In today’s world, one of the few sectors which cloud computing has not penetrated on a large scale is in industrial plants. Many companies are still wary of a remote platform which operates from outside their facilities, despite its undeniable success in other economic sectors and the tremendous advantages it offers.
Editorial of Juan José Colás, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer
Of course, the Digital Transformation of industrial companies is changing this dynamic, because data capture devices and software tools are becoming more interconnected. The need for computers to relate and obtain valuable information that facilitates decision making is increasing every day, and access to this information is no longer reduced to a personal computer in an office, but to multiple devices.
In this context, companies are turning to cloud computing because of all the advantages it offers: an immediate increase in computing capacity, no hardware or software obsolescence, no need for investment in fixed assets, no costs of excess capacity, no need to increase the number of specialized technicians, and the peace of mind offered by advances in security and multi-location which ensure that corporate data is more secure than on a company’s own servers, among other benefits.
All these points are essential competitive advantages in a hypercompetitive world. Therefore, the most important cloud platforms (Azure by Microsoft, AWS by Amazon and Cloud Platform by Google) are growing exponentially and many industrial companies are going to take this step in the coming years.
Digital competitiveness will be the fundamental factor in the survival of many companies. Welcome to the new reality.
As plant manager or head of production, how much do you know about your factory? Have you identified and located every last piece of information? Do you know the efficiency of each machine? How about the workshop? Of each business area and the plant as a whole?
Material waste and a lack of agility in nesting or the nesting of parts are two of the most common problems faced by metal processing companies which slow down the company’s response time for its clients and make the process more expensive. This is due to them not using the appropriate technology in order to fully exploit each piece of sheet metal during the cutting process and/or the fact that this process is completed manually or using slower solutions. Equally, the work of the production engineer mustn’t be knocked as they are experts in the optimization of nesting and machining; the maximization of the margin for each production order received depends on their intervention.
