how microsoft‘s...streamline operations and reduce waste. by connecting lob applications,...

How Microsoft‘s products are transforming manufacturing

Modern manufacturers are embracing customer centricity, innovating faster and becoming more agile

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There used to be a time when manufacturing was linear and purely physical. We were focused on the customer at the tail end of the sales cycle, but the ability to really center the entire manufacturing process around the customer and support an ongoing relationship was lacking.

Today, however, for the first time in many decades, technology has outpaced the evolution of business processes. Smart products have existed for some time, but now it’s possible for these products to deliver real value.

Because of the proliferation of the cloud and big data as well as the continuous connection of smart products, you have a greater opportunity to improve customer connections and differentiate your business. Now, you can listen to social sentiment, analyse customer product usage, de-

termine long-term quality output and deliver new services to your customers.

With the convergence of the physical and digital, many manufacturing companies are already embracing digital transformation. Transforming to a digital business enables you to disrupt the market with new products and services. While simply designing a better product is worthwhile, the real value from this digital transformation is an expanded business model. Instead of products, you can offer a product as a service.

But this level of transformation requires a completely new mindset.

Success hinges on insights and optimisation



The new wave of manufacturers are incorporating data driven insights and workforce, product, and customer connectivity to drive process optimisation.

Your current business is likely experiencing any number of pains, as any business does. With manufacturing undergoing one of the biggest transformations in history, these pains will become exacerbated and new ones will emerge.

Microsoft’s suite of world-class products and services can help you stay ahead of the curve, and address these pains before they become problems – and we can help you on that journey.

You may be facing one or many of the challenges of transformation in the manufacturing industry, but with Microsoft, these challenges represent tremendous opportunities.

VP of Supply Chain: Mass-customisation of product creates the demand for a new level of agility within production and supply chain as organisations pursue the ideal state of producing in batches of one.

COO: Cost reduction is critical to succeed in these uncertain times and markets. Businesses without a highly productive and collaborative workforce across the manufacturer’s value chain face increasing competition in today’s diverse and globally dispersed environment. Compounding the pressure on manufacturers to develop innovative products and services is the imperative to operate at very thin margins. Work stoppages, wasteful production processes, poor sourcing decisions, and inefficient workflows can kill profits, so there can be no rest in the pursuit of operational excellence.

Chief Marketing Officer: Consumer demands and

expectations are causing manufacturers to move from only product offerings to products, services, and content offerings.

This is not only creating significant service-related revenue opportunities (the servitisation of products), but is also redefining traditional value chains and opening the door for new services not possible before. And as products, markets, regulations, and customer needs continue evolving at a faster rate, manufacturing companies will need to become more agile and insight-driven.

VP of Customer Service: Enabling your people to work where they want—in the office, on the go, and at home—and making it easy for them to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and even customers around the world is key to innovation. With skills shortages, businesses need to use technology—virtual experts, online interactive training, and other methods—to provide employees and agents with access to expertise to get their work done.

Chief Innovation Officer: Globalisation has changed the innovation process, the supply chain, the distribution model, and the ways that manu-facturing organisations sell and service customers. Today’s technology is providing the platform that enables any company—small or large, from any-where in the world—to develop experiences and outcomes that customers want. Today, product and service innovation is coming from anyone and from everywhere. Technology plays an increasingly strategic role in helping companies to foster a cul-ture of innovation and stay nimble enough to keep ahead of the pack.

CEO: A power shift to consumers is underway, with today’s customers having more information and new ways to connect than ever before. Large, virtual consumer communities can now drive what succeeds in the market, where buyers are sharing information and opinion about products and about buying and servicing experiences. Consumer demands and expectations are causing product manufacturers to add services and content offerings. As products, markets, regulations, and

customer needs continue to evolve at a faster rate, OEMs will need to proactively listen to consumers, and must become more agile and insight driven, reacting at consumer speed.

Microsoft and Acora enables manufacturers to drive their transformation through the power of digital technology.

Dynamics products enables manufacturers to drive business transformation through the power of digital technology—empowering people and organisations, and reshaping industries.

