Tracking the history of product components and manufacturing processes will be among the most powerful business applications brought about by networked sensing and control.

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Device Networking Will Transform Product Genealogy
Tracking the pedigree of product components is not a new idea. Traceability has been an essential part of quality assurance for a long time, and is built into the ISO 9000 family of quality standards. But even with the advent of vast desktop computing power, tracing product pedigree has remained a labor-intensive and error-prone process.

That’s all about to change as we enter the era of smart, connected products—the Pervasive Internet era. In fact, new techniques, applications, and standards for product-pedigree will be among the most powerful business changes brought about by networked sensing and control.

Quite a few manufacturers have already made the business case for tracking the creation process of products in near real-time, using a variety of sensing and networking approaches. Semiconductor fabrication and pharmaceuticals were among the earliest industries to drive this capability, but it is steadily permeating many other kinds of products and processes. As is so often the case with Pervasive Internet applications, some of the best examples are not immediately obvious to most people and may require a serious shift in business thinking.

Case in point: food.

Pervasive Business Models Are Progressive

Data generated by connected products enables manufacturers to expand their business models, revenue streams, and ecosystems. Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

The Business Case for Food Tracking—from “Hoof” and “Root” to the Table
Sometimes great new opportunities arise overnight due to sudden, unexpected changes in the business environment—including developments that seem, at first, entirely negative or even disastrous. The meat-packing industry has recently seen one such development: mad cow disease.

Mad cow disease is one of a little-understood class of fatal, untreatable diseases that affect the structure of brain tissue. These diseases are now thought to be caused by “prions”—proteinaceous infectious particles. While current evidence suggests that it is unlikely that humans can contract a “prion” disease from eating contaminated beef, safety is far from certain.

For this and other reasons, Europe is leading the world by deciding that it is important to know, in a good degree of detail, exactly where food comes from. For manufacturers, the Pervasive Internet represents an enormous opportunity not only to rise to the food-tracking challenge, but also to greatly expand their own business horizons.

Harbor Research has worked with a leading European manufacturer of food processing and kitchen equipment that has recently examined this case. Although the manufacturer will remain anonymous in this particular essay, it is a leader in a mature industry, and provides a fine illustration of how a far-sighted company can use new networking techology to advance itself to a more differentiated business.

This company is in a very good position to seize early-mover advantage in the Pervasive Internet for two reasons: their pre-existing leadership in commercial food service equipment, and their being already well-advanced in planning for connected products.

New Dangers and Liabilities Lurk Everywhere
Mad cow disease is still a mystery to scientists, but other much better-understood dangers can also lurk in something as common as a fast-food hamburger. The E. coli bacterium, for example, was not considered a serious threat until a couple of decades ago. Today, a particularly virulent strain, E. coli 0157:H7, causes an estimated 73,000 infections and 60 deaths each year in the United States.
The presence of this pathogen in hamburgers from the Jack-in-the-Box fast-food chain killed 4 people in 1993, infected 700 others, and cost the company $15.6M in settlements alone. More recently, E. coli 0157:H7 forced Half Moon Bay, CA-based Odwalla to launch a massive recall of its apple juice.

New, deadly strains of other usually innocuous bacteria may emerge at any time. Last fall in the UK, lettuce from fast-food restaurants was blamed for a massive surge in the number of food poisoning cases caused by the relatively uncommon and multi-drug resistant Salmonella Newport.

Of course, the likelihood of food poisoning is low. But the cases are high-profile, and the emergence of the always fatal “prion” diseases suggests entirely new categories of potential vulnerability. Society may well reach the consensus that it is worthwhile to trace every part of every meal served in every kind of restaurant.

This will take a long time to achieve, but an important beachhead for pursuit of this goal is the restaurant itself. If every food item that comes into the kitchen has a batch identifier, equipment can be designed to keep track of which batches of ingredients go into every finished product. This is easiest with fast food, where recipes are few and highly standardized, and where the machinery highly specialized.

The company we mentioned above is at the forefront of this initiative in Europe, and has a great advantage through its enormous leadership in the fast food market. It will gain important expertise from its innovations in fast food kitchens, and then use that expertise to move to less standardized processes in other kinds of food services. Eventually, the company will integrate the entire food-tracking process all the way back to specific cattle herds and vegetable plots.

