We have reached an era where the success of a business is determined by how digitally empowered they are.
Previously, efforts in manufacturing to optimise productivity and growth in customer satisfaction have been regarded as separate endeavours. Nowadays, the convergence of physical and digital developments is altering these types of assumptions.
Manufacturers nowadays care about integrated digital and physical systems, advanced visibility, improved efficiency, more flexibility, and decreased costs. They need to connect equipment and factories, leveraging data from the factory floor to the client call centre to enhance each element in their operations.
However, this is simply the beginning. Digitisation is essentially converting the manner in which manufacturers do business, allowing a customer-centric approach whilst optimising operations. Digitally empowered manufacturers interact with customers during the product life cycle from design to field service. They sell value-adding services to supplement the product income, commencing new sales streams and strengthening their consumer relationships. And they may be revolutionising the shipping of these differentiated services, by the use of technology like AR to mix the eyes of a technician within the field with the insights of a professional at headquarters.
Capitalising on these developments isn’t confined to large, well-resourced producers. Digital transformation has seen an upsurge like never before. Companies are embracing new age technologies to be competitive.
Microsoft has always envisioned for a modern, scalable, and connected enterprise that is built on cloud and leverages the capabilities of machine learning and analytics. We’ve created solutions that offer a unified method throughout the workplace. Our technique permits transformation in six ways:
Via gathering, integrating, and visualising global supply chain data worldwide, manufacturers’ benefit from a greater end to end visibility into their operations. For instance, one of the world’s biggest industrial automation corporations discovered that by automating the collection and analysis of records from remote installations across the petroleum supply chain, they strengthened their aggressive gain with a quicker time to market. Improved access to supply chain data is the premise for better collaboration across production, delivery, provider, and sales.
With a consolidated view that unifies procedure oversight and offers real-time insight, manufacturers can institutionalise gains in efficiency and use linked devices to oversee and solve problems remotely. The additional insights into manufacturing and client usage enable manufacturers to provide valuable services with ongoing tracking and proactive support.
To deliver customise and contextual engagement throughout any channel, manufacturers have to offer customers greater visibility and gain trust via speedy and helpful responses. This engagement method is based on an aggregate of predictive analytics, the capability to deliver most-valuable services at scale, and guided or self-directed service that’s relevant to customer desires.
With the implementation of a connected platform for sales, a leading domestic technology manufacturer solved potential problems remotely, much before the clients could feel the effect. Additionally, the manufacturer provided custom differentiated services primarily based on the customer utilisation and buying history.
Thanks to the ever-lowering price of IoT sensors, state-of-the-art mobile devices, and cloud-based statistics aggregation, manufacturers can enhance service standards and margins by means of providing remote tracking and proactive maintenance that complement damage/restoration assist. A leading tire provider and manufacturing corporation discovered that by combining client statistics, technician availability, and back-end inventory in a standalone mobile-friendly system, it could offer a seamless consumer experience in addition to enhance its service delivery.
The exceptional way for manufacturers to pursue innovation is to research and learn about their business very deeply, from client usage via supply chain sourcing and manufacturing. With IoT-enabled components, assets, and merchandise, manufacturers can benefit from the insights provided by the data touch points. Statistics from related merchandise and devices can empower developers, engineers, and technicians to collaborate.
For instance, teams can become aware of ill-engineered or defective components and tune product utilisation within the field to enhance future designs, while a leading data and communication technology business enterprise carried out remote tracking. Through this collaboration, they reduced production time and improved the cycle of innovation with the use of a data-centric approach.
While an organisation can offer a 360-degree perspective of client assets and work order records, technicians are empowered via a concrete knowledge of the process in front of them, however of other similar and victorious field service engagements. This goes hand in hand with empowering service professionals to offer immediate feedback, with the use of machine learning to locate and observe comparable instances for successful troubleshooting and scheduling a visit or assessment.
A leading automobile manufacturer desired to reduce costs and save money by using unifying their customer support and consumer engagement at the same time as empowering employees with the latest tools to understand client sentiment. To achieve this, they implemented a system to link manufacturing and project management with their CRM system to be able to deliver customised service and suggestions to their clients.