FLIQ Platform – what is it and how can it benefit your company’s productivity?

To answer the question in the headline, let’s first start with the basics: what is a software platform in general?

FLIQ Platform – what is it and how can it benefit your company’s productivity

“A platform is a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you to grow your business. A platform enables growth through connection: its value comes not only from its own features, but from its ability to connect external tools, teams, data, and processes.

With a platform as the foundation of your business ecosystem, you don’t have to limit yourself to one suite of products — you can add and subtract new applications and tools as your business grows and changes, without having to start from scratch again or deal with messy migrations.”

So, what exactly is the difference between a platform and a product?

Before you think about making any investments, you should think about the complete architecture and set of tools you’ll use to power your business. What is needed now, and how do I ensure that I meet all future needs that I don’t even know about yet? Finding tools that can accomplish all your distinct needs can be challenging but finding tools that can also communicate and talk with each other can be downright overwhelming.

On a high-level, you have two options:

  1. Buy an all-in-one solution that supports most of your different needs you have today and can get you performance wise to 50-70% of the needed level.
  2.  A platform aka a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you grow your business. As quoted in the beginning of this blog, a platform enables growth through connection: its value comes not only from its own features, but from its ability to connect external tools, teams, data, and processes.

 

In other words: a product suite is something fixed that aims to sort out most of the challenges you can distinguish right now. It’s a tool from one company that comes in one package. Everything within that package is designed to work together, but it can be challenging to add new tools that didn’t originally come with it. A platform is something that connects many software tools under one umbrella with all your tools from different providers to help you create an ecosystem that not only solves your most challenging problems but adapts to future unknown needs as well. Even though a product suite seems like a simple and easy option, it does come with some trade-offs:

 

A platform provides foundation to stack specialized products together

“Almost every product today has APIs that let it exchange data with other applications. A platform, however, plays a more active role in coordinating how multiple products work together. You can picture a platform as a hub, with spokes connecting other products to its center. The hub binds those disparate products together and orchestrates them in a common mission. A platform creates a stable center of gravity for your tech stack.”

In other words, a platform is smart: it doesn’t try to do everything itself, but instead provides a foundation on which many other more specialized products can be stacked. To an untrained eye, a platform may initially appear to be suite-like, as they both provide a wide collection of features out of the box. Typically, a platform has one primary purpose, something that can serve as a foundational service or master data repository that other software and services can leverage. Unlike a closed suite, a platform is inherently open, making it available for partnerships with companies that may not even exist yet.

Here are some questions to think about when choosing a platform for your company:

  1. How well does the “core” feature of the platform serve your needs?
  2. How wide and deep can you go in building your own customized platform? Are you able to connect processes (IT/OT), machinery and equipment (IoT), and people into one main data and information flow?
  3. How easy is it for you to work with their APIs to fully access your data and build your own custom enhancements? How stable are those APIs?

 

Why is FLIQ Platform the best platform on the market?

Fliq Platform provides the best of two worlds: complete products and features needed for building world class smart manufacturing processes with short ROI and fast ramp-up, and the no lock in -philosophy, which makes it easily possible to integrate third parties and collect information from different databases or develop completely new solutions on the platform through open interfaces. The platform already supports over 250 different data transmission protocols and complies also to changes and challenges in the future.

FLIQ Platform combines the most developed data visualization on the market, easy-to-use tools to make everyday operations more efficient, artificial intelligence, and top-quality wireless IoT solutions. Our platform has received credit for its usability, as it can solve just the challenges that create the most common bottlenecks and losses in factories. We combine all efficient production systems under the same platform, removing silos.

 

  1. TRANSPARENCY INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY
    The main benefits are born from platform architecture: interfaces and communication. Making the production chain more transparent by improving data sharing and communication are crucial elements in increasing productivity: the factory’s productivity increases when all data can be centrally used by all interest groups. Real-time data management also helps the factory move from reactive to proactive operations. We believe in transparency also in pricing, which is why our pricing is clear and open with no surprises or strings attached.
  2. NO LOCK IN -IDEOLOGY
    Thanks to its microservice architecture, the platform is scalable and adapts to customers’ different needs in a flexible way. The platform is built on a no lock in -ideology, which makes it easily possible to integrate third parties or develop completely new solutions on the platform through open interfaces. The platform supports over 250 different data transmission protocols and complies to changes and challenges in the future as well.
  3. FAST AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT
    With FLIQ Platform, you don’t need to begin IT projects that last for years – it’s ready to use right away for the customer. Implementing FLIQ Platform can be done in an agile way step by step alongside normal work without interruptions or long introduction training periods. The implementation is done according to modern standards mostly remotely, cost-efficiently, and quickly. Implementation can be done even in just days.

 

Interested to know more about FLIQ Platform? Click here: Fliq Platform

Sources:

What Is a Software Platform & How Is It Different From a Product?
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/software-platform Written by Emilie Nøss Wangen