Expanded Business Paradigms: Solutionists and Aggregators
This case is interesting not only for that reason, but also because it potentially involves multiple business models. If the company confines its application of device networking to the level of the restaurant, Harbor Research would term it a “Solutionist.”

The Solutionist is a manufacturer that has expanded its business to tap into the total-cost-of-ownership spending around a piece of equipment. Solutionist activities often include financing, installation, repair, maintenance, facilities, tracking, location, storage, operator training, de-installation, and disposal.

Already, the company in question offers complete maintenance contracts which are of greater value than its one-time product sales. It is only a few small steps away from ceasing to sell equipment per se, but rather selling end-to-end “cookage,” much in the way that GE Healthcare no longer “sells” MRI machines, but rather leases them as part of a broad array of services that constitute a full healthcare solution for the customer.

However, if our manufacturing company’s product-pedigree “killer app” matures in such a way that the company can become the collector and owner of pedigree information farther back up the supply chain, many other networked devices will become involved in an aggregated system.
Then, unless someone else usurps this role, the company has the opportunity to become an “Aggregator” as well.

By virtue of having moved first (or at least early), and by having a large number of devices involved in the overall system, Aggregators leverage “the network effect” to forge new data-driven partnerships and relationships in the “information circle” that has grown around their physical, networked devices.

Traceability and Genealogy Migration
Food-tracking, and by extension product-pedigree generally, will be among the first-generation killer apps of the Pervasive Internet. A number of companies in the pervasive space have already emerged with technology that enables these types of applications.

Boston-based Ember Corporation, for example, has been applying wireless sensor capabilities to so-called “cold chain” monitoring applications. Cold chain monitoring provides for real-time in-transit temperature monitoring of food and pharmaceuticals to furnish proof of proper shipment conditions.

Interactive Ember Corp. SphereMap™ from Harbor Research

Click the image to launch an interactive SphereMap™ of Ember Corporation’s position in the Pervasive Internet landscape. The map and associated content are part of a free, limited demonstration of Harbor’s SmartSphere® platform for “living business intelligence” (requires the latest Flash browser plug-in). Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

Other companies involved in similar work include Exago Pty Ltd (Sydney, Australia) with its TempSense Consignment Monitoring Service, and DeltaTRAK (Pleasanton, CA), which serves the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

Visibility, Efficiency, and Proof
Pedigree-tracking applications and scenarios make business processes much more “visible” and therefore efficient, and they also make possible new business models, relationships, and revenue streams.

These great business benefits alone have driven more early adoption in Europe and Japan than they have in the United States. In part, this has to do with the more legality-driven business culture of the U.S., where companies tend to ignore these types of capabilities or product/process improvements until they are required by law or public policy.

Thus, adoption of “traceability” applications will also be driven by the liability associated with mission-critical products and processes. If a product or process can “kill, injure or otherwise cause harm,” it will be an early candidate for these new capabilities.

Networked devices can easily generate “living documentation” to demonstrate compliance with regulations or standards. They can be used to prove, for example, that lab instruments were properly calibrated during a particular series of testing procedures.

In the short term, the insurance industry will begin to require the adoption of such capabilities, and this in turn will drive new public policy.

Download a printer-friendly PDF version of this essay (380 KB).
(See our terms of use.)

Learn about Harbor’s brand-new study of Pervasive Internet adoption, Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.  Download an overview of Connecting to Your Future (PDF, 328 KB).

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Who We Are and What We Offer
New! Harbor Pervasive Internet Briefing Service
First, a few words about our latest offering, which is a unique and efficient way to harness the resources of Harbor Research: The Pervasive Internet Briefing Service. This annual package delivers outstanding business intelligence value by combining all points of contact to Harbor:

• Quarterly in-person briefings on subjects of your choosing


• All Harbor publications for a year


• Department- or business unit-wide access to Harbor SmartSphere® online tracking projects


• Phone and email access to analysts

Download a brochure on the Pervasive Internet Briefing Service (PDF, 500 KB).

