In a fiercely competitive robotics landscape, simply offering cutting-edge hardware isn’t enough. The key to securing customer wins hinges on a robotics company’s ability to clearly demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) robots deliver.
Decision-makers at potential customer companies are bombarded with promises of automation’s potential, but justifying capex necessitates concrete proof of real-world benefits. Unfortunately, complex user interfaces and a lack of readily available performance data can make it difficult to quantify and prove value easily. This can then translate to lost sales opportunities and frustrated customers who struggle to understand the full potential of physical automation truly.
But it doesn’t have to be this difficult; Formant is here to make proving ROI easier than ever before. Keep reading to learn how our cloud robotics platform, paired with our new feature, Formant Analytics, empowers robotics companies and integrators to build a compelling, data-backed case for their product.
Validating robot pilots
Every robotics company has to start small, and validating pilots with early customers is key to ensuring product-market fit and optimal hardware performance. This validation process is crucial for identifying issues and ensuring future expansions for end-users run smoothly based on learnings from real-world robot data.
Formant simplifies data collection from job sites, providing valuable insights for RaaS companies. Formant Analytics empowers this process by offering intuitive visualization tools. RaaS companies can easily analyze data on sensors, memory, and CPU for hardware diagnostics. Additionally, teams can create reporting on robot performance based on actions such as missions, tasks per day, or miles traveled to further validate value for customers.
Additionally, insights gleaned from robot data piped into the platform and visualized in Analytics can inform future deployments. Robotics companies can now tailor their solutions to specific customer needs and environments, ensuring a successful wider launch.
General robot utilization
Understanding robot utilization is critical for both robotics companies and their customers. Formant Analytics plays a vital role here by providing the ability to visualize and compare robot usage data.
Take, for example, a cleaning robotics company that wants to understand robot utilization to identify which customers have the most active use. Using the data ingested from various fleets, Formant Analytics can compare usage across customers and locations. By analyzing usage data, the robotics company can evaluate each customer fleet to ensure it is the proper size and provide ROI.
To further prove ROI, Formant Analytics can also be leveraged by robotics companies to easily demonstrate day-to-day improvement to their customers. Visualizations pertaining to week-over-week performance can reveal enhanced productivity and set standards for performance that can be used for predictive maintenance. Or, by analyzing data on daily error occurrence, a customer can determine the optimal number of field operators needed to support the robots, optimizing staffing procedures and keeping overall labor costs in check.
Data collection & service expansion
Data collected by robots can reveal upsell opportunities that benefit both the robotics company and the customer.
For instance, a company offering autonomous lawnmowers may want to identify other information about the environment to identify possible upsell opportunities or inform other tasks. As the mower completes its task, it also monitors the flower beds for weeds using sensors on the robot. This information, collected on the Formant platform, can be relayed directly to the sales team, informing them that there is an opportunity to expand the deal by offering weeding services as well. Sensors can be set to trigger alerts based on specific data points (e.g., weed height exceeding a threshold). This allows for proactive upselling and ensures the customer’s service needs are always met.
The customer can also validate that the robotics company can deliver deeply personalized services and demonstrate the ability of one vendor to address multiple tasks.
Formant Analytics: Making data-driven decisions simple
Formant Analytics plays a central role in unlocking ROI for robotics companies and their customers. With a user-friendly interface for data exploration, any user can build a variety of valuable visualizations (line charts, bar charts, etc.) within Formant Analytics to understand data trends at a glance, eliminating the need for complex data manipulation and interpretation.
For users requiring more in-depth analysis, Formant offers an advanced mode with an AI-powered SQL query generator, allowing users to get the data they need with a simple, plain-text prompt through Formant Analytics.
By leveraging Formant Analytics, proving ROI to prospects looking to adopt automation and existing customers has never been easier. Learn more about this feature on our blog, or get a demo with a member of our team to see it in action.
