A manufacturers guide to transformation in the cloud

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1 A manufacturers guide to transformation in the cloud Unleashing growth and productivity Manufacturing sector Cloud transformation series

2 Manufacturers make large, strategic investments in people, equipment, facilities, and technology infrastructures so they can design, make, and distribute competitive products that meet customer needs. They rely on these investments to create value in a profitable manner and enable them to grow the business. That requires them to make the right decisions in planning and executing their strategy and approaching markets. Those decisions, in turn, need to be reliably based on realworld evidence. In a manufacturing business, there is no lack of data related to engineering, products, materials, equipment, customers, the supply chain, and other areas of the operation. How do you make sense of it without investing in data processing and analytical technologies? In the cloud, manufacturers can take advantage of the most powerful analytical tools available today. The cloud also supports their growth without the profit erosion that happens when you augment IT teams and infrastructures. As leading manufacturers are undergoing transformation into digital businesses and others are preparing transformation initiatives to become more relevant and competitive, the cloud is the single most important enabling element.

3 8 reasons why manufacturing and the cloud belong together Moving to the cloud can help you cut costs, but you run the risk of needlessly limiting the potential cloud benefits you can achieve by focusing on financials alone. We recommend considering all the following aspects of cloud computing in your planning. Economical You no longer purchase servers, software, or networking equipment as a capital expenditure to meet your computing requirements. Instead, you contract with a cloud provider for the capacity and resources you need, when you need them. A predictable operating expense is all you pay for. Competitive cloud providers offer a choice of payment scales, service levels, and contracts to fit your business. Immediate Since you don t need to set up a network or a data center, you can test and launch your highpriority workloads in the cloud quickly even within minutes.

4 Scalable When you win more customers, add new products, acquire a company, or extend your supply chain network, cloud resources scale up to support the increase in your business. They can scale back down when needs change. Smart Today s leading cloud services provide sophisticated analytical tools that you can use to plan engineering innovation and product capabilities, strategize how to meet customer needs, respond faster to competitive threats, and direct your growth. Flexible When it s time to change processes, roles, and other business conditions, forget about organizational gravity. In the cloud, you can make such adjustments immediately. Fast growth of the cloud By 2020, the market size of the global public cloud is expected to grow near $160 billion, doubling its value over Compared to a 5 percent annual increase in overall enterprise IT spending, investments in cloud computing infrastructures are on track to grow 30 percent per year between 2013 and 2018.

5 Encompasses the IoT The cloud is the most effective, economical, lowrisk, and scalable way to harvest and analyze the data from sensors connected to the internet of things (IoT) on industrial assets and products in your own or your customers facilities. Enables mobility Without the cloud, mobility is unthinkable. If you want to give mobile employees on the shop floor, in the warehouse, or in the field access to applications and data, the cloud makes this possible, no matter how many users are involved or which devices they prefer. Reliable and secure To keep their customers intellectual property, applications, and data safe and available without interruption, cloud providers make large investments and develop cutting-edge technologies that directly benefit you. That includes redundant data centers that can take over from each other if one of them fails, dedicated connections, and world-class data protection technologies. Actionable intelligence generated through cloud resources positions you for a stronger competitive advantage and brings greater precision to your forecasting and planning.

6 What manufacturers can accomplish in the cloud How does moving to the cloud help manufacturers achieve their goals for growth, innovation, and competitiveness, and what are some of the main outcomes of transitioning to the cloud that you might want to anticipate and plan for? The cloud realizes the potential of mobility to enable productive work with access to information and applications, anywhere and anytime. Predictive maintenance ensures the uptime, productivity, and performance of industrial assets For many manufacturers, evolving maintenance from condition-based to predictive, enabled by data insight from the IoT, is an important use case for cloud technologies. Your analysis of the data coming from IoT-connected sensors on equipment and machinery in your own production facility or the machine products you place on customer sites makes it possible to anticipate and avoid breakdowns, compromised performance levels, and poor productivity caused by malfunctions of the equipment. You can assess how well industrial assets work in real time and in consideration of the environment where they run. That intelligence enables you to keep machinery and equipment operating without outages and at top performance, improving the business outcomes from investments in industrial assets and products. Machine learning enables complete, contextual intelligence to help you meet company objectives In manufacturing, the ability to compete as a viable, relevant business depends largely on your ability to understand and control your machines. Machine learning offers an avenue to intelligence that overcomes the practical and conceptual boundaries of individuals, who are easily sidetracked by their selective awareness of events and trends. Instead of acquiring the tools and building your own intelligence systems, you can take advantage of the resources available in the cloud today. When you connect your industrial assets or the complex products your customers use to the IoT, storing and processing the data in the cloud, they become available to cloud intelligence that can combine with data from your entire operation. At that point, your insight is not limited to the performance of machinery and equipment. You can surround it with contextual information about materials planning, operator training, or the supply chain. If you want to cast an even wider net, you can also assess customer behaviors, market trends, and competitive threats, and correlate those findings with your engineering and production management.

