The phrase “smart mobility” encompasses many elements, from methods of transportation to secure vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to real-time traffic monitoring and more. Every smart mobility use case has a distinct goal, specific requirements, and unique flows. Each portion of the smart mobility ecosystem must work together seamlessly. Otherwise, the entire system could be impractical, and potentially even dangerous.
That’s why CIRRUS by Panasonic’s first focus isn’t on individual features. Instead, we start with the bigger picture, creating a viable smart mobility ecosystem, and then building the essential features within that system. Our ethos helps us design products that not only serve our customers’ use cases, but also provide them with a seamless, cohesive experience.
When customers come to us, they usually come with a problem that needs to be solved. These are their use cases – their tasks, goals, operating functions, and needs. Examples of these use cases could be “monitor V2X system uptime” or “improve travel time for emergency vehicles” or “measure system benefits to justify ROI.” These are the actions our customers need from CIRRUS.
Customers know best what their pain points are, which is why they’re coming to us for solutions. They’re not focusing on overall products or solutions, and certainly not on features, though they will ultimately be served by both.
Products are things that do things. Helpful definition, right? Ok, not so much. There are a lot of philosophical definitions, but in CIRRUS’s world, “products” are collections of functions that can be rationally grouped together. For example, our current connected intersection manager is a product.
Figure 1: CIRRUS by Panasonic products fit into a family of smart mobility solutions.
Features, of course, are elements of a product. It might be an easy-to-use dashboard, or it might be the help documentation, or the hardware offline alerts. They’re all compositional elements that make a solution work and provide specific areas of functionality from the user perspective.
Features are at the heart of CIRRUS because they allow us to provide our customers with significant value. In turn, customer trust and return business allows us to improve traffic and save lives by investing into our continuous engineering improvements.
Then there are services. Deployment planning, for example, is not a product, but a service. We can sell units of it, but it’s really time from an expert. We cannot make a million copies of “deployment planning” because each plan would require a study of the infrastructure, review of needs, a unique schedule, and more. That’s fine, and we can and do sell both, but deployment planning is another piece of the big picture thinking we do at CIRRUS.
So, what value does CIRRUS really bring to you? What we provide are solutions to use cases. Let’s look at building a house as an example. If a customer needs to find a way to hold their house (i.e. their V2X system) together, they’re usually thinking about the specific materials and tools that get them there. For example, this could be a use case for a product comprised of features like a shaped metal piece and comfortable wood handle – a hammer.
But they may not be thinking ahead to when they want to hold lots of building beams together or add a roof. Maybe then they’ll need an automated hammer (like a nail gun). But to operate a nail gun they’ll also need specialized nails, a compressed air supply, or electrical power, and so on. You get the point. The customer only thinks of the use case, but CIRRUS thinks of the entire smart mobility ecosystem.
CIRRUS is like a kit with a nail gun, compressor, air hose, box of nails, and an expert who can help you position them all for your building project. To complete the analogy, the value we provide is getting the house built efficiently, knowing that with expert guidance, the house isn’t going to fall apart.
However, what is key to CIRRUS is remembering the big picture, like the overarching use case smart mobility traffic operations and public safety. Of course, our customers care about air quality, CIPT performance, time saved managing RSUs remotely, improved response time for emergency vehicles, safer intersections, and more. But ultimately, our customers know that we’re providing solutions that consider all the features they need to solve their problems and create safer roadways using smart mobility.
CIRRUS is committed to providing long term, comprehensive smart mobility solutions to our customers, starting with the big picture and working down to the use-case details.