Equilibrium Point Survey of NECA Membership
Equilibrium was happy to have our team attend the Annual NECA Trade Show, held on May 15th in the Hogan Center at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Attendance at the show was very strong, and it was great to meet so many carwash owners and operators, as well as distributors and other service providers who work in the industry. One of Equilibrium’s core principles is customer-driven technology development – that is, making it easy for customers to use our technology and making sure our development priorities are closely aligned to our customers’ needs. So, our primary objective for attending the show was to learn more about the specific opportunities and challenges in each owner’s business, to help guide the roadmap for our IOT platform.
As part of that effort, we asked each of you who stopped by our booth (and there were many of you!) to complete a survey about what features and functions would be most important to you. We learned a lot not only from the survey data but from discussing these priorities and the underlying technology in further depth with each visitor to our booth. One of the questions we asked was to have each owner/operator list the top features and functions they would like to see for remote monitoring and alerting. The results are listed below, sorted by number or mentions.
It’s interesting to note how closely this survey data dovetails the trends and priorities identified by IoT experts across various industries. These trends include:
Re-Inventing the Customer Experience: Deploying IoT sensors to provide new and differentiated products and services. Enhancing and personalizing the customer experience to build value and loyalty. Cost and downtime avoidance are necessary but not sufficient – new revenue sources are also required.
Asset Performance Management: Deployment of cost-effective wireless sensors, easy cloud connectivity, and data analytics to improve asset performance and decision-making process. This goes hand in hand with a re-invented customer experience. All systems need to be up and operating, and downtime minimized, to deliver the experience customers have come to expect.
Augmented Operators: Today’s employees are always connected, they expect and required it not only in their personal lives but at work as well. Using mobile devices, data analytics and transparent connectivity, employees are more engaged and have the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Operations are evolving from machine-centric to user-centric.
Smart Enterprise Control: To enable tight integration of smart connected machines and processes across the wider operation. For example, why stop at detecting low chemical levels when you can alert the right employee, and even automate the re-order from your vendor?
Learn more about IoT and how it is impacting the car wash industry on our blog at:
The team at Equilibrium is currently analyzing survey data and research reports like this to help inform the development of our next set of IoT features. So stay tuned, and if you have any feedback on this list or ideas to share, please provide them in the comments section below.