7 Collaborative innovation opens additional revenue streams and increases team efficiency Predictive maintenance is a great achievement that your internal and external customers will appreciate. No need to stop there. Cloudenabled, intelligence-driven collaboration with your customers can help you understand them much better, strengthen the relationships with them, and maintain your share of their attention and spending. It can also result in product enhancements that you might eventually launch to your entire market. Within your organization, you can rely on the performance and scalability of cloud resources to enable engineering and design collaboration among contributors anywhere. They can use cloud-based virtual reality modeling to work together on new products, prototypes, and functionalities. You save the expense and disruption of business travel by your skilled innovators, and you enable them to collaborate always, not just on special occasions. ecommerce increases your bottom line and customer loyalty When customers like your company and its products, you don t want to send them elsewhere to purchase spare parts or supplies. That is a risk to the customer experience and your competitive standing. At the same time, you want to keep your cost-of-sales low. With modern ecommerce tools, you or your cloud service provider can quickly and costeffectively create, test, and launch an online shop where customers can do business on their own as they order parts and supplies, check on fulfillment and shipping status, and update their accounts. If you want to test and launch such new services as warranty maintenance or transfer and installation of your industrial products, doing so in the cloud and evaluating the outcomes with cloud-based analytics is a low-risk, inexpensive way to reach all potential customers and optimize your offerings for best results. Service provider expertise lets you make more strategic use of your own IT department If your IT department is fully occupied with the day-to-day activities of keeping applications, networks, and infrastructures running and secure, you can move most of these routines to the cloud and let your service provider handle them. Instead, you can use your in-house IT resources to perform custom development and other high-value tasks that help you move forward. Working with a strong cloud service provider, your IT team can efficiently learn the skills of development, provisioning, resource management, and security in the cloud, especially if you maintain a hybrid environment that requires integrations between on-premise and cloud computing. You can draw on your service provider s specializations, for instance, to enable advanced intelligence, collect and process large masses of data, or take the complexity out of working in the IoT. Your ability to compete and remain a viable, relevant business depends largely on your ability to understand and control your machines. Cloud-enabled machine learning makes that possible.

8 Worldwide resources and networks let you grow at your own pace Leading cloud providers maintain advanced cloud infrastructures in global networks of data centers. They will have a data center close to your headquarters, and, when your company reaches across the globe, they can support you wherever you go. That means you can grow in the cloud at your preferred pace. If you want to take a measured, low-risk approach, you could move just one workload into the cloud product engineering, for example to start with, and test the new infrastructure s performance, reliability, and analytical capabilities. You continue your cloud migration at the right time. When you re ready to increase the momentum, you can take advantage of cloud-based ERP and CRM resources with multi-language and multi-currency features to reach customers and markets anywhere. If you re operating production and distribution facilities in several countries and regions, the cloud offers an efficient way to make corporate systems and information available to them and connect their processes to the entire organization. Supply-chain management becomes more controlled Do you sometimes wish you would not have to be tolerant of compromise when it comes to managing your supply chain? When you take to the cloud, it becomes easier to run your business on your terms. Within the cloud s global reach, you can conduct business with suppliers and trading partners anywhere, and manage communications, contracts, deliveries, quality control, and vendor evaluations in the cloud. Many times, that may mean you can source materials at a better price and a more convenient delivery schedule than you could with more limited means. In consequence, you can offer your customers better terms, maintain healthier margins, and schedule production to make better use of your industrial assets and facilities. From concept to packaging, the cloud redefines new product development with more effective collaboration internally and throughout the supply chain.

9 Transform your manufacturing business in the cloud Starting now, you can act on the cloud opportunities that offer the highest benefits. Together, Columbus technology and expertise, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the analytics resources available on the Microsoft Azure cloud make lasting, controlled manufacturing growth in the cloud practical, fast, and affordable. Before, during, and following your move to the cloud, we help you optimize processes, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs. We offer proven, practical solutions and approaches within an affordable subscription model that eliminates distractions and lets you focus on results. To take the next step e-book: How to move to the cloud When manufacturing takes to the cloud These are some common cloud usage scenarios and outcomes we hear from manufacturing companies: Predictive maintenance and effective asset management both internally and for customers Collaborative, IoT-driven innovation and product development in engagements with customers and company resources Increased agility to respond to changes in customer requirements, the availability of parts and materials, and competitive trends More reliable and meaningful strategic planning and decision-making that involves all stakeholders Shorter innovation and engineering cycles because of real-time product feedback and analytics, enabling manufacturers to launch new and updated products faster Productive, reliable mobility for workers on the shop floor, maintenance teams, and field service technicians on customer sites Global, streamlined and secure qualification, negotiation, and transactions with suppliers and resellers Reduced costs of developing, testing, and producing new products and capabilities

10 At Columbus, we help our customers digitally transform their businesses and improve the value realization of their business application investments. We mitigate the inherent risks associated with implementing, upgrading and replacing legacy ERP systems. We lead our customers with best-practice consulting services we have refined over thousands of engagements. We take care of our customers and aspire to keep them for life. To learn more about how Columbus can help you get the most out of your Microsoft solution, contact your local Columbus office.