Leading Ventilation Controls Manufacturer Uses Zipit to Scale Its Connected Service Offering

The Challenge

The customer needed cellular connectivity to support remote temperature readings, remote fan controls, remote monitoring, and other capabilities across barns and greenhouses. Although they were originally working with another connectivity provider, that vendor could not support the customer’s goal of offering connectivity directly to its own customers as part of its remote monitoring and control solution.

The customer also faced several operational constraints with its previous approach:

• It lacked a practical way to oversee and control SIM activations across multiple carriers.
  
  
• Managing different carrier options increased operational complexity and SKU management challenges.
  
  
• Billing customers for cellular service required substantial manual effort.
  
  
• Supporting customer activation and subscription processes pulled time and resources away from the customer's core business of developing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling its products.
  
  
• The existing model made it harder to scale connected deployments across North America and support future international expansion.

The Solution

The customer chose to partner with Zipit because Zipit addressed both the connectivity and commercial operational challenges behind its connected offering.

Key decision factors included:

• Multi-carrier SIM capability for Canada and the United States, helping to reduce operational complexity and streamline the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) that would need to be managed.
  
  
• A path to more scalable geographic expansion across North America, with future support for broader international growth.
  
  
• White-label downstream monetization and billing capabilities, enabling the customer to offer and automate cellular subscriptions under its own brand.
  
  
• Greater visibility and control over connectivity operations, including SIM management and cellular policy controls.
  
  
• A collaborative customer support and onboarding experience that helped tailor subscription offerings and data usage control policies to the customers' products, and business requirements.

The Zipit team worked closely with the customer to define a commercial and operational setup tailored to its business, including:

• Defining monthly and annual subscription options
  
  
• Establishing rules for transparently and automatically transitioning customers from a first-year-free trial to a paid monthly plan
  
  
• Setting up one-time cellular data add-on (top-up) options
  
  
• Configuring customer notifications to match the manufacturer's desired data-usage thresholds
  
  
• Defining automatic SIM deactivation logic after threshold overages as a cost-control measure

Zipit also provided the ability to apply connectivity and usage policies at different levels, including both the end customer account level and the individual subscription plan level, giving the manufacturer more flexibility and control over how services were delivered and managed.

The Results

With Zipit, the customer gained a more scalable foundation for delivering connected services to its end-users.

Key outcomes included:

• A simpler way to offer connected services as part of the customer's product experience
  
  
• Reduced operational complexity through multi-carrier SIM support and fewer SKUs to manage
  
  
• Less manual work associated with billing, payment collection, and subscriber administration
  
  
• Improved ability to support customer activation and service delivery without diverting focus from core business functions
  
  
• More control over SIM behavior, usage thresholds, and account-level or plan-level cellular policies
  
  
• A stronger operational model for expanding connected device deployments across North America and supporting future growth into new geographies