When it comes to steering an industry, change can often be volatile with tech sellers vastly over promising what their product will do to help a company advance as a manufacturing giant. This has then resulted in an understandable hesitancy to jump on any bandwagon that is fueled by the power of promises. However, it seems that there’s one bandwagon rolling through most manufacturers’ doors that has proven a good chunk of its worth.
Cloud Computing
In as few terms as possible, cloud computing is a hosted service that is delivered to companies over the internet. It refers to itself as a cloud because of the image of a cloud used to represent the internet in diagrams. Break it down even further, and it’s a service provided solely through the internet. Though not specific in terms of what it does, the generality means it can do a lot of things for a lot of people. Already offices are utilizing things such as Google Drive, a cloud-based program, to share documents to anyone with a password and internet access.
Adaptation
For the manufacturing industry, cloud computing has already opened up an entirely new realm of possibilities specifically design for companies in this field, including parts catalog software. The biggest and most obvious advantage is that it lets companies unload a good portion of their IT work on the cloud provider. Now, IT departments don’t have to waste time upgrading software or maintaining new hardware.
In addition, the software is designed with the consumer in mind, including those that buy it. Easy to use and quick to deploy, there’s very little down time when switching from the old in-house model to the new brand of technology. More than this, though, is the sheer flexibility of its potential. Processes can be automated and features can be activated or deactivated based entirely on the needs of the business at different points in time.
Put all this together and you have a system that saves time. This saved time can then warp into time spent focusing on bettering the business so as to attract more customers thereby growing the bottom line. If used correctly, cloud computing more than pays for itself in less than a year.
However, not everything about it is entirely ironed out. As far as security is concerned, it’s a system that is entirely on the internet. If someone wants to hack it, they will. Another aspect of reduced security is the fact that sometimes the internet goes down. While business can still be done, this will no doubt inconvenience not only you but potential buyers.
Even with this taken into consideration, cloud computing is the way of the future and is worth investing in now, if only for a small piece of the company. The sooner that’s done, the sooner you can realize the power of more time.