Smart technologies can help you as you guide your organisation through their digital transformation journey. The word ‘smart’ is thrown around a lot in the manufacturing industry, especially in the age of Industry 4.0. But are we using smart technologies to their fullest potential? Is your organisation as smart as it could be?

For businesses like yours, a smarter manufacturing ecosystem can enable:

• Cost savings
• Better visibility over resources, supply chain, workforce productivity and efficiency
• Better workplace safety and sustainability
• The mitigation of risk and threats
• A leaner, more efficient workforce
• The driving of product and customer growth

“Moving into the fourth industrial revolution—dubbed ‘Industry 4.0’—necessitates new approaches to improving manufacturing operations and processes…A clear path towards this is provided by smart technologies…”

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Drive product and customer growth with smart technologies.

The growth of their products and customer base is perennially a high priority for businesses, but can be hugely enhanced by smart technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) can aid in the design process and offer the key insights your business needs to make improvements, develop new products and delight customers.

For example, AI constantly collects and analyses historical, real-time and market data and trends to give you essential information about where improvements can be made, and where consumer demand lies, e.g.– data insights may indicate growing popularity for a certain product over another.

Provide your research and development teams with immersive technologies such as AR and VR, which can be utilised to aid visualisation and prototype design. You could, for example, utilise smart VR glasses to overlay upgrade or construction instructions, and help connect workers with other colleagues so they can work collaboratively.

Automation, including robotic process automation can improve product quality, productivity and efficiency. This, in turn, reduces the likelihood of human error and boosts customer satisfaction. For example, autonomous mobile robots can pick and pack orders with reduced need for human interaction. Automation can also spot flaws quickly, helping remove them from the production line with reduced disruption. In other words, delivering the highest quality products to your customers can be easier and require fewer resources.

Within the supply chain and logistics, you can pair AI with Industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies for impactful quality-assurance wins. Sensors and RFID tags can monitor the condition of goods, and AI can optimise transportation routes to ensure that these goods spend less time in transit. 

Consumers, customers and partners are expecting sustainability and responsibility from their suppliers more than ever. Many vendors and suppliers have sustainability in their company objectives, and will be measuring their carbon footprint across their entire supply chain. That includes your footprint too. AI can tell you where you can reduce your consumption and waste, and automation can facilitate resource-saving initiatives. With machines and facilities running optimally, you can have a positive impact on your footprint and your customers’ footprints too.

Support your business’ goals and objectives by making manufacturing even smarter. By innovating using smart technologies, your business can operate more efficiently, sustainably and with better resilience. Explore the possibilities and become a more attractive, productive and innovative employer, partner and business.

Let’s co-innovate and leverage the power of cutting-edge technology. Together we can enable incredible, productivity, efficiency and resilience-based wins across your entire business. We know this because we’ve already done it with other manufacturers. Our industry experts have decades of relevant experience, enabling them to provide practical and effective advice. Then, our global network, computing and security expertise and extensive ecosystem can help you put those technologies into practice. We can help you de-risk transformation, accelerate change and achieve the promise of Industry 4.0.