The power of preparation is one of the key ingredients to a successful pilot. Let me share a live experience with a Top 5 global renewables company with whom we are currently executing a paid pilot.
At NarrativeWave, we take a unique approach in the IoT space to a pilot engagement. Our approach to a pilot is predicated upon a targeted set of outputs, analytics, and metrics to achieve with the client, delivering specific business value in under 60 days, and then allowing the client to scale in more of a “do it yourself” approach, with the NarrativeWave software solution.
What is also different about the NarrativeWave approach is that our product gives the client the ability to build analytics themselves with training and guidance by NarrativeWave, where needed. This provides the foundation for almost immediate analytic development by our clients and then impact to their business, with minimal investment compared to traditional, expensive platform solutions.
In essence our clients SMEs + NarrativeWave = business outputs. NarrativeWave is a turnkey software solution that enables our clients and their SMEs to build analytics and decision outputs to impact their operations - in a matter of weeks, not months.
We are halfway through a current 60 day pilot with one of the largest global renewables companies. In this instance, NarrativeWave and the client benefitted from a very talented set of individuals on the client side that are clearly experts in their respective domains. When planning for this pilot, we prepared ourselves and the client by reviewing and planning out the specific analytics and outcomes they wanted to achieve during the pilot to prove the value of NarrativeWave. This planning allowed us to collectively start creating value on Day 1 of the pilot instead of Day 31 or months into a pilot process. In essence, we identified with the client, specific analytics and prepared data to test the analytics before the pilot began.
It is important to note: NarrativeWave’s pilot process is a combination of preparation, training and analytic development that includes onboarding and integration; this ensures once we hit Day 61 or Day 1 of a client’s licensing agreement with NarrativeWave begins, that the client is already experiencing tangible impact to their business operations and analytic management. The client is experiencing financial and operational savings.
To ensure success is achieved and the client experiences the value needed to move to a formal commercial relationship with NarrativeWave immediately after 60 days, preparation is paramount.
Preparation and engagement with SMEs and their management BEFORE the pilot starts is a prerequisite to a successful pilot. This also must be combined with a turnkey software solution, like NarrativeWave, that enables the client and its users to achieve impactful business outcomes in a matter of weeks, not months.
The client now has a baseline of analytics that can move to production once tech integration is completed in the coming weeks and even more importantly, the client has a list of analytics to benefit all 3 segments of their business for the Control Center, Performance Engineering, and field management teams.
On the preparation side of this client engagement, we decided to modify the process for this client and the outcome benefitted our speed of success. We started with multiple discovery sessions, before the pilot started, with several business groups to identify and prioritize the analytics to be developed, allowing for the proper validation of NarrativeWave, in record time.
Most importantly, the client required that the pilot demonstrated that their SMEs could build analytics in NarrativeWave in an efficient and rapid fashion. The question needed to be answered that analytic development could scale internally once SMEs were trained. The client felt this was achieved in the first 3 weeks of the pilot.
These business outcome was achieved, but the training sessions were greatly impacted by the preparation of each SME bringing to each session the specific analytics they wanted to build coupled with the corresponding data set.
What was amazing about the results? We experienced our client’s SMEs interacting together on how best to build the analytics and helping each other in the training and analytic development process. It became immediately clear that the NarrativeWave client engineering team was just a facilitator and spectator in the process. The client’s SMEs drove the development process - together.
Although we are still early in the engagement with this specific client, we are grateful for the learnings in this pilot process and our future clients will benefit from the optimization of the NarrativeWave pilot process.
As we continue to scale in our targeted industrial segments, we have learned that most companies have the need for similar analytics and outcomes relative to managing their assets.
Therefore, we are now developing packaged analytics that will allow us to impact future clients even faster and more efficiently - with our new NarrativeWave "FastStart" Analytic Packages for clients.
We believe that the traditional pilot process executed by many of our peers that is open ended, many months long, and not targeted with specific business outcomes - is broken.
NarrativeWave's software solution is a potential game changer for our clients because it is a conduit to put the power back into the hands of SMEs, engineers, analytic teams, and field management teams - to start.
We have validated that companies in every industrial segment, both large and small, are starving for solutions like NarrativeWave where they can build analytics and then drive the automation of business outcomes.
Clients need the proper toolset to achieve these business goals and optimization, but not via outsourcing to expensive platforms their analytics, IP, and data science - but, instead, by empowering engineers and SMEs "to do more with less" with self service tools that are user directed and then user adopted.