Building retail solutions with Azure IoT Central

Azure IoT Central is an IoT app platform for solution builders that simplifies the challenges of building and deploying scalable and affordable enterprise grade IoT applications. Across the retail industry, the use of connected devices to deliver business performance continues to grow in popularity. New solutions are accelerating business model transformation by connecting manufacturers, supply chains, warehouses, and store shelves to owners, operators, and customers in exciting new ways. Today we’ll discuss our stance on IoT in the retail industry, as well as tell you about just a few of our partners building incredible solutions on Azure IoT Central.

Based on the recent IoT Signals report, our survey of over 3,000 enterprise decision makers across the world, the Retail industry has the highest adoption rate of IoT related solutions at 90 percent, which is higher than Manufacturing, Transportation, Healthcare, or Government. Right now, retail and wholesale companies see top use cases for IoT within their supply chains (64 percent) and inventory optimization (59 percent) and of course leaders across all industries have concerns about security. Yet, we know that retailers and companies along the value chain have a long way to go before reaping all the benefits that IoT will provide.

Updates to IoT Central

Today, we announced updates to Azure IoT Central to help solution builders move beyond proof of concept to building business-critical applications they can brand and sell directly or through Microsoft AppSource. IoT Central can help retail solution builders accelerate development, enabling them to get connected, stay connected and transform their business by managing IoT solutions that deliver IoT data and insights to business applications where decisions are made.

We are supporting retail specific solution builders with five IoT Central retail app templates for builders to brand, customize, and make their own apps using extensibility via APIs, data connectors to business applications, repeatability and manageability of their investment through multitenancy, and seamless device connectivity. Get started today with any app template for free and starter materials like a sample operator dashboard and simulated devices to show you what’s possible. In early 2020 updated pricing will help with predictability as you sell your solutions directly to customers or through Microsoft AppSource.

When you are ready to get to customizing and extending, take a look at our rich documentation set, which augments the journey with overviews, tutorials, how-to’s, and industry relevant concepts.

Figure 1, Your brand -- Your SaaS - Customize and extend one of these 5 retail app templates to make them your own

Innovative retail partners building their SaaS with IoT Central

Established industry leaders across the retail ecosystem are optimizing omnichannel solutions with IoT Central; delivering IoT insights and actions from the beginning of the supply chain through distribution, warehousing, and into the hands of consumers through storefront or delivery. Learn about what QuEST Global, C.H. Robinson, Dynamics 365 Connected Store, and Footmarks Inc. are doing today.

Digital distribution center solution from Lenovo

In July, Lenovo introduced Lenovo Digital Distribution Center (built with IoT Central) and discussed many of the challenges faced by distribution centers globally, including staffing surges during peak times, labor costs, space constraints, and overall productivity.

Figure 2, An illustration of the digital distribution workflow

Figure 3, Architecture diagram of Digital Distribution Center by Lenovo

Today we’ll introduce three more solution builders developing solutions across connected logistics, store analytics, and smart inventory management.

Connected logistics solutions from C.H. Robinson and QuEST Global

The challenges facing global logistics and fleet management continue to grow as more retailers move to just-in-time shipping and warehousing. With the holiday shopping (and shipping) season fast approaching, global shipping and freight transportation provider, C.H. Robinson, is putting IoT Central to work during its busiest time of the year. Intel intelligent gateways and IoT tags managed by IoT Central bring new data and insights into industry leading Navisphere Vision. Jordan Kass, President of TMC, a division of CH Robinson responsible for Navisphere told us; “Navisphere Vision provides global shippers supply chain visibility and a predictive analytics platform. To speed up our deployment, increase our capabilities, and evolve for the future, we are partnering and building new device connections with Azure IoT Central to empower one robust agnostic connection that allows for infinite scalability and speed. This enables us to further optimize and deliver better outcomes—such as improved savings, reliability, and visibility—during these high-stakes holiday shipping months.”

Figure 4, An example of a Navisphere Vision dashboard for multimodal shipment insight using IoT device sensors for location, temperature, humidity, shock, tilt, light, and pressure.  

