Unlocking the Full Potential of Manufacturing: Embracing the Power of Cloud

When it comes to implementing new technologies, the manufacturing sector is faced with unique challenges that are often difficult to overcome. Cloud technology, for example, offers clear advantages to the sector, but organizations often question how they can successfully implement this technology while avoiding the potential pitfalls in front of them.

What challenges are organizations facing?

When it comes to modernizing their existing technology, organizations in the manufacturing sector face three main business challenges that are unique to their sector.

Firstly, unlike other sectors, there is a high percentage of blue-collar employees in the manufacturing sector. From their positions on the shop floor and in warehouse, these employees tend to perceive change differently to white-collar employees. Practically speaking, this means that the manufacturing sector needs to adopt different change management processes that focus more on health, safety, and productivity to achieve a successful outcome.

Secondly, the cost of the goods produced by the manufacturing sector is under extreme pressure. This has a knock-on effect, putting pressure on their supply chain for direct and indirect sources of raw materials, as well as their procurement planning including their distribution and inventory strategies. Any technology modernization strategy needs to take this into consideration.

Lastly, as a result of organizations growing inorganically by merging with or acquiring rivals, they frequently have a large variety of legacy applications and systems, often running in silos at different local locations and rarely fully supported. However, these legacy applications remain popular on the shop floor, making it difficult for management to modernize by implementing a new, standard way of working supported by new IT infrastructure that would promote economies of scale across the organization and introduce the benefits of standardization and best practices.

What cloud offers organizations

While these challenges make it difficult to migrate to the cloud, manufacturing organizations are increasingly becoming more open to the opportunities cloud offers thanks to the advances in cloud technology over the past few years.

Latency, in particular, is an important consideration. Legacy applications running on local servers are very sensitive to lags in latency due to manufacturing plants operating under continuous production and requiring real-time integration with all connected applications. The advances in cloud have reduced latency to ultra-low levels, delivering the performance organizations require to ensure that their investment is optimized.

Cloud can also be used as a trigger for implementing other change management programs and creating a vision of the future. As part of the move to cloud, management needs to prepare a business case, which often highlights the potential benefits of cloud as well as suggest other ways to modernize the organization’s IT infrastructure to help give a competitive advantage in the market.

Manufacturing organizations can also use the flexible nature and elasticity of cloud technology to scale based on real-time demand and only pay for the resources that are being used. This enables organizations to have a closer overview of their technology costs and avoid large upfront investments in on-premises infrastructure or data centers, without compromising on security.

What’s next for cloud?

As cloud technology becomes more advanced, organizations are finding new ways to utilize cloud to benefit their operations. But what does the future hold for cloud? Here are some of the trends around cloud technology for the manufacturing sector.

Instead of private clouds, organizations are likely to turn increasingly to a hybrid or multi-cloud approach that incorporates both private and public clouds in different locations such as hyper scale data centers. Additionally, this approach can include edge computing to further reduce latency for sensitive real-time solutions.

The data generated by the different applications on the cloud can be analyzed using analytics to generate new insights into best practices, potential improvements, and opportunities for the future as well as helping to support managementdecision making.

Cloud technologies enable the increasing use of digital twins to support the rise of smart manufacturing. As this becomes more common, it will help organizations to identify potential issues before they occur to optimize production output while lowering unit costs.

Another trend is the rise of cloud ecosystems that incorporate different hyper-scalers that provide industry-specific solutions as and when required, optimizing the expertise the organization has access to while minimizing costs.

Looking to the future with cloud

Cloud technology offers organizations many benefits, from ultra-low latency delivery of services to simplifying their IT infrastructure. However, successful implementation relies on detailed analysis of the current situation and careful planning of the migration and rollout.

Taking these first or next steps can be challenging. The experienced experts from Cognizant can help you with a clear methodology and framework for introducing, adopting, managing, and using cloud based on your unique situation.

Is your organization ready to fully benefit from cloud?