Azure for Manufacturing

There are many changes that we have had to endure in the last few years with challenges that we have never faced in our lifetimes. The reality is, many of these changes have become the new normal if history has taught us anything. Short-term measures that have been taken in response to many global crises have led to changes that last decades, so while some things may return for us, nothing will be the same. We are part and parcel of the digital evolution that has kept us all informed, connected, and for some of us, thriving.

For manufacturers who understand the future of work, there is ample opportunity to find avenues of growth in the digital evolution. It will involve a strategy that brings together the integration of connected, flexible, collaborative, co-creative, and secure digital solutions across the industry, to make the many benefits of digital transformation work for you in the best way possible. To meet the challenges manufacturers continue to face in the chaos of the ongoing pandemic, Microsoft has the most reliable and useful resources and partnerships that are accessible under any budget for your cloud strategy.
Today, we wanted to focus on some of the industry-centric qualities that Azure brings to the cloud table.

Remote Manufacturing Operations

At a time when hybrid and remote work are ideal modes of operation both for administrative and managerial teams, Azure Industrial IoT is a secure solution that you can rely on. You can connect old and new industrial machinery to the cloud with open manufacturing solutions that support and enable interoperability. Managing equipment across the factory floor from a unified source can reduce downtime while tracking assets and performance across the board. Risk assessments are easier with equipment status and supplier connectivity across your distributed workforce.

Automated Quality Control

Get tools, services, and guidelines that will enable your teams to responsibly use AI and empower you to build machine learning solutions that can provide an early-stage intervention with real-time quality control. Monitoring defects and consistency across production and assembly lines with task-specific AI and built-in business logic that can be launched in days! Azure AI could very well be the biggest factor in time and resources management for your business while accelerating your production with high-quality output.

Inventory Planning and Optimization

Limitless analytics means you'll have access to a service that will provide a unified experience to manage, prepare, transform, and continuously prepare for any situation with your industry-specific database templates and insights. Azure Synapse Analytics gives you the freedom to securely use either serverless or dedicated options at scale. Either way, you can use Azure to combine interdepartmental data with external information to optimize inventory with the most accurate forecasting AI to reduce cost and increase customer engagement.

Global Compliance

Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider—over 90 compliance offerings worldwide. This is integral to the security and resiliency options for manufacturers across all sectors. This comprehensive portfolio of compliance means that applications can be more reliably scaled to worldwide users while preserving data residency.

There are more offerings from Azure that we have covered before, such as Azure IoT and Azure Virtual Desktop that can be tuned to your industry and optimize processes to maximize return. The bottom line is that partnerships and ecosystems are vital to manufacturing, while resilience and sustainability are ever more critical to manufacturing stakeholders. Azure can help you achieve these in your cloud journey, whether you're just testing out the cloud or you've already begun your digital transformation. We invite you to connect with our team or check out our Methodology to learn more about how we can help you connect and grow together.