The consumer electronics industry is under pressure with new upcoming technologies, economic instability, and increasing regulation. All this means that companies will face more complex supply chains, a shrinking product life cycle, uncertain demand, and decreasing revenues. Within this dynamic scenario, cloud computing provides a new path for sustainable, flexible, and efficient growth. Gartner has forecasted that the cloud services market is going to grow by 16.6% in 2020 ($249.8 billion) and by 2022, 90% of organizations across industries are going to be using cloud services.
The consumer electronics leaders are sharing their top reasons to adopt cloud computing as improved internal business-process efficiency, increased customer demand, and expanded sales channels. They are using a combination of cloud based services, DevOps services and analytics, so that companies can accelerate time-to-market and improve their customer experience at the same time.
Cloud computing services offer the electronics industry with the chance to redefine customer relationships management, improve transparency and governance, transform their operations, and expand upon business agility. To showcase its complete impact, let us see how cloud can stimulate benefits for the consumer electronics industry.
Businesses Achieve Improved Operational Efficiency
The development of web services, service oriented architecture, and cloud computing holds the key to providing the integration that is going to open up the field to enhanced collaboration and operational efficiency for businesses. Cloud computing service providers will allow companies to move a part or all of their operations from a local network to the cloud platform. This will make it easier for them to access a host of facilities like processing, data storage and more.
To illustrate that, without cloud device management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), managing content deployment and OTA for 70K+ on-field connected devices for a leading electronics manufacturer of POS devices and touch screen displays would not have been possible. The cloud based portal allowed their user subscription and management, add/update devices, content upload, and configurations all on a single portal within a click, which simplified the processes and improved operational efficiency with anytime anywhere access.
On top of that, a standard transition of business applications to the cloud is seen where organizations have deployed SAP/CRM on the cloud providing flexible accessibility and simplified setup for software/servers. Moreover, applying the DevOps methodology, in the cloud will enhance collaboration between the teams, boost the efficiency of the application development cycle, to optimize product quality and save time at the same time. DevOps tools and practices that help the business run faster and smoother by automating key steps with standardization.
Personalized Customer Management and Relationship
Apart from bringing buyers and sellers together on the online marketplace, consumer electronics companies can add value by generating personalized product recommendations for buyers with the help of cloud computing and analytics. As the cloud’s expanded capacity and computing power helps it store information about user preferences, its location, and run algorithms it can derive intelligent insights to enable product or service customization.
For instance, a leading consumer electronics brand inferred their user preferences from buying behavior and usage patterns, and used that analytics to provide customized advertisements, offers, and suggestions. Ultimately, this paradigm facilitates a host of different possibilities, from radically improving the performance of current devices and services that benefits the companies, to delivering improved customer satisfaction and ensuring customer loyalty.
Allowing Businesses with Faster Time to Market and Reduced Cost
The competitive advantage created by going to the market first with innovative products, whether they are feature-rich or value-driven is vitally important in the electronics industry. Electronics OEMs have made dramatic reductions in the product development cycle time with product life cycle management (PLM) systems. However, the development process still remains time consuming and inefficient.
Multiple ready to use development and managed services like AWS IoT core, EC2, API gateway, Cognito, S3, Azure Blob Storage, Virtual Machines and many more from the leading cloud providers will help in expediting collaborative product development by reducing the work of the developer.
With cloud, companies can enforce standardized protocols, synchronize information between their systems, and access a centralized database provided by infrastructure-as-a-service. With standardization and automation, OEMs can improve development efficiency, and avoid costly downstream errors.
That will help to speed time to market and time to value, which will in turn yield a critical competitive advantage. Also, organizations that have adapted to serverless cloud architecture, on-demand database connectivity, and pay as you go model enables to shift their IT capital cost to a variable or operational cost.
Simplified Partner/Vendor Ecosystem Connectivity
One of the major business enablers powered by the cloud is ecosystem connectivity. The cloud facilitates collaboration with value chain partners and customers, which can lead to improvements in productivity and increased innovation. Cloud-based platforms can bring together disparate groups of people who can collaborate and share resources, information, and processes.
The recent trend of ‘open innovation’ is powered via cloud-based software solutions that connect parties, and facilitate the sharing of ideas. There are also cloud based deal management platforms, which streamline the presentation, negotiation, invoicing, and reconciliation of trade promotions that were received from company’s vendors, distributors in a secure, cloud environment. That will put an end to the numerous emails, faxes, and spreadsheets that are typically exchanged, reducing errors that are often associated with this kind of communication.
Data Driven Demand Forecasting and Decision-Making
The efficient management of inventory is one of the common challenges that are faced in the Consumer Electronics industry. It is difficult for giant consumer electronics that manufacture multiple products and manage large distribution channels at different locations to check or manage their stock in real-time and predict future demands. With data analytics and cloud computing, they can have wide visibility of their stocks, market, consumer preferences and competition at a global level.
Cloud offers access to real-time data, cloud architecture and analytics platforms to build both predictive and prescriptive inventory forecasting that significantly decreases their issues, like stocks shortage or surplus, enabling better decision making and managed inventories. Apart from that, company executives can access data and stocks at any time and from anywhere to check the real-time stock availability.
To be successful with cloud, consumer electronics companies have to access its impact on the operating model and determine successive actions for more effective cloud adoption. Cloud computing services including architecture, development, deployment, migration, optimization of cloud solutions and cloud data analytics helps consumer companies transform their business model and operations with enhanced flexibility, scalability, and efficiency elevating their businesses to the next level.
by Bobby J Davidson
We love our company and we love what we do. Check out the ‘Why Percento‘ page to learn more: Love of Technology and Business! As the President of Percento Technologies International, I provide day-to-day leadership to the company’s senior management and I am personally involved in the strategy, business development and sales activities of the firm.
The company was founded in 1999 with the purpose of providing a one call source for organizations in need of Enterprise IT Consulting and Management. We also provide a line of products in the boutique Cloud Server space with a touch of high-end website strategy consulting and design services. We personalizes the IT Service experience with a team approach, working with clients from diverse sectors of industry, including energy services, financial, legal, entertainment, healthcare, hospitality, retail and general and/or corporate business. percentotech.com/contact