Enterprises are always trying to reduce time to market, as speed helps hone a competitive edge. The longer it takes to bring your ideas and products to market, the longer it takes to realize revenue and a return on investment for your company. 5G can help enable and optimize new and emerging technologies that can help improve speed to market.
Barriers to efficiency
When businesses consider bringing a new service or product to market, they must evaluate the risk landscape and the resources needed. They must ask themselves pointed questions.
- How much labor will this process require, now and on an ongoing basis?
- How much will we need to invest in infrastructure?
- How will this affect our supply chain and our existing suite of products and services?
- How easily will we be able to scale?
In today's landscape, these traditional challenges are compounded by implementation headaches—heavy research and development costs, a distributed workforce and security concerns over proprietary data and handling.
Time to market: Technologies that improve speed to market
For a long time, the solutions to reduce time to market favored businesses that could handle high levels of risk and capital expenditure investment and were comfortable with an uncertain payoff.
But advanced technologies, supported by 5G technology, could level the playing field and democratize market access. Digital transformation of the supply chain increases transparency and helps support data-driven decisions. Businesses no longer need to fly blind.
Similarly, cloud computing and virtualization reduce infrastructure costs, meaning companies do not have to invest in computing resources that could go unused.
Digital transformation has also increased access to automation, which can relieve workers of tedious tasks and free them to focus on more important work. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in the field, in a warehouse or in a manufacturing plant can gather data that can be fed into machine learning algorithms. Edge computing interprets this data in real time, forecasts when problems will appear down the pike and acts to help mitigate those problems. Data-driven decision-making gives operations more autonomy, can help minimize downtime through predictive maintenance and can be leveraged for more strategic labor deployment.
Data analytics, IoT sensor data processing, automated production processes and edge computing can be powered by 5G, and they can all help reduce time to market. A combination of 5G and a suite of transformational technologies could dramatically improve speed to market and support your bottom line. A faster time to market can help your supply chain be more responsive to your business needs, too.
Speed to market: Preparing to harness the benefits of 5G
Enterprises and businesses of all sizes can prepare now for the game-changing effects of 5G. 5G can enable many transformative technologies, but businesses probably will not need them all. Part of making the most of 5G capabilities is understanding which technologies and applications will help your business.
5G has built-in security features and benefits, but businesses looking to deploy it should still take measures to secure their networks.
A cultural shift will also need to take place so that the C-suite can make strategic decisions about enabling technologies that deliver key advantages in the marketplace.
Having a great idea is no longer enough. The future belongs to businesses that can understand and deploy the technologies to improve speed to market. 5G will help them get there.
Learn about 5G and how it could help reduce time to market.