Figure 5, Architecture diagram for Navisphere Vision by C.H. Robinson

Road safety is a global issue affecting billions of people around the world. QuEST Global's fleet management solution Fleet Tracker aims to reduce roadside issues, using CalAMP OBD2 dongles to deliver real-time location, driving pattern, speed, engine health, and geo fencing; simultaneously managing vehicles nearly anywhere in the world. Maxence Cacheux, Head of Strategic Partnerships from QuEST Global told us, “We are delighted with the successful deployment of our fleet management solution built on IoT Central, which enhanced its speed, security, and scalability. Now we are planning for the future when our customers around the world have tens of thousands of connected devices, delivering business transforming insights and actions.”

Figure 6, an example of a dashboard from QuEST Global’s Fleet Tracker solution, delivering insights from connected vehicles

Figure 7, Architecture diagram for Fleet Tracker by QuEST Global

Store analytics from Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Connected Store empowers retailers with real-time observational data to improve in-store performance. From customer movement to the status of products and store devices, Dynamics 365 Connected Store will provide a better understanding of your retail space. Built with IoT Central, Dynamics 365 Connected Store empowers store managers and employees to provide optimal shopping experiences through triggered alerts based on real-time data from video cameras and IoT sensors. This new workflow can significantly improve in-store performance by protecting inventory, increasing profitability, and optimizing the shopping experience in real time.

Figure 8, An example of Dynamics 365 Connected Store dashboard enabling retail staff to visualize the flow of traffic throughout their grocery store using optical IoT sensors

Figure 9, Architecture diagram of Dynamics 365 Connected Store

Smart Inventory Management from Footmarks Inc.

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers share many of the same challenges, one of them is getting hundreds or sometimes thousands of custom assets like displays to the correct retail locations, and keeping them in the store for the right amount of time.

When displays don’t reach their pre-determined locations, retailers experience significant loss in sales, a key impact for brands during important buying times. Around the country today, we know a significant portion of point-of-purchase (POP) display programs are not compliant, a problem that Footmarks Inc. is looking to solve through their Smart Tracking app built with IoT Cental, an asset tracking application that delivers previously unavailable insights to CPG’s.

CPG’s can now track the location of their POP assets throughout the entire supply chain and into store execution. Gone are the days of mystery shopping and expensive store visits to get details on your assets.  Shawn Englund, Footmarks Inc.’s CEO is enthusiastic for the future saying, “We are excited to be working with some of the world’s largest CPGs to solve the age-old issue of merchandizing compliance. By adding Azure IoT Central we are able to gain even more insights throughout our CPG partner supply chains and provide actionable insights throughout each of their campaigns.”

Figure 10, An example of a Footmarks Inc. Smart Tracking dashboard showing POP asset tracking along the supply chain.

Figure 11, Architecture diagram of Smart Tracking by Footmarks Inc.

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How one Azure IoT partner is building connected experiences

We recently spent time with Mesh Systems, a Microsoft Gold Cloud platform partner based in Carmel, Indiana, to understand what a day in the life of an Azure IoT partner looks like. They shared some of their recent IoT customer engagements and talked about the types of everyday challenges Azure IoT partners face like building an IoT solution with legacy endpoints, how to approach tracking assets through a supply chain, and integrating an IoT solution with a business application. Finally, we discussed what best practices have driven the success of their IoT practice.

Connected coffee: building an IoT solution with legacy endpoints

Mesh’s experience in the beverage category caught the interest of a large European company that provides coffee beans and routine maintenance to thousands of coffee machines. The company wanted to innovate by providing their bean supplier with robust consumption data using an IoT solution.

But there was a catch. The company managed machines made by many different manufacturers across many different classes of machines. It would be cost prohibitive to build a custom integration for each machine type. There was no way to connect them to the cloud without expensive rework.

“This is a typical brownfield use case,” said Doyle Baxter, Manager of Strategic Alliances, Mesh Systems. "The client understands their business case but the cost of connecting legacy endpoints is sometimes higher than the value of the data. It was a tough nut to crack."

