Manufacturing Firms—Start Using The Cloud, Or Go Extinct
If you have somehow held off on using cloud solutions so far, you’re essentially stuck in the stone age at this point. MainStreet IT Solutions can bring you into the future—get in touch with our team to start modernizing your business today.
You’re Running Out Of Time To Harness The Cloud’s Benefits
The cloud is a big part of the manufacturing world. In fact, the manufacturing industry continues to be one of the top investors in cloud computing, with more than $5B reported in industry-wide spending in 2019.
Are you contributing to that industry-wide investment? If you haven’t invested in the cloud yet, you’re running out of time. Your competitors have likely advanced beyond you, and at a certain point, it will be impossible to catch up.
That’s why you need to get started right away. Let’s begin with the basics…
What Is The Cloud & What Does It Do?
By definition, the cloud is a network of technologies that allows access to computing resources, such as storage, processing power, and more. In layman’s terms, the cloud allows you to access IT resources that wouldn’t be available otherwise—or, at least, not without a much higher expense.
General advantages include:
- Shift IT Infrastructure To Operating Expenses: Whereas CapEx — on-premise IT solutions — is paid for upfront and brings in a gradual return over the following months and years, OpEx is “pay-as-you-go”. You pay for a cloud solution month by month, which vastly reduces the window between investment and return, in addition to eliminating the purchase and maintenance cost for onsite servers and other infrastructure components.
- Access Extensive IT Resources: The cloud has the ability to activate tens of thousands of CPUs. This unparalleled power can quickly perform deep analytics of your data, and process nearly any ad-hoc queries that you require.
- Provide Greater Access: Users can access cloud-based data and apps from any device with an Internet connection. That means your staff doesn’t have to wait for each other to be done with their part of the document or project in order to tackle their own aspect. They can all work on the same project at the same time to maximize productivity.
But that’s not all — the cloud even offers specific advantages to manufacturing firms like yours.
3 Cloud Advantages You Need To Harness Now
Flexibility
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.
- The cloud is 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.
- The cloud is 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.
Cost-Effect
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 on site 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.
With the cloud, you’ll further 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.
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.
Why Aren’t You Using The Cloud?
Whether you like it or not, the cloud is so fundamental a part of the modern business world (including the manufacturing industry) that you need to be making use of it.
If you’re not already using the cloud for file sharing and storage, you’re way behind the times. But if you’re also failing to take advantage of the industry-specific features the cloud can deliver, then you’re missing out.
