Shaping the Future of Manufacturing with Cloud

We’ve seen a major change in attitudes towards the cloud in the manufacturing industry over recent years. When the world went into lockdown in 2020, urgent and unanticipated pressures around social distancing, factory closures and supply-chain bottlenecks caught everyone by surprise. Customers using Plex, which is 100% cloud-native, had a huge advantage in maintaining IT operations.

Now, more than two years later, the value and necessity of a cloud-first approach is more broadly accepted among manufacturing decision makers. Plex’s recent State of Smart Manufacturing Report (SSMR) showed that smart manufacturing adoption has grown by 50% over the past year, and more than 83% of respondents believe smart manufacturing is key to their organization’s future success. Of the executives surveyed, 39% said the adoption of cloud technology was the biggest target for their smart manufacturing investment.

As leaders seek the flexibility that can help them navigate an uncertain economic environment and pursue the innovation that will differentiate their business in the new economy, the pace of adoption in cloud technology will only continue to accelerate.

What’s Changed in Manufacturing Technology?

Interestingly enough, many of the innovations driving smart manufacturing in industrial environments are not actually all that new. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Industrial IoT, Additive Printing, and Blockchain have been available for several years, and have long been on the innovation roadmaps of many technology companies. Manufacturing leaders, though aware these innovations will play a role in their business’ future, have shown caution regarding their introduction into production environments or enterprise processes.

The driving force behind this increased appeal is the interconnectivity between the technologies. A smart manufacturing environment isn’t defined only by technology adoption, but by how these technologies operate together. Sharing data and consolidating the innovations into unified, digital workflows enables leaders to introduce greater levels of automation with more confidence on the value they will deliver.

Plex has existed on this continuum for the past 27 years, working with the new generation of technologies as they mature and combine with the convergence of connectivity and cloud. This has given us the ability to bring these technologies together in a way that was never possible before.