*Dominik Wee
At its core, manufacturing is about innovation as it builds economic capacity, strengthens teams and generates opportunities for growth. Today, we are witnessing the industry undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation driven by changing consumer demands, labor challenges, supply chain disruptions, technological advances and demands for sustainability. We've come a long way since the industrial revolution, and industry has evolved into a much more complex place.
To explore these challenges and opportunities, we will join global leaders and peers at the world's largest industrial technology trade show, the Hannover Messe, taking place April 17-21 in Germany. As we participate in this week of innovation, we will discuss four key areas that are reshaping the future of manufacturing: enabling a connected workforce, fueling engineering and smart factories with the industrial metaverse, building agile supply chains, and accelerating sustainability. Driving these trends is artificial intelligence (AI), which offers more potential for our industry than any other technology we've experienced, and we're just scratching the surface of what's possible.
Here, we explore how Microsoft brings these four trends to life to advance the industry:
Empowering the Connected Workforce
To support smart factories, a connected workforce is critical, and 63% for Frontline Manufacturing Workers are excited about the job opportunities technology creates. From the office to the workers in the factory, Microsoft solutions can improve operations by streamlining everyday work, driving efficiency, safety and productivity, and helping to foster an engaged workforce.
We're building solutions to address the unique challenges manufacturers face – helping to streamline frontline operations, improve communication and collaboration, enhance the employee experience, and strengthen security on shared devices.
Today, we're sharing new capabilities and updates for the workforce, including:
- The native integration of Intelligent Virtual Agents (PVA) with AI into Power Apps is now in public preview. AI-infused virtual agents will be readily available within Power Apps, allowing frontline manufacturing workers to easily find intelligent answers within the context of their manufacturing applications.
- Teams can be used as a calling solution to connect with teammates, customers and vendors. Later this year, factory employees will be able to make and receive calls using smartphones with Android system wherever they are working.
To learn more about how we're empowering today's manufacturing workforce, read the latest post from Microsoft 365 Blog.
Building resilient and agile supply chains
Supply chain disruption is nothing new; however, its complexity and the speed of transformation are outpacing organizations' ability to deal with the issues. Manufacturers are under pressure to prevent and minimize outages, and as a result, nearly 90% of supply chain professionals plan to invest in ways to make their supply chains more resilient.
To support our customers, Microsoft offers solutions such as the Supply Chain Platform and the Supply Chain Center. They enable organizations to reduce risk in complex supply chains and provide an out-of-the-box “command center” enabling organizations such as Kraft Heinz, meet your unique needs without replacing current systems. In addition, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot gives companies real-time predictive insights using generative AI across materials, inventory, distribution network and more, meaning potential outages can be prevented before they occur.
Today, Microsoft is working with customers to improve the resiliency of their supply chains. The semiconductor company STMicro transformed its supply chain, advanced research and development, and scaled production using Microsoft Azure HPC. Now they can get their products to market faster and double their capacity by 2025, while becoming carbon neutral by 2027. Toyota Material Handling Europe is bringing warehouse automation to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with autonomous guided vehicles that can perform repetitive tasks quickly and accurately, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. This robotic technology can help manage inventory levels, resulting in better inventory control and reduced storage costs.
Learn more about our supply chain solutions from the Dynamics365 team in this blog.
People and AI working together: The next generation of engineering and smart factories with the industrial metaverse
One of the most significant changes in manufacturing has been the rise of smart factories. Imagine an industrial ecosystem connected to a common virtual space that allows everyone to visualize and interact with complex processes in real time, with real world data. The industrial metaverse, built on foundational technology like AI, Digital Twins, Mixed Reality, ML and Cloud-to-Edge, is changing the way companies run and manage their business, delivering immediate value through remote operations and enablement, optimization of processes and assets from AI and robotics, automation and autonomous operations.
Likewise, the Industrial Metaverse is creating opportunities to make product engineering more collaborative and immersive. This allows manufacturing companies to reduce and accelerate time to market in an increasingly competitive environment.
Our commitment to immersive experiences that support manufacturers and frontline workers continues with the announcement that we are bringing the Windows 11 for HoloLens 2, improving security and offering the latest tools for developers. We're also rolling out new updates to Dynamics 365 Guides, including the ability to annotate anything close at hand, a custom security feature called "Restricted Mode" that gives organizations more control over their mixed reality apps, and new updates to calls of Teams within Guides to enhance the user experience.
THE Siemens is using generative artificial intelligence to help industrial companies drive innovation and efficiency throughout the lifecycle of designing, engineering, manufacturing and operating products. It will bring a Teamcenter application to Microsoft Teams that leverages the language models in the Azure OpenAI Service to improve cross-functional collaboration. Additionally, at Hannover Messe we are demonstrating how an assistant powered by Azure AI Service can enhance the creation, optimization and debugging of code in software for factory automation, and how we can use industrial AI to enable visual quality inspection on the factory floor . A rockwell is integrating robotics and AI technologies to empower companies to optimize their field service workers and asset management in factories. The Omniverse Cloud NVIDIA makes it easy for teams, from design and engineering to frontline workers, to digitize their workflows, from building digital factory twins to running closed-loop simulations.
Sustainability, energy optimization and fuel cell innovation are more important than ever.
Sustainability is a priority for manufacturers who are adopting eco-friendly practices and implementing initiatives such as using renewable energy sources, adopting circular economy principles to reduce waste and optimizing production processes to minimize environmental impact .
Through our technology, such as the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, and our rich ecosystem of partners, we are building a critical foundation for an energy efficient and sustainable future. Recently, the Seeq Corporation announced the Seeq Solution for Microsoft Sustainability Manager, which enables teams to integrate the preparation, analysis and continual improvement of time series process data, reducing the environmental impact of process industry operations.
Many of society's toughest sustainability problems are chemistry and materials science problems that will ultimately require a quantum machine at scale to solve. However, given the continuing evolution of classical computing capabilities, more quantum chemistry problems can be solved today using cutting-edge cloud services. A Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies, has teamed up with Microsoft's Azure Quantum quantum chemists to develop new predictive modeling tools with the supercomputing capabilities of Azure HPC and refined workflows to accelerate chemical simulations, exploit the potential of AI and get ready for the quantum age.
Many manufacturers are facing the urgent situation of rising energy costs in the factory and production plant, so we are working with partners and customers to prioritize key use cases that will help manufacturers gain visibility into where energy loss is occurring through targeted assessments.
These are some of the exciting innovations happening today to help us build a stronger, more resilient and more sustainable tomorrow. I look forward to seeing many of you at Hannover Messe next week.
*Dominik Wee, Corporate Vice President, Manufacturing Industry and Mobility
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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