Potential digital transformation is everywhere. This time I want to share a personal story based on my IoT cycling device from Garmin. Several years ago I became an enthusiastic cyclist, mainly because it clears your mind and cycling keeps you in good shape after enjoying customer visits with great dinners and excellent breakfasts. As the Dutch lack real mountains, we challenge ourselves with through open fields with strong winds to suffer a little too.

 

Four years ago, started tracking my cycling performance, with a Garmin Edge 810. The story of my Garmin is a real IoT story. GPS trackers, in the beginning, did not communicate with the outside world. Now, this device connects to sensors registering my speed, my location, my heart rate, pedal cadence and produced power at any time, finally uploading it to the Garmin Connect platform.

The IoT platform

The Garmin Connect platform gives me insights on my performance, activities, and segments. The segment demonstrates the social part of the platform. Here you can see how you rank with others who have cycled the same track segment over time. And you can register your own preferred segment too, where you challenge yourself and others in your area. So the number of segments is growing continuously. Imagine all these cyclists around the world virtually sharing and taking the same track. I am curious to learn from Garmin how many people are connected to the platform.
I could not find these numbers. You?

The fun of segments

Digital Twin

Through the platform, Garmin collects huge amounts of data of connected users. Each data set of the connected user could be considered a simple digital twin. The Connect platform provides me insights about my overall performance through the years through various reports. Garmin could offer as a (paid) service to deliver insights of my performance compared to other users and propose predictive enhancements similar to the GE Predix platform. The difference of course that 1 % performance improvement for me in cycling does not bring the same value as 1 % performance improvement of a GE product (turbine, jet engine, train, …). However, the concept is the same and GE is promoting themselves as the next Digital Industrial Company, leading in digital transformation. Read more here.

Digital Twin performance

Connecting to the customer

Tthe change from moving from a document-driven approach towards a data-driven approach to collect and store information is not the main concept behind a digital transformation. The data-driven approach is an enabler to connect directly to the customer and change the current business model from delivering products into a business model delivering services or even more advanced delivering experiences. Services and experiences create a closer relation to the customer, more loyalty, but also the challenge that you need to connect to the customer in such a way that the customer sees value. Otherwise, the customer will switch to another service or experience. The Apple, Nespresso, Uber experiences are all known for their new ways of connecting to the customer, differentiating from traditional product sales. Garmin could also be on that list. However, I discovered they are not there yet, despite an IoT-platform and connected devices. What is missing?

Why Garmin is not a digital enterprise.

Two years ago my Garmin Edge started crashing in the middle of a ride. The system rebooted after some minutes, and the recordings were lost or at least unreadable.  When I contacted Garmin support their standard response was: “Please reset the device and update to the latest software.” Two years ago the software had still bug fixes. After two years you would expect a stable experience.

However, a year ago the problems started to become more frequent. I started to send log files illustrating where the error occurred. Still, the Garmin response was the same: “Please reset the device and update to the latest software.”
However as there were no new software updates, there must be another reason why the device failed more and more.

After pushing for a resolution, the service department concluded I needed a new device. There might be an issue with the hardware. A little bit skeptical I agreed on a hardware switch again, and as expected this did not solve the crashes. My guess is that due to the increasing amount of segments at some places, the software gets confused where the rider is exactly located and in which direction the rider is going. These are the moments when the crash happens, and this is probably a software issue.

Still, the Garmin help desk believes there is a hardware problem (preferably swap the device) where I kept on providing evidence data of crashes to support Garmin in their error-discovery. Till now there is no resolution. The good news is that Garmin support mentioned investigating further.

For me, the interaction with Garmin illustrates that the company internally is not yet digital transformed. The service desk probably has KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) related to their response time and problem resolution time. Although I can debate the response time, it is clear that the problem resolution approach: Update to the latest software and if this does not work swap to a new device is not increasing the knowledge from Garmin as a company what their customers are experiencing.

Apparently, their software management is disconnected from the service department and customers. Only clear bugs during the first launch are fixed. Next, it is a disconnected world again.

A must for a digital enterprise is to dive into customer issues and to connect them back to R&D, both for the hardware part and software part. Something a modern product manager would do. If a company is not able to understand the multidisciplinary dependencies and solve issues from the field (with some effort), they will keep on making the same mistakes again with new product launches and lose customers who are looking for a better experience.

My conclusion

PLM should be part of the digital enterprise too as this is the only way to deliver consistent customer value and positive experience. It requires companies to break down silos and create multidisciplinary teams that are capable of supporting the full customer journey. A digital device and a digital customer platform are just facades to the outside world – the inside needs to change too.

What do you think?
Does your company understand the challenges to transform across all disciplines?
Are you managing PLM, ALM, and IoT in context of the product and across the whole lifecycle?
I am curious !