Your Device Analytics Solution Should Be Able to Ingest and Analyze These 250 Different Types of Data (at a Minimum)
Your device analytics dashboard probably looks pretty busy right now with charts, graphs and color-coded icons indicating the current health of your fleet. However, you might only be seeing a fraction of what’s really happening with each handheld mobile computer, tablet, and printer.
On average, our customers tell us they lose 5-15% of their device fleet every year, which has a direct impact on worker productivity and on their overall return on investment (ROI). If even a single device becomes unavailable, someone – most likely a front-line worker – has to stop to either troubleshoot or grab a replacement from the back room. Even if the disruption is short lived, it’s still a disruption. A workstation – or entire department – could go unstaffed. An entire workflow might get backed up. And that worker’s productivity level automatically declines, assuming only one person is directly affected. If others have to stop what they’re doing to cover, overall business output can start to decline on a broader scale.
In other words, your team needs the foresight to anticipate and mitigate a host of device issues, and that’s a lot easier when your system is pulling in and analyzing all the data points needed to fully assess device performance. The challenge is that devices are often geographically dispersed, and the information needed to make an accurate assessment may be “hidden” in separate places across your operation. This makes it difficult to centrally access performance data and nearly impossible to see what’s happening at a holistic level – even if all your mobile computers and printers are from the same manufacturer.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know…Unless You are Checking on Your Devices Daily
Every organization should know:
- what assets it has online and in the storeroom.
- where its assets are currently located.
- the health of every asset.
- how – and how much – each asset is being used.
Without this information, it becomes difficult for procurement to know when it’s time to reorder batteries, labels or printer ribbons. And front-line workers won’t know when device batteries need to be pulled from service (unless they completely die). It’s also hard to keep devices online 24/7 if you can’t see their current status.
That’s why we have developed more than 20 VisibilityIQ application programming interfaces (API) that offer customers and partners the ability to leverage and ingest the collection of data points from the Zebra VisibilityIQ™ Foresight directly into their own management systems. (And more are on the way!).
We want to further expose – and help you distil – the volumes of detailed information related to device health, availability, utilization, and support collected from Zebra software, battery, device components, and service and repair systems. We also know how much it will help you to consolidate the 250 machine-level data points extracted via the Zebra Savanna™ intelligent edge platform alongside your contract-level support/repair data.
So, we’ve designed these APIs to give you a deeper and more customised view into your business than what you might have with our standard VisibilityIQ OneCare and Foresight services or a third-party product that can only access publicly-available Android and Zebra APIs and data points. Within seconds, anyone on your team can confirm an application’s responsiveness or utilization as well as device-level disruptions and usage. You can also retrieve other real-time and historical status details, such as battery swap activity, WLAN signal strength, and even predictive states. Plus, the APIs give you flexibility to incorporate this data directly into your systems to automate actions, such as purchasing new batteries or assigning a resource to replace one that is dropping below an acceptable performance threshold.
This makes it so simple to systematically and proactively check in on the health of every device, every day. More importantly, it makes it possible for front-line workers and others in your organization (i.e., procurement) to play a central role in optimizing device usage, which is critical to maintaining operational continuity when people and facilities are geographically dispersed.
Our VisibilityIQ APIs help to yield immediately actionable insights directly in your management systems. You can program your applications to automatically send workers clear-cut guidance on the time-sensitive actions they must take to avoid a device failure – or even degradation of performance. In some cases, workflow optimization will be necessary. Other times, a battery or entire device might need to be replaced. Either way, the proactivity elicited by the automatic ingestion and analysis of this aggregated cloud-stored data will prove extremely valuable, especially considering the correlation between device and worker/workflow performance.
Bottom line…
If you need a more complete or customized picture of your business, or you’re looking for a way to automate the distribution of device-related insights, visit our VisibilityIQ API webpages to learn about all the new tools available to you.
Dan Quagliana
Dan Quagliana is the Senior Product Manager for Zebra’s VisibilityIQ solution, highlighting insights on device usage and health optimization. Dan owns the product strategy and feature roadmap for VisibilityIQ, including driving the shift to an API-first operation.
Previously Dan was responsible for building the Data Services business at Zebra, working across the Zebra portfolio to accelerate customers’ ability to transform edge data and events into actionable insights with easy to consume APIs. He also worked in Corporate Strategy where he guided Zebra’s strategic direction with industry and technology trends, with a focus on software.
Dan successfully launched Zebra’s Developer Relations program, creating a community of over half a million ISV Partners and Developers to build awareness and educate them on Zebra’s portfolio and tools to enable the creation of innovative Enterprise Visibility Solutions. Dan has over 20 years of experience in the software field, with the last 14 at Zebra.
