Transformational Changes in Economy and Society - part 3
This is our third and final post about the changes we are likely to see when cities become smart.
Smart Retail
Smart apps will lead retails through the path of flexibility and convenience for the customer. Apps will communicate with beacons to offer products based on location and online shopping behavior, showing customers how products will look like on them or in their places and apps will even allow a customer to scan a product and it will add that product to the shopping basket, so the customer can order it online or search for the nearest store where the article is available. Another trend will be personalized products as 3D-printing based on 3D models of customers' bodies.
Smart Logistics
Smarter logistics means more flexible deliveries in terms of time and place. Personalized delivery is a premium service that will be offered by companies that manage to robotized their order picking process inside their distribution centers, allowing orders to be delivered on the same day. But that also means that cities must have a smarter solution to prevent traffic and congestion. One idea is to provide logistic decoupling points that receive the truckloads and combine parcels of different shippers to distribute them via zero-emission vehicles.
Smart Manufacturing
The smarter manufacturing becomes, more it turns products into physical platforms, so they become the center of ecosystems in which third-party companies can build add-ons. This scenario is easily achievable through 3D-printing, where the customers can build their own personalized add-ons to products they own.
Robotics will also increase the share of activities machinery performs today to the point that it will almost completely substitute low-skill human manufacturing employees, producing a comparatively small number of specialized expert jobs in maintenance and programming.
As 'space-age' materials (like carbon fiber, nanomaterials, memory foam and optical coatings) become cheaper and more accessible, new objects, more capable, advanced and intricated, can be created.
Smart Construction
Advanced techniques in materials, specially concrete, and machinery, with improved construction processes, enable the construction industry to work with more efficiency and lower costs. Monitoring infrastructure via wireless sensors and integrating BIPV (Integrated Photovoltaics) into buildings, allow companies to take a proactive approach to maintenance and energy economy.
Smart Government
Smart cities will not be truly smart without a smart government. A smart government uses the disruptive potential of technology and data to innovate in all parts of the value chain. The government value chain starts with analysis of perceived societal problems. The availability of big data combined with advanced data analytics techniques increases the predictive power of these analyses for policy-making, from planning to execution, shifting from public to private, as the government increasingly defines the high-level requirements and private companies are used for the execution of policies.
Other developments that contribute to smart government are distributed government, through digital platforms and mobile apps; online public services, uses digital technology to make public services available online in a self-service model; and scope of services, allowing the unbundling of government services.
As we can see, many changes are coming to our society as cities become smarter. We just have to become smarter too and prepare ourselves to this upcoming future.
Nobiletec is a multi-national consultancy firm specializes in B2B, B2C and P2P FinTech solutions.
