How can the Cloud deliver greater efficiency, reduce cost & waste, and be used most effectively for marketing and to motivate workforces?
The economic and business disruption caused globally by successive lockdowns and the impact of the pandemic has driven the manufacturing industry even faster than anticipated towards digital technologies that have given them the agility that has been necessary to survive.
The challenge – and opportunity – now is to not only continue that transformation but to do it at scale. The acceleration towards the adoption of digital in the manufacturing sector – whether to facilitate innovation in manufacturing, to connect people and business processes, to make factories safer and more efficient, or to improve and develop more intelligent supply chains – shows no sign of slowing. And now, the growth in industry-specific cloud ecosystems, like the recently announced Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, is one of the emerging developments to support that digital transformation.
It is unlikely that we will return significantly to previous ways of working if the technology to make manufacturing more efficient is so widely available and in use. For this reason, as much as others, manufacturers and those that support them need to be ahead of the curve when it comes to leveraging what the Cloud has to offer. But how should manufacturers be using the Cloud to make their processes and their factories more intelligent? How can these new ecosystems be used to deliver greater efficiency and reduce cost and waste, and most importantly, how can digital be most effectively used for marketing and to motivate and empower workforces?
The short answer is ‘in a number of ways’. Cloud technology can be used to combine product planning with supply chain information to ensure production can move seamlessly from concept to prototype to finished product to dispatch far more efficiently than previously. As market needs change during the course of a year, cloud-based applications can be also used to determine when production needs to be ramped up or scaled back. Similarly, the Cloud can be used to match production with stock availability, sales data and orders received to achieve a more efficient production cycle. This, in turn, will also help reduce the time between receipt of orders and delivery of goods. And effective supply chain management via the Cloud will ensure components are available to match production schedules.
But more than this, manufacturers, like businesses in multiple other sectors, are experiencing the benefits of the Cloud in terms of their marketing outreach and sales management. This enhances the client or customer experience, utilizing data and insights on the customer drawn from technology to manage the sales process more efficiently, more effectively target new and repeat customers, while simultaneously improving internal efficiency and productivity.
