According to a Frost & Sullivan study, 92% of Latin American companies already use cloud services, whether public or private. Much of this involves file sharing, remote management of external sales teams, electronic signatures, and online filing. None of it is possible if a company still saves everything locally, as was done back in the 1990s.
The new organizational concept relies on many computers spread around the world: some store data, others process applications or interconnect the company's resources. The goal of cloud computing is that, from any device connected to the network, a plant can be supervised and even controlled. Imagine managing your company from a smartphone while abroad for a meeting and, at the same time, consider the risk of someone else accessing that device while you are busy.
This is only possible thanks to the Internet of Things: sensors and actuators stay connected to the network, which collects the information, analyzes the vast amount of available data (Big Data), and processes it to display on the user's screen through the interconnection of services.
- Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES): controls the shop floor.
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP): records inventory, tax, and human resources activities.
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): manages the product life cycle from conception through development and manufacturing to market launch.
- Digital factory: a virtual environment for product prototyping and testing with realistic simulations based on the physical plants.
Kartrak works with all of these services interconnected on a single platform. Get in touch.
The possibilities are huge, and with great power comes great responsibility. That is why cloud computing demands a series of security requirements that can be guaranteed by companies specialized in information management. Once that protection is in place, the company can rest assured that its data will not be read, denied, or hijacked, without having to invest in that security on its own. You just have to avoid sharing your smartphone PIN around or using weak passwords like password12345.
You might still wonder about the advantages of having the entire company connected to the network, with no visible servers taking up space and making noise in the rooms, and without depending on local power to access a piece of information. So here are the four main advantages of implementing cloud computing.
- 1.Real-time monitoring: with a radio-frequency (RFID) chip on each material and each product, the system tracks everything from manufacturing to sale, across all units, optimizing transport and production.
- 2.Resource optimization: based on this monitoring, the company gains a strategic view of its situation and identifies production bottlenecks, reducing times and increasing efficiency and agility in decision-making.
- 3.Cost reduction: with IoT and Big Data, many issues can be detected before they even become problems, on top of the obvious savings of not keeping computers, routers, and servers on the shop floor and not having to maintain them.
- 4.Greater operational efficiency: using these systems increases the efficiency of any company. Not all of them need to be implemented at once, but the return grows as investment in the area increases. In addition, hiring a consultancy becomes simpler, since you only need to authorize the limited access it will have to your cloud.
Finally, the concept of digital factories, or smart factories, is the combination of all these technologies: a digital version of the factory containing all the information, from the shop floor to which employees are on vacation or working, and which PPE (personal protective equipment) or machines are in use at any given moment. All of this to support strategic decision-making.
