World is consistently changing in terms of trends, demands, or needs. Companies, countries, and consumers are in a constant flux. Apart from this existing storm, manufacturers have to deal with supply chain issues, rising costs, and skills gaps. Their survival and growth totally depends on the ability to adapt quickly to unforeseen circumstances and sudden changes.
Manufacturers are availing ways of futuristic technology and innovation for building agile and smart factories which are sustainable, resilient, and have profitable operations.
New challenges emerge with connected devices and products like cybersecurity, increased expectations of purchased solutions to be composable and, extensible, and support low code or no code apart from new skills gaps in operational technology (OT) integration & application development, and Internet of Things (IoT).There are various benefits of Azure Cloud for Manufacturing for accelerating the development of factory applications.
Accelerate Journey towards Smart Factories
91 percent of manufacturers have already adopted IoT pointing to increase operational efficiency as the top benefit. Majority of manufacturers are moving to implement smart-factory strategies and continuing their move into the future.
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is one of the most critical performance indicators for measuring the asset productivity, operational efficiency, and the overall success of their smart factory strategy.
Around 76 percent of manufacturing assets are now connected, and many manufacturers are moving applications and workloads from on-premises infrastructure to public or private cloud platformswhile planning to increase investments in smart connected IoT products. They hope to build more intelligent factory applications and reduce costs.
Some manufacturers still face hurdles, even after adopting the smart and connected devices. Most challenging constraints for the smart factory strategies are:
- Developing new applications
- Securing OT applications
- Interfacing with enterprise applications or manufacturing execution systems
- Managing different data formats and protocols
Aggravated by skills gaps:
- Advanced data analysis
- IT cybersecurity
- Cloud OT system coding
- Cloud IT system coding
These skills gaps are addressed by:
- Training
- Buying more complete digital offerings
- Additional reliance on existing partners
Foundation of smart factory strategies is operational visibility, giving the performance insights across multiple lines, factories, and production equipment, while acting as the starting point for enhancing factory, sharing best practices, and multi-factory collaboration between engineering experts, frontline workers, and the partner ecosystem that keep their factories running.
Learn how Azure Cloud for Manufacturing accelerates the path to operational visibility, empowering supervisors, frontline workers, and engineers to collaborate to analyze problems and take action in real-time with real results, and new low code and no code applications.
As supply chain issues, rising costs, and other challenges continue to mount, manufacturers are turning to intelligent cloud solutions and technology to build more agile, smarter factories. To future-proof your manufacturing organization, it’s imperative to find new ways to make data-driven decisions through industrial IoT, cloud, AI, and mixed reality solutions. To learn more visit Azure Cloud for Manufacturing.
