The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

120 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E set up to accommodate remote work, Röhm was quickly able to switch all its employees to work from home across time zones. Masson sees opportunities for manufacturing firms to create new value through digital trans- formation, using a spectrum of technologies from mixed reality to digital twins. “The man- ufacturing industry has proven to be one of the earliest adopters of mixed reality technologies – across sales, service and on the shop floor – successfully leveraging mixed reality business applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Guides across discrete man- ufacturing, process manufacturing, automotive and more,” he says. “In addition, we believe we can accelerate innovation by empowering manufacturers to design, simulate, and validate sustainable products and processes using digi- tal twins and the affordable, scalable power of the cloud.” Cloud has proven itself as a foundation for this transformation, but in a market characterised by rapid disruption companies need to get up to speed fast. Announced in February along with other Industry Clouds, Microsoft is designing its Cloud for Manufacturing solution to help man- ufacturers at any stage of their transformation journey to accelerate time to value. “Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is designed to support the core processes and requirements of the industry,” says Masson. “It is an end-to-end manufacturing solution that includes released and new capabilities that seamlessly connect people, assets, workflow, and business processes, empowering organisations to be more resilient. It brings together common data models, cross-cloud connectors, workflows, APIs, and industry-specific components and standards, with the breadth of Microsoft’s cloud services including Microsoft 365 and Teams, Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and security solutions. Through this offer- ing, we aim to empower companies to deliver value faster, adapt quickly to changing condi- tions, build for the future and do all of this with security at the core. It will provide an on-ramp to the broader portfolio of Microsoft cloud ser- vices, enabling customers to begin with the areas where the need for technology transformation is most urgent.” HYBRID EVENT