Smarter After-Sales Service and Support driven by the Internet-of-Things White Paper HiTech

Sukriti is part of the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) HiTech Center of Excellence, leading the IoT and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) initiatives and solutions for the high tech industry. She has over 20 years of industry experience in the design, development and validation of embedded systems, applied to a variety of domains including industrial automation, consumer electronics, automotive electronics, transportation and process control. Her areas of interest include Real Time Systems, Embedded Software, M2M communications and the IoT. Sukriti has presented papers on IoT and M2M at various forums including the Embedded World Conference and IEEE conferences. Prateep is a Research Area Manager working with the TCS Innovation Labs and leads the development of platforms for IoT applications. He has over 21 years of experience in the IT industry in areas such as software development, research, technology consulting and software quality assurance. His current areas of focus include IT infrastructure architecture and design, IT transformation, storage systems, large scale and real-time analytics platforms, and cloud computing. Prateep has also been involved in the design of the IT infrastructure for a major TCS SaaS offering. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and solutions using connected devices are profoundly impacting enterprises, their customers and end consumers. Real-time analysis of device data and its integration with enterprise systems is enabling businesses across industries to automate processes, launch novel services, enhance customer experience and improve the overall decision-making process. High tech, industrial electronics, healthcare and semiconductor equipment manufacturers are poised to increasingly leverage intelligent systems in combination with innovative digital forces such as cloud, analytics, Big Data, mobility and pervasive computing to create smarter service and after-sales support opportunities at multiple levels. This whitepaper outlines an approach for deploying smart technologies and providing new services that enhance the productivity of the installed base and increase after-sales support revenues. It demonstrates how process improvements and optimization can be achieved by capitalizing on historical as well as real-time data from installed equipment. Deploying smarter after-sales solutions requires a secure, highly scalable, multi-tenant and device agnostic 'connected equipment' or IoT platform. The paper provides insights into the core services that such a platform should offer and elaborates on how it can drive after-sales service and support business.