116 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E Leslie Paulson General Manager for Servigistics Business Unit at PTC “How may I serve you today? A simple question and a gesture familiar to a legion of customer-facing employees. Customers want what they want when they want it, and it can be challenging for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to exceed these expectations efficiently. Why is that? How can OEMs deliver high availability with minimal costs? The answer is a combination of digital thread and service innovation which deliver agile, competitive supply chains. There is a ubiquitous market need for asset uptime and readiness. Regardless of the industry, unplanned downtime is unacceptable. Fortunately, a tsunami of technology innovation is a tailwind for OEMs. Access to equipment utilisation data, sophisticated optimisation algorithms and secure cloud technology maximises asset uptime and readiness. Leaning heavily on digital thread and service innovation is a proven pathway to success creating better products, faster, and optimising service delivery. Maximum equipment uptime delights customers, and delighted customers are the most loyal.” Greg Crandall ERP Practice Director at JourneyTEAM “Microsoft cloud technologies have allowed tighter integration with the sales and production facilities by having complete connection between customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning (Dynamics 365). We are able to help our manufacturing clients improve efficiency in quoting, gain insight into inventory, and streamline order management and scheduling production. This has been especially helpful for customers who have widespread sales channels internationally with main production facilities in one or two locations. In addition, cloud technologies have allowed our small and medium business clients to take advantage of the ability to integrate with independent commerce channels, use D365 ERP to manage orders and demand and then spin up thirdparty logistics (3PL) vendors who handle all fulfilment tasks and easily send orders electronically to the 3PL for final shipment. Companies can quickly get to market in months as opposed to years to build all that infrastructure themselves. Cloud helps them to leverage into a fast-running, profitable business model.” “Having battled shortages and disruptions during the pandemic, manufacturers need tools that provide more insight into their internal and external supply chains and improve predictability. Manufacturers embracing direct-to-customer business models must adapt to rapidly changing demand, and the advent of mass customisation requires flexible manufacturing operations and supply chains. Meanwhile manufacturers are under constant pressure to increase production efficiency and time to market. Production, and the health and performance of the machines that power it, has historically been a blind spot in manufacturing supply chains even though machine failures can have major upstream and downstream impact. Malfunctioning machines are hidden supply chain risks. To achieve more predictable production, Augury customers can combine mechanical machine data from Augury’s Machine Health solution with recipe data from the manufacturer ’s Azure DL instance in order to determine which facilities or production lines are best suited to produce a particular recipe at high quality and with minimal waste.” Chris Dobbrow Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Augury
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=