Manufacturing is one industry that has embraced cloud speedily and profitably. The global IaaS industrial cloud market was valued at close to $5.6 billion in 2015, and the global PaaS industrial cloud market at close to $3.8 billion.  Concurrently, there has been a lot of excitement and hype about Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things.

Cloud-based systems have proven quicker to roll out and easier to customise, and are dramatically saving on costs.  But the real story is that cloud plays directly to two of manufacturing’s sweet spots: keeping production running, and accelerating New Product Development.

Manufacturing companies thrive or fail on their ability to guarantee uptime – the so-called “five nines” is their mantra: 99.999% online uptime – making sure systems and processes work together to provide this. Uptime isn’t optional, it’s mission-critical.

Cloud benefits to manufacturing

There are numerous advantages to the sector of using cloud services, which include the following:

• Hugely increased reliability, flexibility, scalability
• Better, more smartly connected IT environments
• Saving money through providing infrastructure and support on-demand
• Greatly enhanced security and privacy of data
• Reduced requirements internally for infrastructure and personnel
• An empowered mobile workforce: data available anytime, anywhere on any device
• Better architecture and design means easier configuration and updates

The impact on profitability in manufacturing is significant.  Oracle states that cloud computing demonstrates an average improvement of 22% in profitability and an average reduction in costs (attributed to optimised manufacturing operations and planning processes) of 23%.

Visibility and collaboration are two things which are central to ensuring manufacturing efficiency, as it is a sector that really cannot afford to have information silos. End-to-end, integrated solutions allow manufacturing companies to collaborate, connect, and share solutions with others in the organisation and across the supply chain. This enables processes and flows that span the extended enterprise, partners, and customers.  Complete visibility encourages more insightful decision-making and enhances end-to-end business flows, as real-time views offer visibility into work orders.  Collaboration is also aided by using integrated social solutions to resolve shop floor issues.

Keeping production running

Energy consumption data, production data, and direct sensor data (perhaps enabled by the Internet of Things), provides great value for manufacturers. This data can be used to define actionable insight that populates the dashboards of shop-floor management and decision makers so they can – in real-time – chart production line efficiency and the course of facility improvements. Critical information alerts – for example, when a production line is down – can be sent from cloud-based services as e-mails and push notifications to mobile devices.

Given that manufacturers often run widely dispersed facilities, cloud is proving invaluable for monitoring machines remotely.  Gathering all sorts of data from the shop-floor enables the implementation of high-performance condition monitoring.  This is invaluable for remote support and service, and feeds directly into the predictive maintenance of expensive, bespoke assets. Using pattern recognition for detecting irregularities in the data can improve process reliability.