It’s a grim reality. Even today, in the age of digital transformation, manufacturers are still stuck in legacy, on-premise isolated ERP systems. However, cloud adoption is on the rise as more and more factories discover the power of modern systems designed to help with their manufacturing inventory management, shop floor control, order management, traceability, and production planning.
In capturing the total business value, cloud-based manufacturing software not just reduces cost or enhance flexibility but can bring in new digital and intelligent competencies as well. From increasing end-to-end business efficiencies to optimizing operations, manufacturers are leveraging cloud technology’s full potential today. As a result, they reinvent their value propositions by developing, delivering, selling, and servicing their products in the new light of technology transformation.
Let’s take a look at five significant functionalities a cloud manufacturing system can deliver.
Manufacturing operations management (MOM)
Increased product innovation and market demand volatility call for more dynamism, flexibility and connectedness from modern manufacturing operations management (MOM). Historically, MOM applications have long been restricted to on-premise deployment broadly due to security and supply chain concerns. A cloud-based software technology provider can address these concerns quickly and easily because of robust network lines and hybrid architecture platforms. In addition, it can also offer more capabilities through cloud-based operations. As a result, despite the Covid induced worldwide slowdown of 2019-20, the MOM market is estimated to reach USD 23.25 Billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.60%.
Sales and marketing
Cloud-based applications empower manufacturers to take advantage of new growth opportunities. Sales and marketing teams can get a 360 degree view of their customer data by validating profound intelligence and deep insight from every sales condition. A cloud solution can also integrate indirect and direct channel sales in one unified platform where individual, team, group and leadership can co-live for more productivity and flexibility. Dynamic dashboards can launch dozens of sales and marketing metrics. Pipeline performance, forecasting, competition analytics, product and after-sales performance are some broad metrics to measure.
Product development
In the product planning and development space, from design to development to operation, manufacturers need to deal with multiple systems, teams, locations, customer feedback, partners, suppliers and vendors, to name a few. With the right cloud-based manufacturing software, manufacturers can reimagine the synchronization of all the dispersed entities and connect insights, processes and people faster. In the entire product development stage, from accelerating innovation to quickly enabling actionable information across products, R&D, formulation, engineering, and visualization, manufacturers can meet each new product development (NPD) process goal through a cloud software solution. All the configuration and re-configuration can be processed through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Supply Chain
Once production is in full swing, cloud-empowered modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can make things simple from different stages of production (development, limited production, and total production), supply chain, distribution and services standpoint. It helps companies match output with stock and predicted sales. The software can manage forecast and predict units of build-to-order, configure-to-order, engineer-to-order, project scope, job shop, price quote automation, order intake and basic requests.
Productivity management
Productivity improvement often means working smarter instead of harder and optimizing factory operations instead of infrastructure. With cloud computing platforms and APIs, factories can make insightful data-driven decisions to become more responsive, proactive, and predictive. Leadership can maximize asset availability, process performance, and people participation through greater visibility across the factory environment. Manufacturers can realize cloud technology’s overarching impact on productivity on several overlapping metrics.
