected devices with internet of things are generating tsunami of new data streams.

All this data is useless if not analyzed for actions or new insights.

The importance of Data Scientists has rose to top due to two key issues:

Increased need & desire among businesses to gain greater value from their data
Over 80% of data/information that businesses generate and collect is unstructured or semi-structured data that need special treatment

Data Scientists:

Typically requires mix of skills - mathematics, statistics, computer science, machine learning and most importantly business knowledge
They need to employ the R or Python programming language to clean and remove irrelevant data
Create algorithms to solve the business problems
Finally effectively communicate the findings to management

Any company, in any industry, that crunches large volumes of numbers, possesses lots of operational and customer data, or can benefit from social media streams, credit data, consumer research or third-party data sets can benefit from having a data scientist or a data science team.

Top data scientists in the world today are:

Kirk D Borne of BoozAllen
D J Patil Chief Data Scientist at White House
Gregory Piatetsky of kdnuggets
Vincent Granville of Analyticsbridge
Jonathan Goldman of LinkedIn
Ronald Van Loon

Data science will involve all the aspects of statistics, machine leaning, and artificial intelligence, deep learning & cognitive computing with addition of storage from big data.

What is Cognitive Computing?

Posted by Sandeep raut on September 20, 2016 at 6:37

Although computers are better for data processing and making calculations, they were not able to accomplish some of the most basic human tasks, like recognizing Apple or Orange from basket of fruits, till now.

Computers can capture, move, and store the data, but they cannot understand what the data mean. Thanks to Cognitive Computing, machines are bringing human-like intelligence to a number of business applications.

Cognitive Computing is a term that IBM had coined for machines that can interact and think like humans.

In today's Digital Transformation age, various technological advancements have given machines a greater ability to understand information, to learn, to reason, and act upon it.

Today, IBM Watson and Google DeepMind are leading the cognitive computing space.

Cognitive Computing systems may include the following components:

· Natural Language Processing - understand meaning and context in a language, allowing deeper, more intuitive level of discovery and even interaction with information.

· Machine Learning with Neural Networks - algorithms that help train the system to recognize images and understand speech

· Algorithms that learn and adapt with Artificial Intelligence

· Deep Learning – to recognize patterns

· Image recognition – like humans but more faster

· Reasoning and decision automation – based on limitless data

· Emotional Intelligence

Cognitive computing can help banking and insurance companies to identify risks and frauds. It analyses information to predict weather patterns. In healthcare it is helping doctors to treat patients based on historical data.

Some of the recent examples of Cognitive Computing:

· ANZ bank of Australia used Watson-based financial services apps to offer investment advice, by reading through thousands of investments options and suggesting best-fit based on customer specific profiles, further taking into consideration their age, life stage, financial position, and risk tolerance.

· Geico is using Watson based cognitive computing to learn the underwriting guidelines, read the risk submissions, and effectively help underwrite

· Brazilian bank Banco Bradesco is using Cognitive assistants at work helping build more intimate, personalized relationships

· Out of the personal digital assistants we have Siri, Google Now & Cortana – I feel Google now is much easy and quickly adapt to your spoken language. There is a voice command for just about everything you need to do — texting, emailing, searching for directions, weather, and news. Speak it; don’t text it!

As Big Data gives the ability to store huge amounts of data, Analyticsgives ability to predict what is going to happen, Cognitive gives the ability to learn from further interactions and suggest best actions.

Are you a Digital Transformation Super Hero?

Posted by Sandeep raut on September 6, 2016 at 2:49 in OSes

In this Digital age, Superheroes are becoming more popular…. Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Avengers Superman, Batman, Spider man, and many more…

There are a lot of superheroes and it is up to you to decide in which character and style you fit in. You don’t need masks, tights and a cape to qualify, but a zeal to demystify the role of the truly transformational leader, superhero style!

“With great power comes great responsibility.” We have heard this quote, in Spider man. This quote can also be used as a mantra for Digital Transformation.

A CEO should be like The Hulk, who when angered or provoked, would transform into the uncontrollable, green-skinned monster. CEO should be giving a very strong message of Digital Transformation to entire organization, which everyone should take seriously. He or she runs the company and does this from a digital-native perspective, by personally taking up the digital agenda.

CMO is like a Thor, having a legendary hammer with immense power in his hand, called Marketing. She understands the real power of digital channels because her department was the lead for most of the online activities that were developed over the last two decades. She owns the customer facing touch points of the company which are increasingly becoming digital.

Just as Tony Stark built an armored suit to protect his human core and transform himself into a hi-tech super hero, the CIO is protecting the core technology and systems of an organization and can transform the company into technological advances. He understands technology better than anyone else.

It is important to note however that even Iron Man had to continue evolving his technology, as his opponents adapted to his capabilities so do the CIO has to innovate with new ideas and adopt new technologies & trends like IoT, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & Blockchain to name a few, in order to stay ahead.

A Chief Digital Officer was not existing for so many years, is like Captain America who was trapped in ice for 70 years and revived in the present day. Like the super patriotism of Captain America, CDO has only one goal – becoming Digital. CDO is a permanent part of the team with all the skills to manage a lot of internal and external change.

Digital transformation has to be taken like a team of Avengers and is a permanent process. It will never stop. Once you digest one wave of disruption through the proper transformation, you will face another one.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly of Internet of Things

Posted by Sandeep raut on August 29, 2016 at 22:31 in OSes

The greatest advantage we have today is our ability to communicate with one another.