With the dawn of a new generation of business systems, the arrival of ubiquitous digital connectivity, unlimited computing capacity in the cloud and real-time analytics capabilities enables manufacturers to access new insights and build systems of intelligence like never before. They can now use this insight and intel to make significant improvements to products and to create new value-add services.

Forward-thinking manufacturers are improving performance and agility across their businesses—redesigning processes for greater agility and responsiveness, building more open, connected and trusted ecosystems and delivering more personalised customer experiences.

Empower end-to-end manufacturing transformation

Optimise the manufacturing plant



Manufacturers have evolved from isolated plants to integrated plants, growing vertically and horizontally. With Dynamics products you can apply technology to your existing operations and greatly improve efficiency.

As an example: A water pump manufacturer works with Microsoft technology to connect all areas of its production. We can connect devices on the plant floor – different models from different vendors. By connecting these devices, the manufacturer gains enhanced visibility and granular control over what’s going on in the plant. They are able to proactively maintain equipment, streamline operations and reduce waste. By connecting LOB applications, third-party logistics, and other areas of their business, they can optimise processes and improve their overall pro-duction performance.

Microsoft technology enables efficient, effective, connected operations, utilising a variety of flexible solutions. With Microsoft’s IoT solution, you can connect heterogeneous devices, sensors, and systems to connect and improve production using your existing machines, OS’s, and connection protocols. Dynamics ERP empowers your management capabilities, while advanced analyt-

ics turns data gathered from your connected plant into actionable insights. Together, Microsoft has a holistic, flexible manufacturing solution, with IoT, advanced analytics, and Dynamics NAV (ERP) enabling you to truly integrate and enhance production.

For example, you can:• Monitor whether components are arriving at the

plant floor as expected, and slow production if needed to reduce or eliminate excess work-in-process inventory.

• Manage data remotely from a centralised location and push updates and key notifications to the factory floor, making relevant information available to manufacturing employees.

• Analyse data with advanced analytics via an edge processor on the shop floor, or via the cloud, automate production processes, act quickly on insights, and identify and eliminate inefficiencies.

• Implement predefined rules for equipment use and plant management (e.g. shut down production or equipment based on demand or environmental data), to optimise productivity and profitability

• Aggregate data, identify and correct quality issues – with IoT and the ability to perform Big Data analytics, manufacturers can increase the

number of quality checks that are performed, collect more quality inspection data and analyse more data than ever before. This enables them to spot defect patterns, and correct them more quickly. This also enables manufacturers to create predictive algorithms so that times/places where quality issues may occur are identified ahead of time. (e.g. extra humid day might imply more likelihood of quality issues).

• Provide ‘single pane of glass’ visibility across all distribution/sales channels – this enables better inventory management and savings on logistics and distribution costs because the full channel would know would where products are, so re-dundancies can be reduced.

• Establish predictive maintenance schedules - with planned maintenance, cost of operations can be reduced and throughput can be increased

Connected operations solutions from Microsoft work with your environment to help you derive greater value from the industrial internet of things, people and services.

Engage your customers



Another truly transformative aspect of Microsoft technology’s ability to enhance your manufacturing business comes from how you interact with your customers. With Dynamics enabling customer-cen-tricity and servitisation, IoT providing visibility into product usage after the sale and allowing your offerings to evolve, and advanced analytics generating actionable insight from your custom-er, product, and service data, Microsoft helps you transform the customer experience.

In our example, the manufacturer’s water pumps are in use all over the world. Previously, they had limited visibility into product performance or customer usage data. Today, the manufacturer offers their water pump as a service, expanding their value proposition to their customers. With connected devices streaming in data, the manufac-turer can offer predictive maintenance services or pay-per-use pricing tiers. By analysing data about product performance in real time, they can proactively address issues in their products; they can offer replacement parts to customers and adjust future design iterations. All of these new service offerings bring in greater revenue over time and helps improve the overall customer experience.

Microsoft technology also provides unique opportunities for field technicians. They can work with product experts remotely to receive guidance during repairs. They can also access detailed manuals and gain better visibility into the service required on the product.

