Top 5 Reasons to Choose Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Last year, Microsoft continued their mission of tailoring Azure cloud offerings for industries. By aligning their Azure cloud services to industry-specific requirements, customers in each industry have cloud packages that will give them a place to begin integrating Azure into existing operations. They have announced the roll out of financial, manufacturing, nonprofit, healthcare, and retail. The latter, being the first cloud packages to be announced.

These cloud packages bring together common data models, workflows, programming interfaces, cross-cloud connections, and specific components to meet industry standards. They are designed to integrate Microsoft services like Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams collaboration, Power BI analytics with Power Platform tools that are meant to connect front and back end productivity tasks with management tools with improved integration and customizable solutions.

In this post, we'll focus on the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing package that adheres to standards and communities from the Open Manufacturing Platform, Digital Twins Consortium, and OPC Foundation. By pooling together multiple scenarios and cross-platform management tools into a cloud package, Microsoft is already ahead of the game. Most other clouds are specific to one-use scenarios or one process for a business. They are also not usually industry-aware and thus, integration might create conflict when certain standards or practices must be met.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is currently available for preview. It is designed to be as user-friendly as their 365 suite is to customers who want to enter the cloud arena. This entry-level package of cloud services offers customers a familiar but innovative suite of technology that will make digital transformation more affordable and scalable. They've put together the best outcome-driven solutions and capabilities from Microsoft and their innovative partners to accelerate time-to-value by connecting intelligent, integrated cloud, and edge capabilities of the Microsoft stack.

Here are the top five reasons to choose Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing:

Build More Agile Factories

Operations have become remote or hybrid everywhere, everything is simulated and automated to sustain availability and increase uptime. If you haven't integrated manufacturing technology to not only improve but acquire real-time insights for your production lines, there is no better way to explore these options for your business than in Microsoft Cloud.

Workforce Transformation

There is no industry that hasn't been heavily impacted by the pandemic when it comes to their workforce and how their teams must cope with how they communicate and managing safety across all levels, from administration to the factory floor. The frontline needs retooling and reskillings to cultivate technological adaptability so that operational visibility can improve growth and agility without disrupting production.

Customer Engagement

The journey to product-as-a service is accelerating, proactive service using AI virtual assistants or chatbots, and fully connected systems that provide a single view of customers across devices are the way forward. Industry-specific cloud packages like Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing can help your business optimize your use of technology to help understand or improve customer engagement through cloud-like elasticity across environments and reap the benefits of a fully-managed data service. This could be the competitive edge you have been looking for.

More Resilient Supply Chains

As the pandemic unfolded, there was a massive disruption in supply and demand. Securing factories and field assets is essential. For supply chains, an important aspect of this was an over-reliance on one source or one country as well as supply chains that were too lean. End-to-end visibility and connectedness are key to improving supply chain planning and optimization. Agility and profitability through intelligent planning and execution, demand sensing, and traceability are all ways you can use cloud technology to connect internal and external customer and market data to intelligently manage operations and inventory.

Innovation and Improved Services

Microsoft Cloud can empower manufacturers to design, simulate, and validate sustainable products and processes using digital twins with the affordable, scalable power of the cloud. Your business technology portfolio can span across cloud platforms, on-premises datacenters, and edge devices at the factories. Through these and many other modernization strategies, your business can make the most of its assets through an Azure hybrid cloud solution, connecting your data and processes across all these environments to improve your infrastructure. The result would be a unified view of operations across the organization that can accelerate innovation and improve services to deliver the right factory solutions for your success.