Reinventing productivity in today’s manufacturing industry
In our mobile-first, cloud-first world we are always connected, always “on.” The pace of business is faster than ever before—and accelerating.
This hyper-connected world has changed how manufacturing employees need and expect to work. For them to keep pace on the frontlines of today’s complex and global industry challenges requires daily progress on three fundamental imperatives: innovation, performance and growth.
Using a Modern Workplace, manufacturers can support their long-term ability to perform, innovate and grow by empowering all your employees—in the factory, field and office alike—to do more with technology, wherever they go with whatever device.
Reinvent productivity
We want to help manufacturers develop their Modern Workplace, a place not limited by physical and technical boundaries. Where—through the latest technology innovations—manufacturers can bring people, processes, assets and insights together to do really powerful things. And not just to keep up, but to gain real competitive advantage.
Microsoft’s approach revolves around a role-based workspace that inspires leading-edge productivity by supporting workers in several important ways:
- Broad access to enterprise information and insights to improve decision making. This can drive real gains in innovation, forecasting, time to market, self-service training, customer behavior insights, pricing effectiveness and production quality.
- Collaboration and communications anytime, anywhere and any device. A consumer-like bring-your-own-device experience makes your company more collaborative and responsive across your ecosystem of colleagues, customers, partners, and suppliers. It also pays meaningful dividends when it comes to recruiting and keeping talent.
- Social engagement across every level of your company’s ecosystem. The result is an ongoing stream of global, dynamic conversations that spark ideas and new ways of approaching every kind of business challenge, including executing marketing campaigns, solving production problems, and improving customer service.
The lifeblood of business success
Technology underlies the ability to successfully achieve innovation, performance and growth. But it’s not just a matter of automating and speeding up production processes. Manufacturers have to find ways to integrate the information that comes from production lines so you can make better, faster decisions. This information is the lifeblood of business success.
You need world-class mobility, cloud, big data and analytics, and collaboration capabilities to improve your ability to recruit talent, access data, and drive productivity. According to research from IDC, by 2020, mobile, cloud, social, and big data technologies will drive at least 80 percent of the [manufacturing] industry’s growth.
The good news is that everything your employees need to innovate, perform and grow your business is now accessible from one place on any device through Microsoft Office 365. This unique set of workplace tools combines the productivity innovations of Microsoft Office with the power of mobility, social, big data and cloud to allow organizations to be more productive, in a much more meaningful way. That can be as simple as empowering end users with the devices that they want to use in a secure, compliant fashion. Or it could be about helping people make sense of the vast quantities of data that are coming at us each and every single day.
So that’s why we think of these three areas as core elements of a Modern Workplace:
- Ubiquitous collaboration—which is ubiquitous in terms of device, the pervasive nature of the cloud, and enterprise social networking.
- Personal insights into data with a service that is learning and helping you interpret the mountain of information coming at us.
- And then finally, doing all of this in a very secure and compliant fashion—focused on individuals.
Microsoft Office 365 lets you reinvent your work environment and helps transform the way your company works to take full advantage of your environment, accelerate productivity and meet the needs of tech-savvy employees.
I also encourage you to join our new Modern Workplace webcast series that gives you insight into the passions that drive today’s most successful entrepreneurs. Each episode includes interviews with innovators who explore timely business issues, provide actionable advice, and answer questions from our live, online audience.
We’re excited about the Modern Workplace and its ability to reinvent productivity for another generation.