For this use case, Mesh came up with an innovative proposal. Their concept was to identify unique electrical current signatures for different coffee machine processes. The signature of a double shot of espresso would be different from a single shot. Using this current analysis, Mesh could determine the amount of coffee being dispensed.

“There’s work to match up coffee machine actions with current consumption, but the enablement hardware is really inexpensive compared to other connected coffee applications," he said. "Additionally, the same enablement hardware has potential application across other beverage equipment—not just coffee machines."

Connected assets: improving supply chain efficiency

A manufacturer of glass products approached Mesh to investigate an IoT solution for tracking shipping racks. The customer ships their fragile products on expensive, custom-made racks. Unfortunately, the racks often come up missing! All told, the customer writes off more than half a million dollars of lost racks each year.

“We always look for the most cost efficient and easily deployed endpoints, especially in the case of asset tracking,” said Baxter. “In this case, our team specified a small, battery-operated Bluetooth beacon for each rack.” The beacons communicate to low-cost cellular gateways each covering 125,000 to 200,000 square feet.

“Our team designed and manufactured both the beacons and gateways and wrote the embedded software. We built the cloud solution with Azure IoT Central,” Baxter explained. The Mesh team leveraged the continuous data export functionality of IoT Central. The architecture was configured to continuously export data to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Functions, Data Factory, and Azure SQL.

The customer viewed rack movement in a detailed report within a Microsoft Power BI dashboard. With this information, they identified the end customer responsible for the shrinkage. They then coached customers on best practices for managing racks to reduce their lost rack expenses.

Connected construction: integration into business applications

Mesh worked with a construction company that needed to track which employees and contractors were on their construction sites on any given day. The data was critical to meet compliance requirements. This means the company needed to manage the whereabouts of thousands of people over the course of a project. The customer was looking to build one, unified solution for both access control and real-time location.

Mesh proposed a badge access system in which employee badges had Bluetooth beacons that communicated to local gateways and then into Azure over a cellular backhaul. Mesh built its solution with Azure IoT Central, leveraging the continuous data export function.

“A challenge in this project was designing the interface to the project management system in use that was used by the client,” said Baxter. “Sometimes a solution can provide value with its own user interface, but more often than not, the IoT data needs to be integrated into existing business systems.” Mesh worked with its customer to define the integration points and test out communication.

The result was the ability to view both present and absent employees and contractors natively within the company's existing project management system. They used a Power BI dashboard to analyze detailed historical trends.

Partner best practices

Mesh has had a strong pipeline of IoT projects and success moving customers to production. They pointed to their company’s philosophy on proof of concept engagements and best practices. “When we engage with a client on a project, we start with the end in mind,” said Baxter. “We don’t look at proof of concepts as a ‘throw away,’ but rather as a milestone on the journey to scale implementation.”

“Partnership is the name of the IoT game. The IoT stack is simply too deep for one company to provide a turnkey solution without good ecosystem partners. We realize that we are only as successful as our partnerships,” He said. The company has developed strong partnerships with cloud infrastructure, connectivity, and silicon providers.

Mesh brings deep technical skills and a wealth of experience. “We understand the reality of implementing IoT on a large scale – from thousands of sensors and devices being shipped, unboxed, installed and activated to architecting, piloting, and deploying IoT cloud solutions with the latest Azure IoT services,” said Baxter.

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Expanded Jobs functionality in Azure IoT Central

Since announcing the release of our Jobs feature during the Azure IoT Central general availability launch, we are excited to share how we are working to improve your device management workflow through additional jobs functionalities. Today, you are now able to copy an existing job you’ve created, save a job to continue working on later, stop or resume a running job, and download a job details report once your job has completed running. These additional Jobs functionalities make managing your devices at scale much easier.

In order to copy a job you’ve created, simply select a job from your main jobs list and select “Copy”. This will open a copy of the job where you can optionally update any part of the job configuration. If any changes have been made to your device set since its creation, your copied job will reflect those changes for you to edit.

While you are editing your job, you now have the option to save the job to continue working on later by selecting “Save”. This saved job will appear on your main jobs list with a status of “Saved” and you can open it again at any time to continue editing.

