Digital Transformation for Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry has long been committed to technology innovations that help manage demand for products around the world. With facilities in every corner of the globe, manufacturers are increasingly reliant on connectivity to ensure supply chains are operating at their peak. This is borne out in a recent study commissioned by NETSCOUT which revealed that 63% of manufacturers surveyed are under greater pressure to ensure new products reach market as fast as possible. 

To address challenges around complex processes and deeply integrated supply chains, more and more manufacturers are engaging in digital transformation (DX) initiatives that promise to enable them to readily adapt to changing business requirements while evolving the inter-connectivity between people, machines and products in new and exciting ways.

In today’s “just-in-time” manufacturing world where businesses can ill afford the slightest interruption, IT is under tremendous pressure to deliver service assurance. Simply put, network and application disruptions are too costly to be acceptable under any circumstance. This has propelled many manufacturers to examine technological advances to streamline and transform their operations.

Amongst the advances that DX is bringing to the manufacturing sector are improved machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, new automation technologies and wider adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. By incorporating machine learning and big data technology, IoT promises to take data collected by a myriad of sensors and harness it to dramatically improve the efficiency of manufacturing processes. IoT is considered such a big deal that 82% of the aforementioned study subjects identified it as either completely essential or very important to their organization’s DX strategy.

Of course, with the promise of IoT comes considerable IT challenge as well. IoT has the potential to increase IT complexity, especially within highly data-driven, industrial environments. All in all, the manufacturing sector relies heavily on IT systems and services to handle everything from order processing, production line automation, shipping, supply chain logistics and accounts to CRM, CAD/CAM design and even DNS availability, which is vital for the performance of web-based apps. To assure service delivery, IT must have end-to-end visibility, providing the insights needed to pinpoint the root cause of performance degradations anywhere along the service delivery path, so they can quickly resolve any issues.

The push for DX has increased the need manufacturer’s face for business analytics driven by smart data. These traffic flows are literally the best source of information to glean actionable insights. NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology generates smart data based on software-centric pervasive instrumentation of traffic-flows that are collected and processed at the source – from physical and virtual (SDN/NFV) infrastructure on-premises, SDDC and Hybrid Cloud environments - to produce service contextual metadata in real time. This allows IT to gain critical insights into service delivery, business operations, and other vital business performance indicators.

NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform ensures the interoperability of IoT platforms, protocols, applications and services with real-time insights into device, network and cloud behavior. Their proven service triage approach gives early warning to configuration, timing and latency issues, which translates into fewer user complaints and faster problem solving. This in turn allows manufacturer’s to consistently maintain high levels of productivity, lower costs, reduce time to delivery and gain the operational agility to match supply with demand.

For a more in-depth look at how DX is impacting the manufacturing industry, download the NETSCOUT white paper, Assuring the Enterprise in the Digital Era – Manufacturing Sector, by clicking here.

~Written by David Pitlik, Content Creator, Speechwriter, Technology Consultant