Service technicians can also benefit from products that offer descriptions and guidance of the services needed. For example, instead of performing a checklist of 100 tasks every time a pump is serviced, the pump could tell the service technician exactly what 3 things he needs to do to resolve a problem. This increases service efficiency and can eliminate the need for repeat service calls known as “call-backs.” It helps you improve your quality of service, achieve service excellence, and reduce the cost of service by enabling technicians to work faster and to more accurately diagnose problems.

In addition to technicians in the field, sellers can benefit from added visibility by upselling and cross-selling to their customers. For example, if a tooling machine provider realises that a cutting tip on a customer’s machine is wearing out too quickly, they can offer several things to their customer:

First, they can simply offer general support, calling the customer and helping them recalibrate the machine to prevent it from wearing out.Alternatively, because they have visibility into how fast the tips are wearing, they can also offer inventory management services to the customer. They can agree to automatically send new cutting tips when the customer needs them.

Finally, they can upsell. By analysing long-term trends, they know that their customer goes through 80 cutting bits every month. By offering them discounted rates on a bulk purchase, they can generate greater revenue today and help their customer save money.

By connecting the right people with the data they need, you can transform the selling, maintenance and engineering parts of your business.

Transform global operations



Microsoft technology can transform your business on the operations front. With Dynamics products, IoT, and advanced analytics you can turn customer centers into profit and innovation centers, unifying sales, marketing, and service data to gain key efficiency and profitability visibility, and then acting on those insights to increase sales and service productivity. You can run advanced analyt-ics across the entirety of your company, from call center data in Dynamics 365 for sales, plant management data in Dynamics NAV (ERP), product usage and sales data from IoT devices and customers, and more to harness data-driven improvements to your business and offerings, while enhancing R&D. With global visibility, capable Dynamics ERP and CRM, and advanced analytics, you can identify and propagate best practices across your manufacturing plants, service techs, field sellers, and more, streamlining global supply, increasing end-to-end efficiency, and enabling you to scale quickly.

In our water pump manufacturer example, the company has connected their plants, products, and people. By connecting these things, people and services, the manufacturer has greater visibility and control over the entire organisation. All aspects of the business are visible from a central-

ised dashboard, providing information and insights to the decision-makers who need it, whether they are helping customers in a call center, designing new offerings in R&D, or managing global opera-tions to streamline supply.

With increased digitisation, any manufacturer can streamline operations and improve customer experiences. For example, you can:• Integrate service, marketing, and sales to gather

powerful customer and product usage insights, then act on that insight to drastically improve the customer experience and increase sales produc-tivity.

• Leverage data from across your business – manufacturing plants, customers, products, sellers, field techs, global operations, and more – to transform and accelerate innovation, enabling you to seize new revenue streams, hasten new product and service introduction, and disrupt the market.

• Use data from IoT with powerful BI tools – derive business insights from Big Data analytics and improve operations at the global level

• Make data available to the right individuals for a variety of purposes based on role, such as

product development, facility and device servicing, or business and operations management

• Access more data than ever before and integrate with 3rd party syndicated data to improve process and quality control (e.g. use data on regional weather patterns to determine locations where weather conditions will result in higher demand, or view data about fuel and other input prices to predict profit margins)

Conclusion: Empower manufacturing with Microsoft



Digital transformation is changing the entire manufacturing industry. Competitive edge is no longer based on product offerings. Now, manufacturing is about the best and most profitable business models.

By building a continuous flow of information across a comprehensive platform, you can take advantage of new business models and differentiate your business in the market.

You will need a holistic approach. It’s not about just connecting devices and products or just about applying advanced analytics to what you do today. To unlock new business value, you need to connect equipment, analyse data, visualise information and integrate people and processes to be able to make decisions in a productive way. With this level of connectivity and insight, your equipment and

products become new higher value digital services that are predictive, proactive and personalised.

And Microsoft and Acora are uniquely positioned to deliver comprehensive solutions, providing technologies and services to transform your entire business.

Contact Acora:T: 0844 264 2222E: [email protected]: www.acoranav.com

how microsoft‘s...streamline operations and reduce waste. by connecting lob applications,...

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