Is Cloud Computing Reforming The Manufacturing Industry?

The manufacturing industry has been a slow adopter of new technology, and rightfully due to raised security concerns. If an organization is planning to automate its industrial process, they also need to assure that the new technology is secure enough and capable of effectively managing the workload. Cloud computing has proven its worth and it's been used majorly as a mainstream technology in different business domain. Not long did it take for the manufacturing companies to understand the core value of integrating cloud with the industrial operations and now the sector is rapidly adopting cloud technology to improve business efficiency. Let's discuss this in detail.

Manufacturing industry and cloud

Manufacturers are burdened with the demand to become more agile, improve accuracy, and to invest on its internal intelligence and knowledge. As according to researches, many manufacturing industries managed most of its operations manually which was rather difficult and inefficient. They kept a record of elements manufactured and discarded, issues with the machinery, and so on and ultimately, all of this data was maintained in an excel spreadsheet. This information was further used daily to create reports for management and for additional other purposes.

Now with the integration of technology and industrial components, manufacturers are able to obtain data directly from the machines that cut down the layers of processes involved the other way. Machines are merged with the cloud applications and it is helping manufacturers to host software and keep track of data generated, remotely. Initially, cloud was used for only used for accessing and sharing data, but as the technology evolved, it enabled real-time connectivity among materials, people and machines.

Furthermore, cloud solutions assisted these organizations in apply their own inherited ideas into every sales condition. Although on-premise systems were capable of doing this, it lacked the agility and efficiency that of cloud solutions. Besides, cloud-based systems were easier to manage and maintain, customize and potentially surge adoption rates across resellers. Here are certain ways manufacturers have applied cloud-based strategies in their business.

• Managing direct and indirect sales has become a commonplace as most manufacturers have integrated cloud applications to keep a systematic records of sales result. What's more is that the application provides status of the profit and loss statement of each deal.

• For convenient planning and execution of marketing campaigns, cloud-based marketing applications are used that effectively and accurately tracks campaign results. As marketing is currently playing a crucial role in the manufacturing industry, manufacturers want to keep a keen track of everything that is happening under this category and as a result, automation is delivering exceptional results.

• Manufacturers have initiated automation and integration of customer support, service, order status queries to content management and distributed order management platforms, resulting in cost and time efficiency.

These are just few cloud approaches that manufacturing industries have applied to their system. Nevertheless, the conclusion here is that automation is indeed helping manufacturers to cut down time consuming tasks and focus more on their main business.