Once you have chosen to run your job, you can select the “Stop” button to stop the job from executing any further. You can open a stopped job from your list and select “Run” again at any time you’d like.

Whether your job has been stopped or is completed running, you can select “Download Device Report” near your device list in order to download a .csv file that lists the device ID, time the job was completed or stopped, status of the device, and the error message (if applicable). This can be used to troubleshoot devices or as a sorting tool.

We are continually working on improving your device management experience to make managing devices at scale easier than ever. If you have any suggestions for the device management or Jobs functionalities you would find useful in your workflow.

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Streamlined IoT device certification with Azure IoT certification service

For over three years, we have helped customers find devices that work with Azure IoT technology through the Azure Certified for IoT program and the Azure IoT device catalog. In that time, our ecosystem has grown to one of the largest in the industry with more than 1,000 devices and starter kits from over 250 partners.

Today, we are taking steps to further to grow our device partner ecosystem with the release of Azure IoT certification service (AICS), a new web-based test automation workflow, which is now generally available. AICS will significantly reduce the operational processes and engineering costs for hardware manufacturers to get their devices certified for Azure Certified for IoT program and be showcased on the Azure IoT device catalog.

Over the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to the program such as improving the discovery of certified devices in the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog and expanding the program to support Azure IoT Edge devices. The goal of our certification program is simple – to showcase the right set of IoT devices for our customers’ industry specific vertical solutions and simplify IoT device development.

AICS is designed and engineered to help achieve these goals, delivering on four key areas listed below:

Consistency

AICS is a web-based test automation workflow that can work on any operating systems and web browser. AICS communicates with its own set of Azure IoT Hub instances to automatically validate against devices to Azure IoT Hub bi-directional connectivity and other IoT Hub primitives.

Previously, hardware manufacturers had to instantiate their own IoT Hub using their Azure subscription in order to get certified. AICS not only eliminates Azure subscription costs for our hardware manufacturers, but also streamlines the certification processes through automation. These changes accrue to driving more quality and consistency compared to the manual processes that were in place before.

Additional tests

The certification program for IoT devices has always validated against bi-directional connectivity from device to IoT Hub cloud service (namely device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device). As IoT devices become more intelligent to support more capabilities, we have now expanded our program to support validation of device twins and direct methods IoT Hub primitives. AICS validate these capabilities and Azure IoT device catalog will correspondingly showcased them as well that make it easy for device seekers to build IoT solutions on these rich capabilities.

The screenshot below shows customizable test cases. By default, device-to-cloud is the required test and all others are optional. This new requirement allows constrained devices such as microcontrollers to be certified.

The screenshot below shows how tested capabilities are shown on the device description page in the device catalog.

Flexibility

Previously, hardware manufacturers were required to use the Azure IoT device SDK to build an app to establish connectivity from device(s) to cloud managed by Azure IoT Hub services. Based on partners’ feedback, we now support devices that do not use Azure IoT device SDK to establish connectivity to Azure IoT Hub, for example, devices that use the IoT Hub resource provider REST API to create and manage Azure Hub programmatically or hardware manufacturers opt to use other device SDK equivalent to establish connectivity.

In addition, AICS allows hardware manufacturers to configure the necessary parameters for customized test cases such as number of messages of telemetry data sent from the devices.

The screenshot below illustrates an example page that shows the ability to configure each test case.

Simplicity

Finally, we have made investments to design a user experience that is simple and intuitive to hardware manufacturers. For example, in the device catalog, we have streamlined the process from device registration to running the validations using AICS through a simple wizard driven flow. Hardware developers can easily troubleshoot failed tests through detailed logs that improves diagnose-ability.

Because it’s a web-based workflow, serviceability of AICS is so simple that hardware manufacturers are not required to deploy any standalone test kits (no .exe, .msi, etc.) locally on their devices, which tend to become outdated over time.

The screenshot below shows each test case run. Log files show the test pass/fail along with raw data sent from device to cloud. The submit button only shows up when all the test cases selected pass. Once the tests are complete, we will review the results and notify the submitter of additional steps to complete the entire certification process.

