Every business comes with its challenges. But, what if you could take your biggest manufacturing challenges—the ones you grapple with day-in and day-out—and turn them into competitive advantages?

Your next question might be, “but how?” That’s where connected manufacturing comes in. Connected manufacturing is a business strategy that leverages cloud computing to harness operational and business data for greater visibility, efficiency, control, and customer satisfaction. It’s also the digital foundation your business needs to take advantage of current and future opportunities.

Plan for Efficiency

Your business might struggle with lack of visibility into inventory, leading to stock outs or excess inventory. And in the absence of a comprehensive supply chain planning process, you probably incur expedite costs to get products to your customers on time. With connected manufacturing, your opportunity is to use sales, marketing, financial, engineering, and operational data to drive a production plan that takes everything into account so you meet demand with the right level of inventory.

Control Plant Operations

Disconnected quality processes mean you might experience frequent product defects or recalls. You also might not be operating as efficiently as you think you are—machines are down or overloaded. Connected manufacturing enables you to capture, digitize, and access all activity on the shop floor so you know what’s happening all the time and you can be proactive in your approach. You can implement error-proofing processes too so quality issues are caught before products are shipped.

Connect Your Business

Can you trust the data you get on reports or spreadsheets about inventory, machine efficiency, or orders processed? Likely, your systems operate in siloes and only account for transactions—not insights. Connected manufacturing aligns and streamlines processes, so you spend less time collecting and verifying data and more time using reliable data to make decisions about your business.

Unlock People Potential

Do your technical people spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks like system maintenance and upgrades? Or are they constantly dealing with integration issues and software migration/updates? If so, cloud technology can free up their time to spend on more value-added tasks, like mining the data you generate.

See why more manufacturers are becoming connected and leveraging cloud computing to take advantage of the opportunities that harnessing operational and business data creates for their businesses.

Download the infographic: Transform Challenges into Opportunities with Connected Manufacturing.