Your manufacturing business may be humming along and doing quite well. Even so, you’ll need to make a decision on how your business will respond to the changes taking place in manufacturing now: shop floor (industrial) automation, additive manufacturing, lot sizes of one, cloud computing, analytics, mobility, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
If you choose to do nothing, you could risk losing your competitive edge.
These shifts in the industry will require your business to move faster—while at the same time maintain quality and provide more personalization. More manufacturing companies are looking at ways to accomplish this right now, and they’re looking to advanced technologies for the answer.
Why should you care about connected manufacturing?
Connected manufacturing is a business strategy that leverages cloud computing to harness operational and business data for greater visibility, efficiency, control, and customer satisfaction. Connecting your people, processes, and supply chains gives you end-to-end visibility and control.
You know exactly what’s happening on your shop floor because activity is recorded and collected in real time, and is accessible—not just by you or your employees but also to your customers and suppliers. You get complete visibility into historical data you can use to create a demand and supply plan to share with sales, marketing, and operations. They can adjust the plan as needed. You can take that plan and translate it into your materials requirements and scheduling that would in turn drive production. Then you can use manufacturing visual and intelligent analytics to make more-informed decisions and adapt as demand shifts.
These are key differentiators that enable you to deliver on customer demand and compete in dynamic marketplaces.
Waiting will only put your business further behind.
The longer you wait, the farther behind your business will be in the game. The more you learn about connected manufacturing, the more you’ll be convinced that it’s a key strategy that will put your business in a better position to adapt to shifts in the manufacturing industry.
Find out more by downloading the infographic: Why Connected Manufacturing?
