How Your Manufacturing Firm Can Take Advantage Of The Cloud
Manufacturing firms are continuously under pressure to develop new products and get them to market quickly. With both local and offshore competition, the pressure on your company will continue to increase. Many manufacturers today are overcoming these challenges by working in the cloud.
To remain competitive, you must innovate with technology. If you want to stay ahead of the game, you'll need the best technology support available, and this can be challenging. Using the cloud can help. It’s changing how we all do business.
By taking advantage of the awesome power of the cloud, your manufacturing firm will lower its costs, keep up with customer expectations, and help your employees get more done in less time. This will improve your bottom line, and help you stay ahead of the competition.
Why Should You Work In The Cloud?
If you’ve been thinking about moving to the cloud, there are lots of good reasons to do so. Working in the cloud lets you assign and monitor tasks, get metrics from your applications, and manage your configurations in single, easy-to-understand screens.
Using a centralized cloud-based location means less time going back and forth with your managers to find out what’s going on. Below are our top 3 additional reasons to move to the cloud.
1. Get The Flexibility Your Manufacturing Firm Needs
Change is a constant, and all companies, including manufacturing companies, must be able to adapt to change. Static, on-premise IT solutions and infrastructures can hold you back. The Cloud supports flexibility in a number of ways.
- It’s scalable: The Cloud makes it easy to scale up or down if you have slow or busy seasons, and most manufacturers do. You can scale cloud services up if you take on a new customer. This is especially useful for manufacturers that operate on a seasonal cycle.
- It’s agile: Working in the cloud provides agility for your staff. They can easily adjust to new conditions. With traditional on-premise IT solutions, this process is slower and more complex. The Cloud allows for faster application deployments, data backups, and computing power.
- It’s mobile: Before the cloud, if you wanted to get work done, you had to go to your office and use your desktop computer. This made it impossible to retrieve your digital files if you were stuck at home or traveling. Today, if you need to view a file or work on a project, you simply go online using the device of your choice and work in the cloud.
2. Lower Your Overall Costs
With the cloud, you can reduce costs and get the most value from your IT assets. When you outsource the management of your IT infrastructure to an IT service provider via the cloud, your operational, maintenance and administration costs are reduced.
The need for you to employ staff to maintain, administer and update hardware and software is eliminated. Plus, you'll be free from the worry of IT headaches. And, with cloud services, you can save on investments in software, hardware, and IT infrastructure solutions. All of this can be "rented" via the cloud.
You'll reduce your capital outlay and free up cash for other initiatives. Plus, when you use cloud services, you can benefit from user-based billing where you only pay for what you need and nothing more.
3. Improve Collaboration, Efficiency & Productivity
- Collaboration: Leading manufacturers use cloud technologies to enable easy collaboration that keeps everyone informed and working. Your teams can work on the same project from different locations. Documents and files are updated in real-time.
- Efficiency: With the cloud, your company will benefit from a shorter time-to-market because your people and processes are simply more efficient. You’ll save time and money.You will eliminate duplication of efforts to increase overall efficiency. Changes to documents can be made in real-time, so your employees won't need to upload, download or email versions to one another. It’s a great way to avoid having different people do the same job over and over.
- Productivity: Enterprise Resource Planning in the cloud makes a lot of sense. With cloud-based ERP systems and other applications, your staff will experience higher rates of productivity. They can optimize their time when accessing, retrieving and processing information to carry out operations more efficiently. Productive, happy employees just make for a better workplace.You can manage all projects from one dashboard. Working in the cloud lets you assign and monitor tasks, get metrics from your applications, and manage your configurations from single, easy-to-understand screens.
- Eliminate downtime: Your managed IT provider can manage, monitor and maintain a cloud-based infrastructure much easier. They will often see an issue and resolve it before it causes any trouble. This means fewer interruptions to your business operations and less downtime. With uninterrupted continuity of your manufacturing operations, you'll add to your long-term profits.
4. Don’t Forget About Cloud Security
As with any new technology, if you’re going to fully harness the advantages it offers, you have to also make sure it’s not putting you at risk. Moving all your data to the cloud does offer you greater convenience and access as a user, but if unsecured, unauthorized parties could gain access as well.
That’s why you have to take steps to protect your data in the cloud. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is a superior way to keep your cloud data secure. MFA requires the user to utilize two methods to confirm that they are the rightful account owner. There are three categories of information that can be used in this process:
- Something you have: Includes a mobile phone, app, or generated code
- Something you know: A family member’s name, city of birth, pin, or phrase
- Something you are: Includes fingerprints and facial recognition
By securing your cloud data, you can enjoy the flexibility, cost-effect, and efficiency of the cloud without putting your business at risk.
