Pitney Bowes Embraces the Industrial Internet

by Roger Pilc, Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer

Companies across industries are looking to the Internet of Things to transform their businesses by integrating and harnessing physical and digital technologies. Retailers, for example, have high profile success as they blend their physical stores with online shopping, ecommerce and better shipping experiences. 

When it comes to industrial businesses, the opportunity exists to leverage machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things technologies and extract and analyze data from industrial machines to drive better business outcomes. The business benefits include lower cost of operations, greater productivity and output, and higher service levels. 

At Pitney Bowes, we are leveraging a combination of physical and digital technologies to transform our businesses, which include mailing and shipping, global ecommerce, and location intelligence.

We announced a strategic alliance with GE to transform our enterprise mailing business with GE Predix, the software platform for the Industrial Internet.

Our 95 years of mailing experience is a resource for Fortune 500 companies as they send invoices, statements and direct mail to their customers who seem allergic to turning off paper delivery. Only 18% of consumers have opted to have their financial statements sent to their homes digitally, the rest prefer - insist upon - paper mail.

That said, the mailing industry is ready for change. In April, at the National Postal Forum, USPS Postmaster General Megan Brennan said, “The convergence of mail and digital experiences is a way of adding strength to strength. The potential is enormous for this industry, because it will create a daily bridge from your mailed content to your digital ecosystem.”

With GE Predix, we will be adding an Industrial Internet-grade layer of analytics and business solutions to our production mail business. This will improve machine, operator, and mail factory productivity, reduce downtime, increase service levels, reduce costs of operations, and optimize capacity management and job scheduling across client assets. Our clients are quite enthusiastic to be able to save on their bottom line and grow their top lines with this new level of analytics, which will help them optimize operations.  

The GE Predix platform is specifically designed for the Industrial Internet, which means that its software solutions, data, analytics, processing speeds, and scale are particularly suited to solve global, industrial-size business challenges. GE is revolutionizing their avionics and wind energy businesses with the Industrial Internet. Our development work together to date shows great promise as we combine physical and digital technologies to produce fantastic business outcomes for Pitney Bowes and our clients.

If the mail industry is ready for the Internet of Things, imagine how you can transform your business by blending physical and digital worlds.