Founded in 1983, Harbor Research Inc. has more than twenty years of experience in providing strategic consulting and research services that enable our clients to understand and capitalize on emergent and disruptive opportunities in high technology, Harbor Research’s clients are leaders in communications, computing, control, and content. Harbor Research has built extended relationships with larger multi-line companies including AT&T, ABB, General Electric, Danaher, Eaton, Emerson, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hughes, IBM, Intel, Invensys, Lucent, Motorola, Rockwell, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, as well as with growth companies such as EMC, Cadence Design, Conexant, Qualcomm, and PTC.

We also work with a broad array of emergent start-ups and pre-IPO technology ventures. We have built relationships with a number of significant Pervasive Internet players, including Questra Corporation, Xsilogy, DataSweep, eDevice, Wireless Innovation, and emWare, to name a few.

We provide studies, workshops, briefings, research retainers, and consulting engagements of uniquely high value to both technology suppliers and adopters. For more information, please contact us.

Harbor’s new online platform for research services offers continually updated intelligence and stunning data-visualization.

Static, printed reports can’t track the complex ecosystems and warp-speed pace of high tech. SmartSphere® projects can.

The brains of the Web. The brawn of server databases. The beauty of a CD-ROM.
For nearly ten years, we’ve been waiting for Web media to get good enough to let us do this. It’s finally here. Harbor SmartSphere® re-invents the whole concept of delivering research value. It’s to business research what the Pervasive Internet will be to business itself: a huge injection of dynamic intelligence and sheer voltage. SmartSphere® is online, interactive, dynamic, and visualized. There’s nothing static, rigid, or dead about it. Eventually, we at Harbor will do everything in SmartSphere® that we used to do on paper, and we’ll do it better. And you can, too. in a custom-configured project of your own, SmartSphere® can be anything you want it to be.

And yes, you can get printed reports. We’ve re-invented those, too. Not fixed, one-size-fits-all printed reports, but custom printed reports that you configure and SmartSphere® creates for you on the fly in PDF format.

See SmartSphere® and find out more right now:

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. So what are they worth if they’re pictures of your whole world, and you can fly around inside the pictures with your mouse?
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).

A small portion of an interactive Harbor SphereMap™. This one portrays a company’s world. You “fly around” the map by dragging it with your mouse, bringing into focus any area you want to explore. You see a company’s peers, investors, products, and alliance-structure at a glance. Clicking nodes fetches additional information from the database. Shift-clicking nodes creates new maps of other companies—and maps of markets, too.

Projects, projects, projects. Ours, and yours.
SmartSphere® is an online platform that Harbor uses to deliver Web-based services. You don’t buy SmartSphere® the way you buy a program for your computer. You buy access to one or more SmartSphere® projects. We define projects of our own on important high-tech subjects, and clients can subscribe to those projects. Clients can also define their own custom (and completely private) projects.

SmartSphere® projects are laser-focused on their subjects. No waste, no fluff, no irrelevance. A SmartSphere® project delivers continually updated information on whatever the project has been defined to track. Some of that information is created in the good old-fashioned way, by experienced researchers and analysts. And some of it is created with 21^st century tools like automated news feeds and Web-based info services. Every time you log in to a project, there’s new information—freshly tracked events, new company alliances, new company and market comparisons, enhanced company, market, and technology profiles, and insightful Harbor commentary and analysis.

When you visit our SmartSphere® demonstration, you’ll see a limited version of our own “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project. Bear in mind that the free demo offers limited information and functionality. The full “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project, for example, was created to replace and improve our own earlier online publication, Pervasive Internet Report.

Custom SmartSphere® projects. Your secret weapon has arrived.
You’ve heard about some of our SmartSphere® projects. Now let’s talk about yours. Does your company have business development, M&A, R&D, or sales and marketing goals? We hope the answer is yes. How would you like “living business intelligence”™ on the companies that interest or worry you? Or on the markets and technologies that are defining your future? A custom SmartSphere® project is the perfect way to do that. “Living business intelligence”™ means research that is laser-focused on your targets, and continually updated for as long as you need it.

Any collection of companies, markets, or technologies can become the backbone of a SmartSphere® project. You define who or what they are. You define what you want to track about them, and how you’d like to rank or score or weight them. You define the types of cross-company or cross-market comparisons you’d like to see.

Take action and take control.
If you’ve read this much about SmartSphere® without clicking something, it’s time to click. Here are those links once again.

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration.
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).