The Internet of Things, also known as IoT, allows machines, computers, mobile or other smart devices to communicate with each other. Thanks to tags and sensors which collect data, which can be used to our advantage in numerous ways.

IoT has really stormed the Digital Transformation. It is estimated that 50 billion devices connected to the Internet worldwide by 2020.

Let us have the Good news first:

Smart Cars will communicate with traffic lights to improve traffic, find a parking spot, lower insurance rates based on telematics data
Smart Homes will have connected controls like temperature, electricity, cameras for safety and watch over your kids
Smart healthcare devices will remind patients to take their medication, tell doctors when a refill is needed & help curb diabetic attacks, monitor symptoms and help disease prevention in real time, including in remote areas
Smart Cities & Smart Industries are the buzz-words in IT policies of many governments
With sensors and IoT enabled Robots used in Manufacturing - new products could potentially cost less in the future, which promotes better standards of living up and down all household income levels
Hyper-Personalization – with Bluetooth, NFC, and Wi-Fi all the connected devices can be used for specifically tailored advertising based on the preferences of the individual
Real time alerts in daily life - The Egg Minder tray holds 14 eggs in your refrigerator. It also sends a wireless signal to your phone to let you know how many eggs are in it and which ones are going bad.

Now here are the Bad things:

There are no international standards of compatibility that current exist at the macro level for the Internet of Things
No cross-industry technology reference architecture that will allow for true interoperability and ease of deployment
All the mundane work can be transferred to Robots and there is potential to loss of jobs
All smart connected devices are expensive – Nest the learning thermostat cost about $250 as against $25 for a standard which gets a job done. Philips wireless controlled light cost $60 so your household will be huge expense to be remotely controlled

And the Ugly part:

Remember the Fire Sale of Die Hard movie, a Cyber-attack on nation’s computer infrastructure - shutting down transportation systems, disabling financial systems and turning off public utility systems. Cyber-attacks can become common when devices are sold without proper updated software for connectivity
Your life is open to hackers who can intercept your communications with individual devices and encroach your privacy. Imagine a criminal who can hack your smart metering utility system & identify when usage drops and assume that means nobody is home
Imagine when you get into your fully connected self-driving car, and with some hacking a stalker’s voice come up from speaker “your have been taken” and you may not find Liam Neeson anywhere nearby, to rescue you.

All the consumer digital footprints can be mined, aggregated, and analyzed via Big Data to predict your presence, intent, sentiment, and behavior, which can be used in a good way and bad way.

We just need to manage the safety and privacy concerns to make sure we can receive the full benefits of this technology without assuming unnecessary risks.

Connected Cars - Best Companions of Smartphones !!

Posted by Sandeep raut on April 18, 2016 at 7:17 in Programming

The ‘connected’ car, not to be confused with the self-driving, autonomous car, is defined as any vehicle equipped with Internet access that allows data to be sent to and from the vehicle.

Since the automobiles were invented, car makers have been trying to add features which may reduce driver error. Today’s car has the computing power of 20 personal computers, features about 100 million lines of programming code, and processes up to 25 gigabytes of data an hour.

Digital technology is also changing how we use and interact with our cars, and in more ways than you probably realize.

The market for smart vehicles is certainly set for takeoff and many analysts predict they could revolutionize the world of automobiles in much the same way smartphones have changed the face of telecommunications.

Is your car connected to the Internet? Millions of vehicles around the world had embedded Internet access, offering their drivers a multitude of smart options and benefits. These include better engine controls, automatic crash notifications and safety alerts, to name just a few. Owners can also interact with their connected vehicles through apps from any distance.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communications, for example, could help automobiles detect one another's presence and location to avoid accidents. That could be especially useful when it comes to driver-less cars - another advance already very much in development. Similar technology could help ensure that cars and their drivers slow down for school zones or stop at red lights.

Connected vehicle technologies provide the tools to make transformational improvements in safety, to significantly reduce the number of lives lost each year through connected vehicle crash prevention applications.

The Connected Car will be optimized to track and report its own diagnostics, which is part of its appeal for safety conscious drivers.

Connected cars give superior Infotainment services like navigation, traffic, weather, mobile apps, emails and also entertainment.

Auto insurers also have much to gain from the connected car revolution, as personalized, behavior based premiums are already becoming new industry standard.

OEMS and dealers must embrace the Big Data revolution now, so they’re ready to harness the plethora of data that will become available as more and more connected cars hit the roads.

Cloud computing powers much of the audio streaming capabilities and dashboard app functions that are becoming more commonplace in autos.

In the next 5 years it seems that non-connected cars will become a thing of the past. Here are some good examples of connected cars:

Mercedes-Benz models introduced this year can link directly to Nest, the Internet of Things powered smart home system, to remotely activate a home’s temperature controls prior to arrival.
Audi has developed a 12.3 inch, 3d graphics fully digital dashboard in partnership with NVIDIA.
Telematics Company OnStar can shut down your stolen car remotely helping police solve the case.
ParkMe covers real time dynamic parking information and guide drivers to open parking lots and meters. It if further integrating with mobile payments.

The next wave is driver-less, fully equipped and connected car, where there will be no steering wheels, brakes, gas pedals and other major devices. You just have to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride!!

This article originally appeared here.

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