Protektor
How Protektor used Trusted Twin to introduce a new Shoe as a Service offering
Protektor is a leading Polish manufacturer of shoes that specializes in the production and distribution of safety, work, and military footwear. They currently serve B2B clients across 30 markets in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.
Building our Shoe as a Service offering with Trusted Twin has the potential to go through Digital Transformation quickly, and at a fraction of the cost needed for developing the tech infrastructure in-house. The program is still in the testing phase, but with Trusted Twin as a partner the implementation goes smoothly, allowing us to focus on what we’re good at – shoe manufacturing.
Protektor explores an opportunity to create an entirely new service to go beyond footwear manufacturing. They opted for a Shoe as a Service to take the burden off their clients, who would no longer need to manage footwear usage internally, as well as to better price their products.
To make it happen, their tech partner decided to use Trusted Twin, a data-sharing platform, which allows access to real-time shoe usage data. Trusted Twin allows Protektor to benefit from Digital Transformation without investing in IT infrastructure and building new IT-related competencies. The project is still in the testing phase.
Challenge
Going through Digital Transformation without becoming an IT tech company
As Protektor’s clients experience high employee rotation, managing footwear is time-consuming, costly, and requires a lot of paperwork. Protektor seeks to address this challenge by launching their novel Shoe as a Service offer. For Protektor, the goal is to:
- go through the process of Digital Transformation painlessly, so that they can maintain focus on their core, shoe manufacturing services
- gather shoe usage data to build irrefutable digital documentation for each pair of footwear.
All of the above have to be achieved without the need of building and maintaining the IT infrastructure internally.
Solution
Protektor’s tech partner is testing the Trusted Twin platform to gather data in the form of digital twins of shoes. RFID tags sawn into footwear allows the creation of a verifiable, irrefutable linkage between the physical item and its digital counterpart.
Protektor will be able to:
- offer Shoe as a Service to customers, thanks to the ability to maintain digital footwear documentation for each pair, stored on digital twins
- relieve their clients off of paperwork, with Protektor providing shoe management through collecting real-time footwear data
- better price their products by analyzing the end user’s daily footwear usage.
Choosing Trusted Twin lets Protektor offer a service based on cloud infrastructure without the need of becoming an IT company.
Highlights
- Reduced cost and risk of implementing the new service
- Access to best-in-class integrations and documentation
- Cost of IT infrastructure aligned with the revenue generated from the new service
- Ability to focus on shoe manufacturing without the need to build new technical competencies
- All non-functional issues related to service availability, scalability, and security taken care of by Trusted Twin.
Expected results
Thanks to Trusted Twin, Protektor will be able to develop the idea to build their subscription-based Shoes as a Service module, quickly and at low risk.
They expect to:
- decrease software development costs significantly
- reduce the implementation time of digital twin infrastructure to less than a year
- minimize the project risk by implementing a scalable solution, which allows them to maintain digital twins for the first pairs of shoes free of charge.
The bottom line
By introducing the shoe-as-a-service platform, Protektor might become the pioneer in the modern specialist footwear industry.
Running Shoe as a Service maintained by Trusted Twin will allow the company to build a comprehensive source of product knowledge, including insights regarding product usage. As a result, Protektor will be able to improve the footwear’s functionality and build long-term relationships with clients, thus entirely extending and transforming their traditional revenue generation model.
Protektor manufactures approximately 1,000,000 pairs of shoes annually. The percentage of their assortment eligible for the new service remains confidential.