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Location and Maps in Azure IoT Central powered by Azure Maps

Azure IoT Central brings the simplicity of SaaS for IoT with built-in support for IoT best practices and world class security and scalability with no cloud expertise required. We have been constantly adding features and true to the promise of SaaS applications, you can just start using new features right away to build production-grade applications without worrying about managing infrastructure.

This blog post is part of a series of blog posts you will start seeing for new features in Azure IoT Central in the upcoming weeks.

Azure IoT Central now leverages Azure Maps. A portfolio of geospatial functionalities natively integrated into Azure to enable users with fresh mapping data necessary to provide geographic context to their location aware IoT applications. We received several interests from public preview customers to leverage geospatial services for various use cases ranging from simply localizing their devices, validating location information, spatially referencing device locations on a map, to geofencing use cases around their devices. As any other property in Azure IoT Central, location metadata can be persisted on the cloud and updated either by the device itself (device properties) or the user (application properties). By integrating with Azure Maps, user can now give geographic context to their location property and map any latitude and longitude of a street address, or simply latitude and longitude coordinates.

For this first release, Azure IoT Central customers can configure a location property in their device template and pass addresses or coordinates as values. This feature uses the Azure Maps Search Service, to find addresses and places from around the world. Azure Maps supports address level geocoding in 38 regions, cascading to house numbers, street-level, and city level geocoding for other regions of the world.

After configuring a location property, in the Device dashboard, an Azure IoT Central customer will also be able to add map tiles. For this, IoT Central uses the Azure Maps JavaScript Control Services to allow layering the configured location property atop of Azure’s Maps right in the Device Dashboards. User can interact with the map tiles.

Similarly, Azure IoT Central users can add a location map tile in the Device Sets dashboard which will display the configured location for all the devices in the set on a map.

In addition, if you are a device developer get started with the MXChip IoT DevKit device using the Azure IoT Central Sample DevKits which will contain an example of device location property and maps, all powered by Azure Maps!

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What’s new in Azure IoT Central

Azure IoT Central brings the simplicity of SaaS for IoT with built-in support for IoT best practices, and world class security and scalability with no cloud expertise required. We have been constantly adding new features, and true to the promise of SaaS applications, you can just start using these features right away to build production-grade applications without worrying about managing infrastructure.

IoT Central has implemented a number of new features, capabilities, and usability improvements. We will dive deeper in to many of these features in the future, but for now we’d like to focus broadly on what new features have landed in IoT Central.

State measurement

Previously, devices could be measured by telemetry or by events triggered. Now, users can measure their devices qualitatively by defining device states. State measurement enables devices to report the current state of the overall device or its components. For example, a connected air conditioner may have two states (stopped and operating), and a user can see all connected devices and their current state.

Event monitoring template

IoT Central is continuing to expand remote monitoring capabilities by adding support for device event monitoring. Using a simple and intuitive UI, users can now set up rules to monitor any critical events from their devices and get alerted within minutes of an issue occurring.

Bulk device import and export

Connecting a large number of devices to IoT Central can be difficult. Previously, connecting these devices at once was an error-prone, overly manual process that took a lot of time to set up. Now, users can register large numbers of devices in IoT Central at once, using a simple csv file that can be created by hand or exported from existing asset management or ERP systems. Additionally, users can download device identities and the corresponding device connection strings as a csv which can be used to automate the process to flash credentials onto devices. With this change, applications can be scaled up and duplicated much more easily.

Location and map services

This new feature set enables powerful new geospatial services for many use cases. Users can give geographic context to their location data and enter location properties, which allows them to validate location information, spatially reference device locations, or geofence use cases around their device.

New account management tools

Subscriptionless trials

We’ve made it easier to try out IoT Central. A user can now try out IoT Central without an Azure subscription. Only an email address is needed to set up an account

Self-service trial improvements

The administration section of IoT Central has gotten several usability improvements. Previously, users would need to reach out to a customer support specialist, but now can administer their trials themselves. A user can now extend their trials, convert to paid, and manage application settings from the administration page within the application.

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