Analytics
Most manufacturing companies have already implemented ERP and BI tools. However these tools remain restricted to basic information about sales, inventory and purchase, for the management, and are still not used for fact based decision making.

Advanced and predictive analytics can change New Product Development, efficiency in Supply Chain Management and enhance Customer Relationships. Manufacturing units may have collated huge   volumes of data over the years, which primarily remained unutilised.  Analysing them can help to identify causes for supply chain inefficiencies, such as inventory pile-ups, machine failures, critical labour shortage etc. and enable mitigation in advance.

Product lifecycles have become shorter, so to stay competitive, enhancement of existing products and development of new products by understanding customer psyche is increasingly important. Analytics can help to understand the knowledge generated during developmental phase of a product and can help the product development team.  Analytics can help to analyse customer data and thus develop a product which is more apt for the market.  Adoption of Analytics should increase for manufacturing sector with the increasing facilitative conditions for Indian Manufacturing.

Cloud
Cloud will have greatest impact. With the Cloud, manufacturing units don't have to set up their own infrastructure. The three core components of Cloud - Iaas, PaaS and SaaS enable any manufacturing unit to adopt and use latest tools and technologies without wasting time and resources. Cloud can replicate similar IT services in manufacturing units spread across different geographies. Integrating IT in different units spread geographically used to be a big challenge earlier, but with the adoption of cloud, this issue to can be put to rest easily and at a very low cost.

Earlier when setting up a unit in remote location, engineers'  would usually travel to, build the entire IT infrastructure, run it for months and then train the employees before finally handing over to the locals in factories. Now with Cloud, one can easily replicate the existing infrastructure in new plants and can make the system can be up and running with limited costs and resources.

Cloud adoption also enables the conversion of capital expenses in IT into an operational, and transaction-correlated operational expense. This of course leads to far greater agility than possible with own IT resources, not to mention the ability to focus better on operations rather than on IT.

The author is Global Delivery Head, Blue Star Infotech.

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